{"id":1192,"date":"2012-09-02T18:34:10","date_gmt":"2012-09-02T17:34:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wydawnictwopodziemne.rohnka5.atthost24.pl\/?p=1192"},"modified":"2012-09-02T18:47:21","modified_gmt":"2012-09-02T17:47:21","slug":"english-putin-the-faceless-aparatchik","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/staging.wydawnictwopodziemne.com\/en\/2012\/09\/02\/english-putin-the-faceless-aparatchik\/","title":{"rendered":"Putin \u2013 the Faceless Apparatchik"},"content":{"rendered":"

Masha Gessen ends her book about Putin* with an Epilogue, which consists of her diary entries covering a \u201cweek in December\u201d. It wasn\u2019t just any week but the<\/em> week from the 3rd<\/sup> to the 10th<\/sup> December 2011, the week of The Snow Revolution <\/em>in Moscow. This was the time when, almost in spite of herself, she experienced the restoration of her faith in Russian democracy. It was a time of volatile emotions for Gessen, as high hopes were mingled with fears. She worried at first that the \u201cbrewing revolution had no unifying symbol, no slogan\u201d only to rejoice when someone coined the phrase the \u201csnow revolution\u201d. She fretted when a demonstration was moved from \u201cthe fabulously named Revolution Square\u201d to a place called Bolotnaya (Swampy) Square… She applauded every good joke told during manifestations, and celebrated that \u201cthe goons who were spouting propaganda\u201d from tv screens \u201cstarted speaking a human language\u201d but then she suddenly remembered that the same journalists sounded human about 12 years earlier, before they became Putin\u2019s goons.<\/p>\n

The choice of this blog-like diary for the ending of a book about Putin ought to be surprising but isn\u2019t really, because the most lively part of her book concerns the Nineties, the Yeltsin era of \u201cdemocracy\u201d and that week in December left her hoping for more of the same. Gessen leaves us in no doubt as to why she found the Yeltsin period of her life the most satisfying. She states verbatim \u201cI gained everything in the 1990s\u201d. All the active participants in the momentous events of the early Nineties she describes as \u201cbrilliant\u201d, every businessman had a Ph.D., every politician was an \u201cactivist\u201d (and more often than not had a Ph.D. to boot). I was reading these parts of the book \u2013 book about Putin, lest we forget \u2013 having an unmistakeable feeling of d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu<\/em>: we\u2019ve seen it all before, we lived through the same excitement, the same passion, the same ultra-democratic idiocy which left one on the verge of ecstasy. The year was 1980 and the place was Poland. We too felt we had to re-invent democracy from scratch; we too thought we carried a righteous struggle against evil; we too hoped and believed and misplaced those hopes in people who were not worthy. We weren\u2019t the first ones either. Before us people went through the same process in Czechoslovakia in 1968 and in Hungary in 1956, the process of almost spiritual intensity, of intellectual renewal, the exciting feeling that everything around is in the state of perpetual ferment. And just like Masha Gessen, we could not accept that our authentic and spontaneous reactions were cynically manipulated. The paradox of this situation is obvious: the more authentic and spontaneous were the manipulated masses the better the outcome for the manipulator.<\/p>\n

Strangely enough, Gessen\u2019s book is full of examples proving that point which must be a testament to her honesty. She is an intelligent observer and a courageous human being so her book is rich in fact but sadly lacks in understanding. She commences her narrative with Galina Starovoitova\u2019s murder. Starovoitova assumed the status of a symbol for Gessen. It was Starovoitova who led the crowds in a \u201cfive-syllable chant the reverberated, it seemed, through the city: \u2018Ros-si-ya! Yel-tsin!\u2019\u201d She subsequently became a candidate for the post of defence minister, which Gessen sees as symptomatic of the times, bearing in mind Starovoitova\u2019s pacifism and feminism. In 1992 Starovoitova found out that the kgb reconstituted the internal party structures and publicly confronted Yeltsin with this fact only to be rudely dismissed; and lastly in 1994 she predicted that the Chechen war would become a \u201ccertain disaster and the biggest threat to Russian democracy\u201d. Starovoitova was gunned down in 1998. Gessen sees all these events as milestones, encapsulating the nature of changes in those days. She set out to investigate her friend\u2019s murder but never managed to find out who ordered it. Nevertheless, in the process she realised<\/p>\n

