"For much of this time, given (mayor Anatoliy) Sobchak's frequent and protracted absences and his preoccupation with national affairs, Putin assumed the functions of acting mayor. He supervised the drafting and implementation of countless international business deals and policy reforms. These transactions did not always go according to plan, and no doubt many profited handsomely from Putin's admitted inexperience in these matters. During his attempt to establish municipal oversight over a series of casinos, for example, the city was cheated. In another case, the city was fleeced for $120 million for two shipments of cooking oil. Although during this period his mother bought a choice apartment at an exceptionally low price at a city auction, Putin didn't seem to enrich himself personally. In the one specific public charge of corruption that was brought against him, Putin sued in court for slander and won".
"Putin was not corrupt, at least in the conventional, venal sense. His modest and frankly unfashionable attire bespoke a seeming indifference to personal luxury. While as deputy mayor, he had acquired the use of the summer dacha of the former East German Consulate and even installed a sauna unit there, but when the house burned down in the summer of 1996, his $5,000 life's savings burned with it. To have accumulated only $5,000 in five years as deputy mayor of Russia's second largest city and largest port, when hundreds of less well-placed Russians were enriching themselves on government pickings, implies something other than pecuniary motives behind Putin's activities. Commenting on her husband's way of life, Lyudmila Putin noted: 'He was never at home".I was left alone with the kids, my in-laws and a miserable apartment. We didn't have a stick of decent furniture. And we hardly had any money to buy anything with.'
".In sum, Putin was honest, certainly by Russian standards. He lived simply and worked diligently." (pp. 32-33) (15)
A former city councilor of St. Petersburg who supposedly ran an investigation, Marina Salye, explains on Frontline that there was an agreement to provide food aid to the city of St. Petersburg during Putin's time in the mayor's office. She holds up a document written in Russian that, she claims, shows that the money for the program disappeared "without a trace" and that no food came. Frontline never clarifies whether an independent person who understands the Russian language and administration ever examined the document to confirm its authenticity. Salye later states that her and her fellow city council members "concluded that Putin and his assistant should be fired."
What Salye does not specifically allege on camera is that this was an act of corruption or dishonesty on Putin's part. Any problems with the food aid could have been due to Putin's relative inexperience and the chaos and heightened corruption that was occurring at the time in the country, as Lynch alluded to in the above passage from his book in connection with parties "profiting handsomely from Putin's inexperience in these matters." The assumption that it was personal corruption by Putin is made specifically by Dawisha.
As security analyst Gordon Bennett explains in his 2002 report, Vladimir Putin and Russia's Special Services, with respect to Putin's time in the mayor's office in St. Petersburg, "If Putin had as much dictatorial power as had been suggested, he and Anatoliy Sobchak would have made sure they won the municipal elections in 1996." They did not. (16)
Further into the Frontline program, we are provided with the well-worn ominous innuendo about Putin's past in the KGB. In actuality, Putin was a low-level analyst stationed in Dresden for the bulk of his career. He wasn't some James Bond style assassin and high-level KGB officials didn't even seem to be aware of him. (15)
When he returned to Moscow from East Germany in 1990, he actually turned down a promotion to "the headquarters of the KGB's foreign intelligence operations," opting to keep his family in St. Petersburg where they had secure housing, which would have been difficult to obtain in Moscow. (15)
When a disenchanted Putin finally left the KGB voluntarily, he went public with his former ties to the agency, including, as Lynch detailed in his book, announcing it intentionally on a television program so it could not be used to blackmail him in the future. (15) This is different and more blase than the version the Frontline audience is treated to in the interview with filmmaker Igor Shadkhan, which implicitly spins the episode as Putin wanting to burnish an image as some sort of KGB tough who wanted to intimidate everyone.
Claims about Putin's lavish Spanish villa are also trotted out without question. However, an investigation by none other than Putin nemesis Alexei Navalny revealed that Putin does not own the villa in question but Zoya Ponomareva, the daughter of a Russian parliamentarian, does. (17)
Conspiracy theories surrounding the Moscow apartment bombings in 1999 are dusted off as well. These theories generally entertain the idea that Putin and the FSB were behind the bombings as false flag operations to catapult Putin into the presidency.
Gordon Bennett, formerly with the Conflict Studies Research Centre, made a salient point discrediting this theory when he underscored the fact that it was primarily propagated by the late exiled oligarch and Putin enemy Boris Berezovsky and those connected with him. Berezovsky never was able to present any substantive evidence of the accusation when pressed to do so. Interestingly, Berezovsky only made these accusations after Putin had moved against his media empire. (16)
Lynch calls these claims against Putin and the FSB "tendentious. " He points out that Russian military operations, overseen by Prime Minister Putin, were already underway in response to the Chechen incursion into Dagestan when the bombings took place, thereby nullifying the purported motivation for Putin and the FSB to manufacture a terrorist attack. (15)
These kinds of unsubstantiated claims and innuendo are par for the course among most of those interviewed for the Frontline program, led by Dawisha -- lots of smoke offered but ultimately they seem to come up short in producing actual verifiable evidence of the fire.
It is unclear if Dawisha is just being sloppy with her research and fact-checking or if she is knowingly playing fast and loose with the truth in order to further the currently fashionable and profitable agenda of hysterical Russia bashing and Putin demonization.
What's more disturbing is that Frontline gave her practically free reign to frame the issue of Putin's alleged personal corruption, without doing due diligence and consulting with sources that might provide facts inconvenient to Dawisha's assumptions, like Allen Lynch, Gordon Bennett, Jack Gosnell, Sharon Tennison or many of the business people who have stated that their actual interactions with Putin have been open, honest and fair.
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
1
