Assassination of Anna Politkovskaya
15 years ago, the Soviet regime received a blow on the part of the story but he survived by taking a different form. It is taking ever more visible traits of an authoritarian regime similar to an elective monarchy.
The recent murder of Anna Politkovskaya confirms evolution. It is the last of the 261 journalists killed in Russia since its liberation from communism in 1991. Politkovskaya was astonished to see continue and publish, in spite of threats and the death of his fellow journalists. In part this is due to his dual nationality, Russian and American.
A link with foreign countries, even more superfluous was always protective. The secret police (KGB, now FSB) ranked then that person in another register, surrounded considerations of high politics. Because the appearance was with the Soviet Communists a priority capital. Kill someone, it was never too serious, human life in Russia does not cost very much. Its price is evaluated in terms of the consequences of the loss of the individual power. As everywhere else. In the West, they can be catastrophic. In the USSR today, Russia, ever.
macabre elements of the case appear immediately. The journalist was killed on the anniversary of Putin, as if this elimination could be used as gift to the former kagébiste. The reaction of the latter is odd. Located in Dresden, near the Chancellor Merkel, he is obliged to follow him to classify the murder as a crime. And he adds: "But the political influence of his writings was very limited." "But" ambiguous, seems to be a message. Repeated at will by the press. What and to whom? Without doubt, the Western politicians who may fear the weakening of the power of Putin after an assassination of this magnitude and such cynicism. And they are now considering Putin as the true owner of Russia, especially its gas and oil. The message is clear: do not be afraid, I am the chief. Since then, an eloquent pair is: every time, speaking of the death of Politkovskaya, we think of the anniversary of the president, and vice versa.
Curiously, the colonel Putin has been followed in this style of messages, with "Le Monde" who wrote in his Oct. 11 editorial, "the murder of Anna Politkovskaya can only be attributed to the regime." This sentence is not the conclusion of an investigation just begun and which we do not believe it will lead. Is it a directive in what to think sent to prospective voters, free and conscientious in presidential elections? Only the socialist newspaper had failed in its fiscal Putin precisely that order, "should not." Charge, of course.
The Russian press has not yet made the final version. First, she spoke of the five assailants. No wonder this same number since we understand the precautions taken by the killers of business: to be 5, it's almost guaranteed not to be settled too easily then. Now the pro-government Russian press, now dominant, and advance an alternative scenario speaks of a mysterious video that would have saved a woman supervisor Politkovskaya just doing errands before returning home and being murdered in the elevator door. Another video would have saved a young man who was transformed into the new 25 October in a police veteran of the war against the Chechens.
A week later, the U.S. State Department announced that it will not undertake the investigation into the assassination because he had been held in Russia, the country of second nationality of the victim. Without doubt, because Russia is a small colonial war in Chechnya, which has already the appearance of a war against Islam, "as in Iraq." And that's all.
Boris Pasternak
Politkovskaya's case is unthinkable in the era of the Soviet empire. Only the services of the states had the weapon actually kill someone shot at his elevator would give his signature. At the time, the KGB was hiding, he was behind the armed thugs of puzzles. Konstantin Bogatyrev and the poet died in 1976 fell, his skull fractured at the door of the elevator.
The Pasternak affair was more complex. If you have not read his novel "Doctor Zhivago", you know at least the film of the same title, where the name of Omar Sheriff who played the lead role long before he commented on the results of horse races on television.
Pasternak's novel, a famous Russian poet, had sparked a storm in the Soviet Union in 1958. Ruling was a Nikita Khrushchev, a former collaborator of Stalin, whose main task was to years 30s forced collectivization in Ukraine which had 1.5 million peasants died. However, Khrushchev found a degree of indulgence in the West because, first, the peasants were not dead or British nor French, and secondly, it was Khrushchev who had spoken officially, unofficially, crimes Stalin, confirming in a sense, what the people wanted to know, already knew (which was not a primary concern of French writers like Sartre, his group and many others).
This did not prevent Khrushchev to provoke the Cuban crisis in 1962 that installed missiles on the island of Fidel Castro and what was the bloodiest again, to shoot a demonstration of workers in Novocherkassk hungry in southern Russia, and later shot the few Soviet officers who had refused to shoot at this event.
That's the background on which was added the name of Pasternak. Its main "fault" was to tell the events of the Russian civil war unleashed by the Communist coup in 1917 that even today, the Sorbonne called "revolution" in accordance with the Stalinist propaganda. You may have seen its flagship, namely, "The Battleship Potemkin" which is not too far away, about the hypocrisy of the famous "Potemkin villages".