\u201cthat throughout the 1990s, while young people like me were constructing new lives in a new country, a parallel world had existed alongside ours<\/span>. St. Petersburg had preserved and perfected many of the key features of the Soviet state: it was a system of government that worked to annihilate its enemies \u2013 a paranoid, closed system that strove to control everything and to wipe out anything that it could not control<\/span>.\u201d [all underlining mine \u2013 MB]<\/p>\n

Sounds familiar? Yes, dear reader, you have read it here many times before. So, without further ado, let\u2019s follow in Gessen\u2019s footsteps and let\u2019s look at the career of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, the accidental president, the man without face who came from nowhere, unknown even to his friends; a man who remains largely unknown still, after staying in power for over 12 years in the largest country on the planet.<\/p>\n

Gessen expresses surprise at Putin\u2019s \u201cunlikely rise\u201d more than once. She relates the frantic search for a successor by the so called \u201cYeltsin\u2019s Family\u201d, a close group of advisers, including Yeltsin\u2019s daughter and the \u00e9minence grise<\/em> of that era, Boris Berezovsky. They feared prosecution from whomsoever formed the next administration so they wanted to find a \u201cfriendly\u201d candidate who could guarantee their security. It was Berezovsky who introduced Putin to them. Putin was certainly friendly, helpful and above all loyal. Gessen concentrates her bile on the rather tedious fact that a small clique of people was deciding who was going to be the next leader of Russia \u2013 allegedly still \u201cdemocratic Russia\u201d (I was tempted to ask: \u201chave you not heard of the politburo?\u201d) \u2013 instead of asking the more pertinent question: how did it happen that Putin was offered to them on a plate, as it were? He was so grey and unobjectionable that everyone could project onto him whatever he wished. But how did he find himself in that position in the first place?<\/p>\n

Putin is a man of mystery. Gessen traces his biography back to his parents but omits to mention that his grandfather, Spiridon, was a personal cook to Lenin, then to Lenin\u2019s widow, to Stalin and finally was employed as a cook in one of the Moscow party committee\u2019s dachas. Official cooks were always linked to the secret police in the soviet union because they held an obvious position of trust. According to Gessen, Putin\u2019s parents lived in a communal flat, seemingly in great poverty, with his mother taking menial, often physically demanding jobs, despite her advanced years. Yet they also had the largest room in the flat, they also had a television set, a telephone and a dacha, which were all unmistaken signs of privilege in the overwhelming poverty of post war Leningrad. They were both over 40 when Putin was born and there were rumours that he was adopted (fuelled by the very strange detail that no one could remember Putin before the age of 8, despite the fact that his parents lived in the same communal flat all the time). Gessen rightly dismisses such suggestions as unproven and largely irrelevant.<\/p>\n

What seems proven though, is that Putin was groomed for the kgb. As a schoolboy he had a portrait of Yan Berzin on his desk at the dacha. Berzin was the founder of gru but is little known outside the \u201cchekist circles\u201d. \u201cYou would have had to be a true KGB geek not only to know the name but to have secured the portrait,\u201d comments Gessen and yet the natural suggestion that the young boy\u2019s intention to become a chekist came directly from his father is also difficult to prove. Indeed there is no direct evidence of the older Putin\u2019s work for nkvd. It seems probable that after being seriously injured in action behind enemy lines during WWII, \u201che remained part of the so called active reserve, a giant group of secret police officers who held regular jobs while also informing for \u2013 and drawing salary from \u2013 the KGB. This may explain why the Putins lived so comparatively well: the dacha, the television set, and the telephone \u2013 especially the telephone.\u201d<\/p>\n

