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The Devil's Advocate
November 27, 2006 02:44 AM
Always available to vouchsafe a tyrant, Pat Buchanan acquits Vladimir Putin in the murder of Sasha Litvinenko in London last week.
What benefit could Putin conceivably realize from the London killing of an enemy of his regime, who had just become a British citizen? Why would the Russian president, at the peak of his popularity, with his regime awash in oil revenue and himself playing a strong hand in world politics, risk a breach with every Western nation by ordering the public murder of a man who was more of a nuisance than a threat to his regime?
How quaint. Putin jails his critics, silences the free press, bullies his Western-leaning neighbors, supplies Iran with missiles, prevents sanctions against North Korea and blocks efforts to stop the genocide in Darfur - and Pat wonders why he would now risk a "breach" with the West! And just when things were going so smoothly....
Well, I would never presume to challenge Pat's expertise on the authoritarian mindset, but it seems to me that he's over-estimated Putin's desire to ingratiate himself with Europe. He's also overlooked the obvious Kremlin windfall from the murder: Even if Putin's goons weren't responsible, Putin's critics will get the message. How better to intimidate opponents than to demonstrate that there is no safe haven safe for them? The inscrutability of the act only enhances the effect.
Yet Pat considers it more plausible that the Kremlin's enemies - Litvinenko's friends - cooked up this entire scheme in an effort to "embarrass" Putin, the former KGB man, who comes across here as a Chaplinesque figure, charmingly oblivious as his opponents are murdered around him. Uh huh.
It is fitting here to mention a book review posted recently on the CIA's Web site. The volume explores the KGB files (translated memos, actually - the files were destroyed) on Andrei Sakharov, the late dissident. It sheds light on the absurdity and paranoia that once governed the KGB [Hat tip: aldaily.com].
At the time of Sakharov’s first public expression of dissent—the publication in the West in 1968 of his essay “Reflections on Progress, Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom”—the KGB did not know what to make of him. Sakharov was, after all, one of the Soviet Union’s leading physicists, and he had been showered with honors. The KGB, not realizing that Sakharov’s essay was the result of a gradual disillusionment with Soviet society rather than an impulsive act, at first hoped to bring him back to orthodoxy. “To prevent him from committing politically harmful acts, we believe it would make sense of one of the secretaries of the Central Committee to receive Sakharov and conduct an appropriate conversation with him,” recommended KGB Chairman Yuriy Andropov in June 1968. (90)The reluctance to condemn Sakharov, however, brought problems of its own, as the KGB noted that “government circles in the USA” might misread the Kremlin’s silence as an endorsement of his views and wrongly assume that Soviet foreign policy was shifting. (94) In 1970, with Sakharov becoming more radical and building contacts with other dissidents, Andropov recommended the installation of listening devices in his apartment to “discover the contacts inciting him to commit hostile acts” and prevent “individuals hostile to the Soviet state” from exploiting his name. The monitoring, which eventually included physical surveillance, break-ins and thefts, and reporting by informers, continued until Sakharov’s death in 1999. (99)[3]
The KGB, continually unable to comprehend Sakharov’s dissent, could only view his actions through the prism of its Bolshevik and Chekist past. As a result, KGB officials not only saw him as the tool of foreign conspiracies but often managed to detect multiple plots working together. In December 1975, Andropov reported that “bourgeois propaganda is actively exploiting [Sakharov’s statements] for purposes of subversive activities against the Soviet Union and other socialist countries.” (207) Soviet anti-Semitism reinforced these themes, as when Andropov declared in 1973 that Sakharov and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn were “offering their services to reactionary imperialist and especially Zionist circles.” (166) Shortly after President Jimmy Carter sent a letter of support to Sakharov, Andropov claimed that “ideological centers and Zionist organizations have involved the new Carter administration” in Sakharov’s subversion. (223) The KGB also often ascribed Sakharov’s dissent to the malign influence of Elena Bonner. Her views, wrote Andropov in 1980, “not only are based on her hostile attitude toward the Soviet system but also conform to the recommendation of intelligence services in the USA.”
This is the universe Putin emerged from.