Pasternak painted a picture where the massacres and atrocities were committed on both sides, which are sorely apparatchiks remove and replace the cruel days of commissioners, anarchist and say, idealistic.
Thus began the perpetual replacement own the Stalinist regime, which continues in a more gentle. This political slogan of the dictator, "Among us there are no irreplaceable," has become proverbial. Thus, Stalin began a meeting of its Central Committee: "Comrades, you see more of you, Comrade Yakovlev. Why? Because Comrade Yakovlev had committed a serious error. Which? I'll tell you. He imagined irreplaceable. Here is a very serious political mistake! That is why Comrade Yakovlev is no longer with us. Comrade Petrovsky, you have a worried look. Your conscience is not calm? Do you think, perhaps, to be irreplaceable? No? I welcome this. You have understood the lesson. Time to move our agenda. "
Pasternak Not only treated the civil war in an unacceptable manner; Soviet journals refused publication. He was not content either to have compassion for the issues of Christian faith, and everyone knew that God was no longer without speaking of the immortality of the soul. Worse, he sent the manuscript abroad, in a capitalist country, Italy, where the novel was published by Montador, publisher communist, certainly, but too individualistic and ambitious! Even Gallimard does not allow to act without the advice of a competent person placed high enough! It was Cold War, right? Soviet tanks were in Hungary and Germany East, is not it?
And then, the calculations of this "treacherous" Pasternak, we see them, however much he choose a Communist editor! Who laughed at the pressure of the Central Committee Italian! Worse, the Swedish Academy attributed to Pasternak's Nobel Prize. It is said that this new, Khrushchev had opened his mouth to explode in a long series of obscene words (note that after the longest whose name the great turn of Peter the Great comprises 257 words) but neither the words nor the breathing stopped coming! At that point the guards ran to fetch a doctor.
I was 13 years at the time, and I remember the hurricane the people's anger (name well, very well controlled). Meetings in factories, in universities, convictions of the wildest, "like a mad dog," "this lackey of American imperialism that denigrates his homeland as an ungrateful swine." The spearhead of the working class - an official name, the secret police - Pasternak offered to exile abroad.
By holding his family hostage, of course. Pasternak was chosen after two years of harassment, to refuse the Nobel Prize. His letter began: "having the meaning ascribed to this award by my fellow ..."
Shortly after, exhausted, he died in 1960 at the age of 70. The power could finally take revenge! They arrested the wife of the poet, Olga Ivinskaïa - she will be 7 years of concentration camp. It seeks to stop the daughter of Olga, almost adolescent. The problem was that Irina became engaged to a French student, Georges Nivat, who was studying in Moscow. They were married the following days ... he fell ill, so much so that it is not transportable the Office of Soviet marriage. It postpones the date, but it was fixed beyond the expiration of the visa. "That's okay, Mr. Nivat, you go to Paris and return immediately with the extension of your visa for you to join your beloved, for better or for worse. "Especially for the worst, obviously.
Have you ever sufficiently captured the spirit of the Soviet state to guess that Georges Nivat never obtained a visa, once outside of the Soviet Union? As for his little Irina it was immediately stopped to spend three years in a camp. The project of marriage did not survive this test.
At the time of the great terror, before World War II and before the release of Stalin as dictator of Eastern Europe liberated from Nazism, all notions of resistance had been abolished. Like all people, the writers also had entered a mere awaiting execution.
Maurice Blanchot, who had spent a wonderful little book to hold and forgetting do not speak, and for good reason: this experiment does not begin until a certain inhumanity of the state when it becomes a collective executioners. France, avoided it, fortunately, in the twentieth century. To be ignorant in this regard, it is a chance history.
Mandelstam
Think of a great Russian poet Osip (Joseph) Mandelstam. Suspect in the eyes of the secret police from the early 30s, soon openly persecuted for worms too independent and even attackers - it's one of the few who dared an epigram about Stalin.
"We live without knowing the ground beneath our feet, our conversations are not audible ten paces, and if someone has the courage to say a phrase he remembered from the Kremlin mountaineer ... His fat fingers are fat like worms, his words are as heavy weights merchant. His mustache blues groove, shining his boots! Around him, a band of chefs hard skin, it provides a set of lousy service. And he forged order by order, that are struck on the forehead, the eye, in the belly! Each performance is a feast for him, with his guards to robust chest. "
was signing his death sentence. It is the madness of a poet, to decide whether an action risky. It seems to me that I understand. Relatively speaking, I had a similar experience with my pamphlet "The head of Lenin." The atmosphere can become so stifling that the window is broken even at the cost to awaken the guard. Except that I had not the courage to sign my shot of my name.
