Jared, I think the story about Pavel Borodin is more complicated than this. Your interest in the matter seems to come down to this: an important Russian diplomat and public official is arrested. This is prima facie an attack on 'the former Soviet peoples' themselves and a sign of renewed American aggression. If only life was so simple. I guess where you are coming from is the parallels with the possible fates of former Yugoslav leaders, or, let me rephrase that, leaders of different ethnic and political and national groupings within the ex-YF. But frankly I don't think you are doing your cause many favours by attaching it to the fate of someone as notoriously corrupt and evil as Pavel Borodin, someone that, according to opinion polls cited yesterday on Johnson's Russia List, many ordinary Russians *themselves* don't want back. Borodin is a hate-figure for millions of Russians; he is one of the oligarchs and pro-western modernisers with strong Kremlin links, like Anatolii Chubais or Boris Berezovsky, who could not appear in a public place: if he did, the mob would tear him to pieces. So arresting Borodin is one of the few 'unfriendly acts' by Americans which most ordinary Russians would actually be grateful for. Before being shunted off to the semi-retirment of his new post as Secretary of the Russian-Belarus Union, Borodin was in charge of the Kremlin property administration. This was the heart of darkness of the Yeltsin programme for plundering Russia and enriching his oligarch cronies. Trying to save Borodin on the grounds of his alleged diplomatic status is equivalent say to the attempts which some well-meaning Americans made to have Hermann Goering saved from the noose on the grounds that he was a former member of a Govenrment and should have immunity as a result of the German surrender.It is absurd to argue that criminals can enjoy life with immunity because they own a piece of paper. But I'll tell you something else about Russian diplomat passports: these documents occupy a special place in Russian consciousness even today, because the main beauty of them during the Soviet era was not so much that you could go *into* any third country with them, but that they allowed you *out* of the Soviet Union without the (almost impossible to obtain) exit visa. This made the dip passport such a revered object that any Soviet (now Russian) possessor of one has an almost preternatural awareness of its importance; if you have one, you are in a class apart. This means that Borodin did a thing almost incomprehensible to any Russian, especially a high-placed bureaucrat, when he chose to travel on an ordinary passport because he couldn't get a visa for his dip. passport. True, these days a Russian doesn't need an exit visa from the KGB to leave his homeland. That's the theory. But in practice, life is not so simple. Highly-placed persons who have fallen from grace, like Borodin, in particular are aware that coming and going is not so simple. Not only the Russian people are calm about Borodin's arrest, so too is president Putin, who so far has not uttered a single word on this incident. Why is that? The answer is that there is a secret war going on between the Putinites and the Yeltsinites. It is not a war for the soul of Russia, but it is a fight between 2 groups, one in decline, one ascendant, for access to the stream of plundered wealth and for new sources of power and privilege. Yeltsin's 2 main oligarch backers, Gusinsky and Berezovsky, are in trouble. Gusinsky is in a Spanish jail awaiting extradition to Russia. Berezovsky, now in New York, faces the same fate. Top bureaucrats and oligarchs do live in fear, surrounded by guards, with travel plans constantly updated. Chubais himself recently fled Russia for a time. ALL these people -- the elite of "New Russians" -- depend on being able to flee Russia at a moment's notice. There were times in Yeltsin's presidency when HE HIMSELF had his personal jet warm its engines up, when the going got specially rough. ALL these people have based themselves on the export of capital: phenomenal amounts. There are more than 100 dollar billionairs living in the Moscow region alone. A game has gone on for more than a decade, in which the West has not only countenanced but encouraged the export of capital from the ex-SU, perhaps a trillion dollars in all. This helped impoverish the Soviet people, destroy its industry and turn it into a helpless appendage of the West, thus ensuring the West's victory in the Cold War. This flood of money also mightily helped fuel the US boom, for eg by enhancing asset values then used to leverage into the debt which powered growth. And, best of all, it made political hostages out of the Russian elite, who are hated by their impoverished countrymen, and who therefore depend on being allowed by the Western monetary and political authorities to salt their loot in Swiss banks, or (in Borodin's case) the Bank of New York, or the Caymans, Cyprus etc. The elites also depend on being allowed to slip abroad and enjoy their ill-gotten gains in comfort and security. That is why Borodin's arrest makes them nervous. After all, Borodin was just one "muzhik" among many others; if they can arrest "our Pasha" they can arrest anyone. That's the thinking of the oligarchs. It is odd to argue for the rights of people like Pavel Borodin to rob Russia undisturbed, and have a constant safe haven abroad. Borodin's actual job was to dispose of the asset-base of the CPSU. He controlled fabulous power and wealth. He spent $500 million (!!!) on refurbising Yeltsin's Kremlin apartments. What happened to that money? He and Berezovsky systematically looted the hard currency earnings of Aeroflot, the national airline What happened to that, and the