According to his official biography, at the age of 16 Putin went to the kgb headquarters to join the force but was told that they did not sign up volunteers… He was finally contacted in his fourth year at the university and since then openly spoke of his work for the security police. Naturally, no documentary evidence of his kgb career has as yet emerged \u2013 we will have to wait until de-putinisation campaign, which will follow in the future as certainly as night follows day \u2013 but there were many suggestions that he worked in the fifth directorate, charged with fighting dissidents. He was then sent to the spy school and assigned to East Germany. Gessen comments with irony that gdr was a backwater and that really promising graduates would have been sent to West Germany but I must disagree with her. Firstly, sending an unproven agent to the West was always fraught with danger, as confrontation with the world of plenty put an inevitable strain on the agent\u2019s loyalty. However, perhaps more importantly, I suspect that different set of skills was required for a mission in the West \u2013 certain suaveness and ease of manner, as demonstrated by so many successful soviet spies, but absent from Putin\u2019s personality \u2013 whilst the role played by Putin in Dresden was equally important. Officially, he collected information about the enemy but in reality such information could be gathered from behind a desk situated in Moscow as well as in Dresden. What he really did was recruit Latin American students; he also ran some members of Rote Armee Fraktion, the remnants of the Baader-Meinhoff terrorist gang. Gessen interviewed some members of the RAF and is adamant that Putin was not directly involved with terrorists, which begs the question: why and how did he get in contact with them?<\/p>\n

And then the \u201crevolutions \u201889\u201d came. Gessen has soppy stories to tell about perestroika and glasnost\u2019 and Putin is full of equally ridiculous tales in his official biography. He tells of the instance when his stasi compound in Dresden was surrounded by demonstrators but the soviets couldn\u2019t do anything without orders from Moscow. \u201cAnd Moscow was silent,\u201d says Putin, clearly making a point that Russia could not afford another paralysis of power. It was the \u201cparalysis of power\u201d, which is the commonly accepted narrative explaining the next decade in the ussr. To be fair to Gessen, she doesn\u2019t share that view; she sees the Nineties as a glorious time of putting the splendid \u201cprinciples of radical democracy\u201d into practice. Needless to say, I don\u2019t accept either of these descriptions.<\/p>\n

The key moment for Putin\u2019s career was his joining the staff of Anatoly Sobchak, chairman of Leningrad City council at the time. Gessen does a good job in debunking the fictional stories surrounding this appointment. Sobchak knew very well that Putin was sent to him by the kgb and that\u2019s exactly what he needed. He had credentials as a \u201cleading pro-democracy politician\u201d so it was necessary for him to build up a solid base where it really mattered. Gessen acerbically claims that it was wiser to pick one\u2019s own kgb handler than to have him picked. However, she also quotes a defector, Sergei Bezrukov, who maintains that Putin met the kgb general Drozdov in February 1990 in Berlin and that the only conceivable purpose for such a meeting must have been the next assignment.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, things were bleak in the ussr. In June 1989 tea and soap had to be rationed in Leningrad, in August 1990 there were tobacco and sugar riots and in October \u201890 sugar, vodka and cigarettes began to be rationed too; in November ration cards had to be introduced. Sobchak\u2019s \u201cdemocratic\u201d city council was responsible for supply of food to the second largest city of the world superpower (which in itself speaks volumes of the immeasurable idiocy of the soviet system but it doesn\u2019t seem to bother Gessen) so there were inevitable suspicions that the supplies are being sabotaged to discredit the \u201cnew broom\u201d. In May 1991, Marina Salye \u2013 one of many colourful personalities of those times, to whom Gessen paid well deserved tributes with her lively portraits \u2013 went to Berlin to sign contracts for trainloads of meat and potatoes because after years of socialism, the fertile Russian land could no longer feed half of Europe, as it did under the tsars \u2013 it couldn\u2019t even feed itself. To her astonishment, she could not be seen by her German contractors because they were \u201cengaged in urgent negotiations with Leningrad council on the subject of meat imports\u201d. Salye immediately contacted Sobchak who \u201cdidn\u2019t know what was going on\u201d. Within a year Salye managed to piece together what happened in Berlin. The soviet prime minister, Pavlov, granted a Leningrad company called Kontinent a concession to negotiate trade contracts on behalf of the government. Kontinent then hijacked all existing negotiations and sent the food supplies to Moscow warehouses (Gessen\u2019s comment is that this was clearly in preparation for a certain August \u201cevent\u201d). Negotiations were conducted on behalf of Kontinent by one Vladimir Putin and the commission written into these contracts varied between 25 and 50%!<\/p>\n