Arrested in 1934, Mandelstam was exiled to Voronezh, a provincial town. He is famous. It is forbidden to any publication. His wife Nadezhda is with him, his name means hope. We think not, of course, who it turns out to be rather ironic. The three years ended, in Moscow that he can to be immediately rearrested and sentenced to deportation in the Far East, on the edge of the Pacific, across from Alaska. The few memories of survivors probably speak of him as we have seen sick, feverish, gone mad, hungry, looking for something edible in a discharge of the concentration camp. We threw his body into a common grave, having attached, according to the custom of the time, at its foot an aluminum plate with the record number. In case you need to find and prove the inmate's death.
The great widow
remained the widow, Nadezhda. And now his task, his vengeance : extend the poet's life, save his work. Because the searches are thorough, any piece of paper writing is confiscated and disappears into the mouth of the secret police. Caches, okay. But the risk is huge, and always confirmed to be torn from the place, arrested, deported. What to do with thousands of lines of "Voronezh Notebooks" sought by all the spies of the Soviet Union? One solution: learn by heart the .
Learning is one thing. Do not forget, is another. Each day, a portion must be repeated the next day the next. Again and again and taken up endlessly. This work started in 1938, lasted until 1953, Stalin's death and the execution of the head of the secret police. A new leader, it was still quiet (until the case Pasternak ...) Then she put down the immortal lines on paper, give copies to friends without fear of denunciations, the opportunity to find the manuscript in the free zone the world. Three precious volumes are published in Russian in the 60s in the United States.
I was fortunate to have one of these volumes in Moscow in 1972, made by a young researcher in Russian literature, a brilliant Alain Préchac Normale. Myself, officially university, I had a double life related Samizdat. This word means self-publishing, a little parodying the names of the editions of state. Mandelstam's poetry was not unknown but still illegal version, typed-written or drawn on photographic paper, heavy and bending.
Harassment
This activity, copying and distribution of texts banned or simply absent, was dangerous. A Once someone has suspected the KGB began an investigation, assisted by an invisible army of spies and the crowd of "honest Soviet citizens," according to the formula. Finished the Stalinist purges mass scale of punishments was now appropriate. It was just a board of a party official, the convening of the alleged or any member of his family, his bosses warning by the KGB; firing at all, with special mention in his workbook known as put on the blacklist or receive the passport wolf ; Interrogation in the KGB; search; spinning open; anonymous phone calls nocturnal harassment strangers and beatings by "thugs" after this part called preparedness, summing solemn stop "anti-Soviet activity" and finally The arrest, trial behind closed doors; deportation to exile inside; sentence of three to seven years in camp plus 5 years of exile in Siberia, with the ban at the end of the term, reside in large cities.
Bifurcation capital could occur after the arrest: the orientation of the accused to a formidable specialty psychiatric hospital where they did not get out alive. He had become world famous for the release.
I say have a double life because Soviet reality was double, too. Sooner or later the parallel existences were to meet. And now in 1971 my philosophy faculty had received a letter from the "competent body" revealing my "true ideological face (its contents had never revealed). Licensee, I tried to hide in northern Russia, on the White Sea. In vain. Finally, in February 1973 the KGB had undertaken a massive attack and hailed me in searching five houses in one morning, supposed to be my workplace and hiding places.
After months of spinning, I expected, and the spoils of the barbarians turned thin. They still capture the volume of Mandelstam who had been brought from Paris by the couple Préchac, a treasure, as a fee of my texts published in the press in the West. I never managed to recover in spite of my complaints with the police chief secret: since the reforms of Khrushchev, there was an "office of personal grievances to the attention of the Chairman of State Security" (for now Andropov, the former "peacemaker" of Hungary in 1956 and future leader, at a very short, the USSR), to give you full title. The final refusal was based on the fact that "the book was published in a capitalist country" ...
Mandelstam's widow Nadezhda Mandelstam
is the happiest widows, reports Joseph Brodsky's words Anna Akhmatova. She survived the Stalinist purges until major day of posthumous fame of her husband. All the attention and sympathies, see the poet's adoration of the fans have covered the early 70s.