literally hundreds of billions of dollars which disappeared, looted from Soviet Russia? Putin wants to assert himself against "the Family", ie the Yeltsin clan which put him there. But it is hard, because they have so much dirt on Putin himself. Before he can really assert himself, he must complete his crab-like Long March thru the institutions of the Russian state, getting a steely grip on the KGB, the army, the regions, and above all, getting a grip on the mass media. Only when he has the media fully under control, can Putin be sure that the Yeltsinites no longer are capable of embarrassing him with revelations about the dirt from his own sordid climb to power over a heap of still-warm bodies. This is why Putin began his attack on the oligarchs by going after Gusinsky and Berezovsky, because they were the media-magnates he needed to neutralise first. When Chubais tried a minicoup of his own recently and tried to grab a piece of the media pie, he was forced to flee Russia. They all know that he that controls TV controls the masses. >From the point of view of the West, the position is also highly contradictory and confusing. On the one hand, Bush wants to dish the remnants of the Clinton/Gore Russia policy, and destroy many enemies in Washington at the same time. Tainting Gore with his former association with corrupt people like Borodin is one way. On the other hand, it does not do to make the remaining oligarchs desperate by giving them the feeling that there are no safe havens left. The West needs to keep its grip on the collective scrotum of the New Russians. Therefore a complex minuet is being played out. The West has answered calls to arrest Gusinsky, but none of these folks has yet actually been sent back to face the music. It must first be made clear to the Russian elite, to the oligarchs, that these are 'special cases', that it is merely a little housekeeping, cleaning up the most grotesque and bizarre forms of highly visible and completely unacceptable corruption of the Yeltsin era. Once that is done, it will be back to business as usual, ie robbery and plunder of Russian oil, raw materials etc, but without flamboyant excesses. So it is a question of training the quislings how to behave. Their children are all at western (mostly Swiss) finishing schools anyway, learning how to 'go on', how to be part of the world bourgeoisie: to be polite, charming, discreet, and make highly-publicised charitable contributions etc, while you plunder the planet and impoverish the masses. It is all just a matter of time and of the continued absorption and digestion of the fSU by the western python. As for Borodin, Gusinsky etc, of course they will be allowed to live out their lives in quiet obscurity in their villas on the Cote d'Azur, so don't shed too many tears for them, Jared. It is a mistake to allow these rascals to drape themselves in the twin flags of 'human rights' and of 'Russian national pride'. To argue that "Pavel Borodin's arrest indicates that new aggressions are planned in the military, political and financial spheres, new attacks on the people of the former Soviet Union" is to ignore the truth that Borodin has been a key player, a key quisling, who helped the West destroy Russia for more than a decade. The Yeltsin's and Borodin's were the fifth columnists and shock troops who did the West's job for it. Why defend them? And while it is possible that sharply antagonistic contradictions might yet emerge between Russia, China, India on one hand and Nato/US on the other, that is still not likely absent a major geopolitical earthquake, and the reason it is not likely is that the Russian, Chinese, Indian etc elites are fully integrated into the world bourgeoisies and fully accept US imperial hegemony. The fact that Putin is cynical enough to throw a few cost-free sops to the Russian masses, like the music but not words to the Soviet anthem, is only further proof if proof were needed. We should not allow ourselves to be duped by such obvious games. The oligarchs are playing the patriot cardbecause (a) it makes them a little less loathsome in the eyes of their fellow-countrymen and women and (b) because they want a little more wiggle-room in their dealings with their Western masters, they want to loosen their collars a little and not be quite so slavihly dependent on Western goodwill. For ten years they have been marionettes of the CIA and State Dept and they are fed up. This has made them punchdrunk, this living in constant fear, and may well explain why Borodin did such an otherwise inexplicable thing as fly to NY *with no dip passport*. He must have known, because his own contacts in the Russian Foreign Ministry certainly told him, that the fact the US had denied him a diplomatic visa could only mean one thing: he faced arrest. Perhaps it became clear to Borodin -- perhaps he received one of those anonymous but well-informed phone calls which are the bane of elite lives and which tipped him off that Putin had him in his sights, and it was time to go. Better an American jail than a Russian one, hey? Mark Borodin Falsely Arrested - Washington's Excuse a Lie by Jared Israel [revised 1-31-2001] Elsewhere we have posted excerpts from a Moscow Press conference given by Genrikh Pavlovich Padva, a lawyer for Pavel Borodin. Mr. Borodin, a Russian diplomat and Secretary of the Russian-Belarus Union, was arrested on January 17th at Kennedy Airport in New York as he stepped off the plane from Moscow. He was on his way to the Bush Inauguration. That is, Mr. Borodin was invited by the U.S. to come to the U.S. on what amounted to an official State visit, and then arrested. _______________________________________________ Crashlist website: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