And thus we arrive at the August coup. I had happened to write about it in the Soviet Analyst <\/em>shortly afterwards and I must say that many of Gessen\u2019s assertions confirm my view of a \u201cbadly rehearsed spectacle\u201d. Some of the behind-the-scenes manoeuvring she describes are pricelessly hilarious: Sobchak forbidding Salye to call the shenanigans a \u201cmilitary coup\u201d in fear of causing panic; Yeltsin summoning all \u201cdemocrats\u201d to his dacha and somehow not fearing arrest despite his dacha being \u201cencircled by kgb agents\u201d; Sobchak and others flying to their respective cities by official planes to \u201cco-ordinate resistance\u201d; Sobchak blocking access to Leningrad television station to members of his own council and then meeting putschist general Samsonov before delivering a rousing speech on the telly only to go into hiding in an underground bunker \u2013 together with Putin. The farce of it all would add up to a grotesque performance of commedia dell\u2019arte<\/em> for the masses, except for one little thing: everyone seems to think that it was all for real…<\/p>\n

After the \u201cfailed coup and triumph of democracy\u201d Salye reported results of her investigations into Putin\u2019s dealings to the Leningrad city council, to mayor Sobchak and to Yeltsin. Needless to say, nothing happened. Interviewing Salye for her book, Gessen asked a relevant question: \u201cBut wasn\u2019t he [Sobchak] acting just like some regional party boss?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThis was different,\u201d said Salye. \u201cIt was different because he talked a good line. He knew he had to present a different exterior, and he succeeded in doing this. He played the democrat when he was really a demagogue.\u201d<\/p>\n

As much as I admire the dedication, the sheer courage of people such as Salye, Starovoitova, Politkovskaya, Yushenkov and Gessen herself, I cannot but lament their excruciating naivety. Have they learnt nothing from the history of the soviet union? Is it not littered with demagogues playing democrats? Is it not full of \u201cclever people with Ph.D.s\u201d thinking that they will outsmart the silly chekists? Is it not overflowing with \u201cgames\u201d of individuals \u201cpresenting a different exterior\u201d only to fulfil their role and be dismissed? Sobchak was dismissed after he fulfilled his role, just like Zinoviev and Kamenev before him, but unlike them he was not murdered in pseudo-judicial process but instead poisoned in hospital, which Gessen describes after Arkady Vaksberg. For his troubles, Vaksberg himself was subject of an attempt on his life.<\/p>\n

I will not bore the regular readers of this website with details of the operation \u201cStorm in Moscow\u201d, which provided the background of Putin\u2019s rise to power. Suffice it to say that Gessen relates the facts faithfully. All the more shame on The Economist <\/em>where we find a disgraceful statement in their review: \u201cMs Gessen’s tale is marred by a tendency to believe the darkest of conspiracy theories\u2014for example, that the Russian apartment bombings in 1999 were the work of the siloviki<\/em>.\u201d I\u2019m tempted to say that Economist\u2019s <\/em>case is marred by a Hegelian tendency to dismiss the facts when they do not fit their theories; the theory in this instance being, that Russia is a normal country and facts such as the government bombing their own sleeping citizens into oblivion must be dismissed as \u201cdark conspiracy theories\u201d because they cannot possibly fit in with the wishful thinking. As long as such attitudes prevail in the (still) free media in the West, there is no chance of a realistic assessment of the situation in the so called \u201cRussia\u201d. I must say that this is most unexpected and upsetting coming from The Economist<\/em>, especially so since the International Editor of that magazine happens to be the excellent Edward Lucas. But enough of that, let\u2019s return to Gessen\u2019s portrayal of Putin.<\/p>\n

