As the recent murders of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya and former spy-in-exile Alexander Litvinenko make clear, anyone who attempts to expose the political subterfuge and corruption in Russia today can pay with their lives. And Russia's new bourgeoisie looks likely to demand an ever more authoritarian state. PATRICK SCOTT gives the background. The origins of the murdered Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya and the Russian President Vladimir Putin could not be more diverse.
Politkovskaya was a child of the Soviet bureaucracy, born in fact in New York as the daughter of Ukrainian diplomats to the United Nations. When the Soviet Union still existed her place as part of the ruling bureaucracy was all but assured. Even with its collapse she was better placed than most to jump ship and become part of the new Russian capitalist class.
But rather than do any of this Anna Politkovskaya chose to carve out a career for herself in Russia as an investigative journalist. And through her writings she exposed the political reaction and corruption that underpinned post soviet Russia.
If Politkovskaya was born into the Soviet bureaucracy then Putin became its adopted child. Though originating from more humble cirPutin Was recruited to the KGB (the Soviet secret police) in the 1970s shortly after graduating from university. As a KGB officer Putin would have had first hand practice of carrying out the political persecution and repression of dissidents and has admitted as much in interviews published in First Person, his biography.
Putin only resigned from the KGB in August 1991 during the failed putsch against the then Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Though a part of the ruling bureaucracy, albeit as a relatively minor functionary, he had clearly come to realise that the political winds of Russia were now blowing in the direction of capitalist restoration.
The political liberalisation that preceded (in the form of Glasnost) and was to continue after the fall of the Soviet Union can be seen as a means of preparing the population for capitalist restoration in Russia.
But today in Russia even this liberalisation has barely been able to sweeten the very bitter pill of a neoliberal capitalism. A very tiny minority were able to buy state-owned enterprises at knock-down prices to form the new capitalist class whilst the vast majority of the Russian working class were forced into grinding poverty. This is reflected for example in mortality rates, which show life expectancy especially for men having actually declined in Russia over the last decade or so.
It looks likely that Russia's new bourgeoisie will come to demand an ever more authoritarian state and maybe even one that will dispense with even the formal trappings of bourgeois democracy altogether.
All this forms the political background to the writings of
Hard-hitting investigative journalist who put the heat on Putin and his pals: Anna Politkovskaya Politkovskaya was the thirteenth journalist murdered in Russia since Putin's election in 2000. Her murder only attracted attention in the west because she was far better known there.