An unexpected thing happened. The poetry of a great Russian poet she carried in her memory for 20 years, made his work, feeding and plowing his soul and being. The widow had begun to write, and had quickly brought forth two volumes of his memoirs, written in excellent prose, full of flavor and freshness! The table at the time it was painted was not flattering.
course, the century Communist was inhuman. Nobody would accuse this writer to have signed an information after four days and nights of torture by insomnia, or as an engineer in jail, having left all his family hostage to the secret police, working on weapons of mass destruction desired by Stalin. Personally, I find unjust charges imposed by, say, Stravinsky in Hollywood where he made the movie commercial music, to eat better, in respect of Serge Prokofiev in Moscow, making music for movies Stalinist to stay alive.
century was a miserable : The power would dominate the world with nothing to give him the coward seeking, as they do today, to spare Stalin and Hitler, the people were deceived and crushed with indescribable cruelty. It was a disaster and misfortune all, the century when the thistles replaced the roses.
of a sudden the Moscow intelligentsia turned away from the great widow can not bear his meeting stripping unretouched. I remember the years of irony to it, fairly bland indeed. Nothing of their alleged heroism only remained to intellectuals. For years, we consoled ourselves by koans like: way out of the cage? men and monkeys are in a cage whose keys are in the hands of monkeys. If a man takes hold of the key becomes monkey too. Ways out of the cage?
The great widow had offered a powerful medicine, a sobering effective against this intellectual and emotional ineptitude. Obviously, in our own festival of love, his voice brought a discordant note.
Brodsky speaks movingly of her in his obituary in 1980. "For the last time I seen May 30, 1972, in a kitchen of a Moscow apartment. It was evening, sitting in the shadow cast by a deep cupboard she smoked a cigarette. The darkness was so dense that one could distinguish only the red end of the cigarette and the two bright eyes. The rest - his tiny body covered in a shawl, her hands, the oval of her face ashen and auburn hair, was swallowed by darkness. It was like the last effort of a large flame extinguished, a small ember that if you touch it, probably cause a burn. "(V, 124).
Trial Brodsky
Brodsky himself, before becoming a Nobel Prize in 1987 and died in New York in 1996, was sentenced to 5 years of internal exile in 1964. The trial took place in St. Petersburg, the room was full of young Komsomol Kgb. The preparation was not flawless: Vigdorova, a journalist friend of the poet, had managed to enter the room and shorthand three quarters of the trial until the police had reported the irregularities to the presiding judge.
- You over there, stop writing! - He cried.
- Comrade Chairman, I am a journalist, I write articles on education of youth, I need this verbatim!
- Stop, or I'm outta here! - The president's face was blood red.
The remainder of the trial had been established through the testimony of defense witnesses called to testify but never listened.
Brodsky was sentenced to 5 years of exile in northern Russia, for 'social parasitism'.
The next day, the verbatim record typed took her way invisible and intangible, through Soviet society channels by mysterious Samizdat. To reach me, in Moscow, without a direct connection with the journalist, it took him two months. A friend had moved all knocked on my door in a village near the capital, at 6 o'clock in the morning. 20 pages without intervals, covered with explosive text, it would make the evening even an acquaintance.
What? We panic, we just type in a typewriter. At midnight we have ten copies (on paper of the cigarette). The original leaves for Moscow in the friend's pocket, running, literally, three kilometers to the station to catch the last train. We were young and enthusiastic. Certainly, before us was a wall, but something was clear: their crimes will not pass over in silence anymore. The 20 years that followed were filled mainly with the struggle to enlighten the public .
My friend had taken verbatim from the original to make it, being paid by two copies of my ten copies: one for him and one for someone on, which provides him text.
As for Brodsky, he remained in exile three years. Then released, the KGB did emigrate in 1972.
Kgb in France: liquidation of the book of Alain Préchac. Soviet Literature. What do I know? 1977, No. 1688.
the KGB, engine of political repression inside, wanted to control the antennae of the Russian company abroad. Here's an episode of his successes in France.
arrived in France in 1975, with some of my archives, I collaborated with Alain Préchac. Normale, professor of Russian literature and Soviet brilliant translator, among the first to Solzhenitsyn. Presses Universitaires de France would have ordered the famous series "What do I know?". For the first time, a very competent writer and helped several people in the field, including myself, could handle the difficult and ambiguous that was the Soviet literature.
The novelty of this book was the tone used to tell the independent adventure of literature under communist rule without a candy Aragon and other kingpins of the subject (whose relationship with the NKVD KGB is confirmed by Documents at the BNF, well kept and never published). For the first time in France, names and titles of many works were cited, and well before that in other countries. Names that are famous today, including those of guests of the Salon du Livre de Paris 2005 ...
The book came out in 1977, right kagébisme. Putin was 25 and already working for political supervision in the occupying Soviet troops in East Germany.