She is quite right to highlight the conspicuous presence of Vladimir Kryuchkov at Putin\u2019s inauguration ceremony. Kryuchkov was a kgb boss and the highest ranking organizer of the August coup. As a kgb boss throughout the period of \u201cEastern European revolutions \u201889\u201d he was by definition involved in planning and execution of events such as Polish \u201cround table talks\u201d, Czech faked student\u2019s death and the violent overthrow of Ceausescu in Romania. She\u2019s also right not to dismiss as a joke Putin\u2019s toast at a kgb banquet:<\/p>\n

\u201cI would like to report that the group of FSB officers dispatched to work undercover in the federal government has been successful in fulfilling the first set of assignments.\u201d<\/p>\n

This was said on the 18th<\/sup> December 1999, Putin had only become the prime minister. Yelstin did not resign until the last day of the century, century dominated by the bolshevik plague. Yes, plague. It was neither the communist ideology nor the pathetic soviet military power that dominated the age but I wonder if Gessen understands that. She muses at one stage:<\/p>\n

\u201cLike most Soviet citizens of his generation, Putin was never a political idealist. His parents may or may not have believed in a Communist future for all the world, in the ultimate triumph of justice for the proletariat, or in any other of the ideological clich\u00e9s that had been worn thin by the time Putin was growing up; he never even considered his relationship to these ideals.\u201d<\/p>\n

Communist ideology, the preposterous economic theories, the ridiculous ideal of bright future, as depicted on the soviet agit-prop posters, was not much more than the propagandists\u2019 cattle feed, their opium for the masses. The elite of the working class was never required to believe in such nonsense; instead, it was vital for them to be as flexible as possible in their ideology, to bend over backwards as demanded by the tactical twists and turns of the leadership. It was vital quite literally, because if they were not nimble enough to follow subtle changes in the official line \u2013 their lives were at stake. So it does not really matter what generation Putin grew up with \u2013 his relationship to \u201cthese ideals\u201d was always merely functional and was supposed to remain such. The \u201cideals\u201d were simple tools or even more to the point: ideology was like a skin to a snake, a skin which can be shed without as much as a blink.<\/p>\n

After Putin\u2019s inauguration, the chaotic and relatively free media were swiftly curbed. They could be restrained with ease because they were in the hands of a small clique of oligarchs, just like all soviet economy. It was enough to threaten Berezovsky, Gusinsky et al. to obtain control of the media \u2013 most journalists followed suit, and those few who did not, died in strange circumstances. Gessen calls the next phase the \u201cdismantling of democracy\u201d… She clearly still believes, to this day, that Gorbachov really tried to reform the ussr, that the communism collapsed and \u201cRussia\u201d in the Nineties was a democratic state. And yet the evidence so skilfully gathered by her seems to suggest that there was neither democracy nor \u201cRussia\u201d in the Nineties but the same old soviet union under a different name. Unless of course she would like to maintain that shelling of a parliament building is a normal democratic procedure or that the soviet anthem is really Russian. Actually, after reading her recent comments about the Pussy Riot trial, I suspect that she is firmly of the \u201ceternal Russia\u201d persuasion since she compared the Moscow trial of the feminist punk rockers not to the soviet pseudo-justice but to the … 17th<\/sup> Century Holy Rus. Gessen lists violations of electoral laws under Putin, as if they factually mattered: a candidate\u2019s application was rejected because of the use of \u201cSt Petersburg\u201d instead of \u201cSankt Petersburg\u201d or was it the other way round? Prefilled ballots were delivered to psychiatric wards \u2013 and what if they weren\u2019t prefilled? Would the result be different? After 95 years of bolshevik rule she still cannot understand that in no circumstances should one participate in elections under the bolsheviks. They will forever lie and cheat, they will maintain that the proverbial white ceiling is black, they will do whatever is required to keep them in power because such is the nature of bolshevism.<\/p>\n

