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Wednesday, June 21, 2006

A Smart Move

Robert Parsons of Radio Free Europe reports:

In Moscow, I attended a conference of mostly young Russian journalists on the question of defending journalists' rights. I expected a chorus of discontent but did not find it. Of course, there were complaints about the difficulties they faced in carrying out their profession -- among them censorship and threats of violence -- but there was also an acceptance of the Putin model of governance. I asked one who he thought had been responsible for the chain of apartment bombings just before Vladimir Putin's election as prime minister in 1999. "The FSB, of course," he told me, without a moment's hesitation, referring to the successors of the KGB. "Sometimes," he went on, "the state has to do such things to protect itself. It was a smart move." The message he and his colleagues seemed intent on making was that the state had to come first. And if in the process the flow of information had to suffer, well, so be it.

A smart move. Planting bombs in civilian apartment buildings. A smart move. Killing hundreds of people including women and children. A smart move. So that the government could continue a war in Chechnya it cannot win, at the cost of tens of thousands of lives. A smart move.

Electing President Putin, a proud KGB spy. A smart move.

Ha! And they say Russia has no future!


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Removing your head from your ass is key to intellectual debates.

La Russophobe said...

Thanks for your words of support for the innocent citizens of Russian murdered at the hands of KGB butchers.

Thanks as well for setting an example of how to conduct an intellectual debate. Your valuable scholarship makes an important contribution to the future of Russia.