In 1982, my destiny led me away from literature, the Holy Land and in the monasteries of the Grande Chartreuse and Mount Athos in Greece. I never saw Alain Préchac in 1997 and learned an amazing story , The KGB managed to liquidate our small but valuable book, with the support of French authorities. According to his information, the Ministry of Education had received a protest petition signed by teachers Soviet Russian language and literature, serving in France. And an amazing event occurred: the book was withdrawn from sale, striped library catalogs and even the catalog of the series What do I know? itself! There is more! Except in the Japanese edition ...
The contents of the petition remains unknown to the public today. My letters to those concerned did not reply, including that addressed to the BNF or the legal department of the Society of People of Letters which I belong. However, some contributors to the book, the consequences were more serious. One of them, contained in the book under the initials AB ., Was that the writer Alexander Bogoslovsky Moscow. Once the kagébé understood that obedience of the French in this case was acquired, it Bogoslovsky arrested and sent to the Gulag for three years.
Simon Bernstein
Tarkovsky's film, Solaris already very old, probably will survive through a sequence with this dwarf that you just saw. His name is Simon Bernstein, died in Moscow in 1973. The official diagnosis was endocarditis. He died in hospital. I went to see him several times. He became increasingly anxious, unequivocally expressing doubts about the treatment of his illness. With the help of some friends, I sent one of "ours", a doctor by profession, in whom we trust. He spoke with colleagues, read the medical file of Bernstein. Everything seemed fine. Soon the patient died. What do you want? People die sometimes endocarditis. Rarely, but it happens.
Why Simon's suspicions? Literary criticism, manager of a club of young writers, Communist Party member. Arrived in 1965, the trial of Sinyavsky and Daniel, sentenced to 7 and 5 years of camp to be published - under pseudonyms, abroad! - Their news and stories. Bernstein had signed, like many others, the petition against this sentence, which was aimed primarily at intimidating other writers.
Not only had he signed, but he also refused later to retract. He had brought to the committee of the PC in his district. A dozen people had settled around a long table covered with red cloth. The small size of Bernstein - suffering from a hereditary disease, Duchenne bone size, barely one hundred and ten centimeters, made the grotesque: the serious and solemn comrades condemned without appeal a dwarf, a Jew, moreover, of which only the head protruded above the table. Triumphantly, he had been expelled from the party.
course, they followed the dismissal and a ban on working as a facilitator or educator. In the street, they followed him from time to time. One winter evening, the mysterious thugs attacked him and stole his coat ... He earned his living as an extra in particular profile. Thus he participated in the Tarkovsky film, to immortalize.
His magnanimity and his sense of humor, lightness of being, his readiness for a move funny, sharp, unexpected stay in my memory. One day we went to the American exhibition of graphic works. The queue took away any hope of entering the same day. Then Simon said: - He must try otherwise. - And we went out of the room. Approaching the police, Simon said in a nice low: - I am on a mission. And me pointing a finger: - It is with me. - The uniformed guards gaped, and we spent almost fearing currents explode with laughter.
His funeral passed in a Kafkaesque atmosphere. Like any product in the USSR, buy a coffin was not an easy thing, let alone a corresponding size. There were only white child beers, decorated according to custom, lace. We, some friends have accompanied him to the crematorium. And we here in a small room, with a robust woman wearing red scarf around a table. She stepped forward and took the floor immediately.
- Comrades, "she said, a citizen of the Soviet Union ... (She consulted the record) Simon Bernstein left us. I declare open the farewell ceremony.
We spoke at length. There were moderate friends of the deceased who spoke of his attempts to improve "our common life." Radicals, outraged by this controversy evoking sentimentality launched the courage of Simon, and his bravery in circumstances where "some think only of escape. "
The lady ceremony showed signs of impatience, the accumulated queue outside. Finally, memories dried up. Small beer of child began to descend down the . Friends of Simon, all poets and artists, were massing around with a childlike simplicity, to take a look, as if it was possible to see anything.
soon as the door closed behind terrible beer a man in civilian clothes who remained silent all the time in the corner rose. Calm and indifferent, he made his way through the assembly to the exit. The secret police had finished with him.
Hypothesis Green
The current weakness of political power resembles that of previous years, starting in 1938. Unexplained for now, it probably corresponds to the years of ... global warming where power awaits the end of a cycle, to pass, relieved, to the next.
When the return to totalitarianism in Russia, we see that both political obstacles to show, namely: (1) international trial of several former tormentors the Stalinist-Brezhnev-Yeltsin-Putin, say three of the most notorious, in memory of the famous "troika" of judges, the favorite tool of the great terror which follow (2) the need for Russia the law on "lustration" already in force in the former communist countries of Eastern Europe, to say that the ban on former officials of the secret police (eg, Putin) to occupy positions in the administration Russia.