Gessen\u2019s account is at its best when dealing with the incredible stories of Beslan massacre and the Moscow Theatre Siege. To begin with, she calmly relates the events as they appeared to the outside world: then she moves on to the painstaking efforts of brave individuals who tried to get to the bottom of what actually happened only to end with the gruesome depiction of the grisly truth. For instance, the theatre siege appeared at first to end in a great success for the security forces, only to be botched by the ineptitude of medics; but then the implausible role played by Khanpasha Terkibayev was exposed by Politkovskaya. Terkibayev was the leader of the terrorists but was allowed to walk out of the theatre by the storming troops. Unfortunately, he could not keep his mouth shut when interviewed by Politkovskaya so he had to die in a car crash a few days after FBI requested an interview with him. However, after piecing together an accurate picture of the actual events, Gessen subsequently proceeds to interpreting them and this is where she is at her least convincing. She sternly points an accusing finger at Putin for organising both sieges and for always pushing towards the bloodiest possible outcome. \u201cDid this add up to a series of carefully laid plans to strengthen Putin\u2019s position in a country that responded best to the politics of fear?\u201d she asks and goes on to answer that it was not so because Chechens had their own hand in these disasters…<\/p>\n

Moving on, Gessen describes how Putin put into practice the old leninist maxim that the \u201ccapitalists will sell us the rope with which we\u2019re going to hang them\u201d. Clever Russian academics were happy with Putin because \u201che listened to them\u201d; Western media were happy because Putin employed clever Russian academics; foreign investors were happy because he allowed them to invest; big business was happy because Putin allowed them to operate; Russian businessmen were happy because they could finally turn out a profit in early 2000s and also because their dubious acquisitions from previous era attained an air of legitimacy. Not for long. The academics were sidelined, businessmen treated roughly. The stories of Khodorkovsky or Gusinsky are well known so let me focus on the less known person of Bill Browder, the grandson of the ex-gensek of the US comparty and a soviet spy, Earl Browder. According to Gessen, Bill Browder was a \u201ctrue ideologue: he had come to Russia to build capitalism. He fervently believed that by making money for his investors, he was creating a bright capitalist future for a country it was his legacy to love.\u201d<\/p>\n

He was an \u201cactivist shareholder\u201d. There are lots of them in the West. They believe in the so called shareholder democracy or the power \u2013 and obligation \u2013 of shareholders to change the companies they part-own. Browder would buy a stake in a Russian business, conduct an investigation, which inevitably exposed corruption or usual soviet inefficiencies, launch a campaign for reform and reap rewards from subsequent rise in share prices. Putin liked him and supported him so his Hermitage fund grew from $25 million to $4.5 billion. When Khodorkovsky \u2013 Russia\u2019s richest man at the time \u2013 was arrested Browder rejoiced because it seemed to him that Putin \u201cwould stop at nothing to establish law and order\u201d. Unexpectedly, in 2005 Browder was detained at Moscow airport and denied entry to the country. To most sane people it would have been a blessing to be expelled from the soviet Paradise but Browder was concerned. He slyly divested over $4 billion worth of stock so when finally Putin pounced, Hermitage\u2019s Russian operations were a string of empty shells. It took Putin some time to realise that, for once, he was outsmarted but once he did comprehend what had happened he ordered a string of local courts to issue multimillion dollar judgements against Hermitage. How could the company be guilty of anything since it was an empty shell? Browder employed lawyers and accountants who investigated and found out that the empty shells were re-registered into the names of convicted felons and sued by other companies for no less than a billion dollars. Browder tried his old tactics of filing complaints in Russian courts but in response his lawyers were accused of criminal wrongdoing. He finally had enough and offered his representatives refuge in the UK. Only one of them refused; Sergei Magnitsky argued that he\u2019s done nothing wrong and was not going to run from his own country for no reason. He was arrested in November 2008 and died in prison less than a year later. He was thirty seven. His prison diary chronicles the abuse he was subjected to.<\/p>\n

