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Jump to navigationJump to searchMafia State by Luke Harding (view source)
Revision as of 10:17, 14 November 2011
, 10:17, 14 November 2011no edit summary
Only the courage of crusading journalists like Anna Politkovskkaya or human rights lawyers like Natasha Estemirova have penetrated the gloomy secret machinations of the Russian interventions in Chechnya. As Harding vividly shows, they were forced to pay with their lives. The former was shot outside her Moscow flat; the latter is abducted from her home in Grozny and shot by her kidnappers. The FSB and other state agencies maintain their pressure on Harding reporting these matters to the West; there are still further break-ins at their new Dacha in Sokol, in northwest Moscow.
The background which Harding gives on the struggles between the oligarchs for oil and gas revenues are both intriguing and highly pertinent to understanding current issues. His chapter entitled, ''Give me your papers'' is revealing on the control of the media both here and in Russia. The dependence of the population on television - the independent channels having been shut down - does nothing to awaken them from the soporific compliance to the post Soviet state autocracy. Harding interviews Lebedev, the prosperous owner of four UK newspapers with son Evgeny: the London ''Evening Standard'', ''The Independent'''', the ''Independent on Sunday'' and the ''i-newspaper'', and encourages his readers to think through the Orwellian implications for both countries. His comments on the amount that is spent providing all of us with Channel 85, Russia Today (RT) would be amusing if we could manage to forget that the $1.4 billion that the Russian government spends on such propaganda is more than their expenditure on defeating unemployment.
The book contains eight pages of quality coloured photographs which supplement the account. These include the author's family in the remarkable landscape of the Caucasian mountains. There is a snap of a most magnificent yurt in Siberia under the peaks where Siberia touches on Mongolia. The wonders of the scenery sharply contrast with the tenure of the ugly politics of the times. In one aside Harding mentions how one proclivity stands 3269 metres above the Sugansky Ridge, near the border with Georgia and is named the ''Peak of Russian Counterintelligence Agents''.