\u201cBack to the ussr\u201d is the title of the last chapter of Gessen\u2019s book. The courts are there to do the bidding of the head of state, the whole of the economy is at the state\u2019s disposal one way or another, but, she assesses, it is a country without ideology, without politics, just a \u201cfully fledged authoritarianism bordering on tyranny\u201d. Why does she think it amounts to going \u201cback to the ussr\u201d then? <\/span>To this reviewer\u2019s mind, today\u2019s \u201cRussia\u201d is no more than a soviet state, a country without politics, because these are left for the ruling elite; without ideology because there is no need for one, homo sovieticus will keep himself in check without the need of imposing on him what to think about linguistics, as Stalin-the-great-linguist did. However, it is not back<\/span> to the ussr because ussr never disappeared, communism never collapsed. Communism is not<\/span> the communist ideology. It is not<\/span> the ridiculous notion of central control of means of production \u2013 it is a Method of acquiring power and staying in power.<\/p>\n

I do not share Masha Gessen\u2019s enthusiasm for the snow revolution, but in any case, it would never have crossed my mind that any Revolution Square \u2013 and God knows there is plenty of them in our part of the world! \u2013 could be \u201csplendidly named\u201d. Let\u2019s not forget that all these sad squares in a multitude of towns in Eastern Europe (and elsewhere) were named thus in celebration of the bolshevik coup, which brought nothing but misery to the world and paved the way for Putin et al. Putin, the man without a face, is only one of many, and if it were not for him, some other faceless apparatchik would have come out of some soviet closet and would have done exactly the same. So should we join Masha Gessen in hoping for the better future for the ussr? In hoping for the next Khrushchov? The next Thaw? The coming de-putinisation?<\/p>\n

No thanks.<\/p>\n

_______<\/p>\n

* Masha Gessen, The Man Without Face, The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin<\/em>, Granta Books, London 2012<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Masha Gessen ends her book about Putin* with an Epilogue, which consists of her diary entries covering a \u201cweek in December\u201d. It wasn\u2019t just any week but the week from the 3rd to the 10th December 2011, the week of The Snow Revolution in Moscow. This was the time when, almost in spite of herself, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1192","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-michal-bakowski"],"yoast_head":"\nWydawnictwo Podziemne - Putin \u2013 the Faceless Apparatchik - Micha\u0142 B\u0105kowski<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/staging.wydawnictwopodziemne.com\/en\/2012\/09\/02\/english-putin-the-faceless-aparatchik\/\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Micha\u0142 B\u0105kowski\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"23 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/staging.wydawnictwopodziemne.com\\\/2012\\\/09\\\/02\\\/english-putin-the-faceless-aparatchik\\\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/staging.wydawnictwopodziemne.com\\\/2012\\\/09\\\/02\\\/english-putin-the-faceless-aparatchik\\\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Micha\u0142 B\u0105kowski\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/staging.wydawnictwopodziemne.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/0f8e7f00fb6bbcbd9bc0efebcf0817a2\"},\"headline\":\"Putin \u2013 the Faceless Apparatchik\",\"datePublished\":\"2012-09-02T17:34:10+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2012-09-02T17:47:21+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/staging.wydawnictwopodziemne.com\\\/2012\\\/09\\\/02\\\/english-putin-the-faceless-aparatchik\\\/\"},\"wordCount\":4699,\"commentCount\":8,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/staging.wydawnictwopodziemne.com\\\/#organization\"},\"articleSection\":[\"Micha\u0142 B\u0105kowski\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/staging.wydawnictwopodziemne.com\\\/2012\\\/09\\\/02\\\/english-putin-the-faceless-aparatchik\\\/#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/staging.wydawnictwopodziemne.com\\\/en\\\/2012\\\/09\\\/02\\\/english-putin-the-faceless-aparatchik\\\/\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/staging.wydawnictwopodziemne.com\\\/en\\\/2012\\\/09\\\/02\\\/english-putin-the-faceless-aparatchik\\\/\",\"name\":\"Wydawnictwo Podziemne - 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