Vladimir Putin publicly committed, in June 2005, a crime of embezzlement. He hosted a group of foreign businessmen in St. Petersburg, including Robert Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots football team.
Kraft showed him a ring with 124 diamonds, which he had won as a prize for a championship he had won. Putin took the ring and put it in his pocket. To avoid embarrassment, Kraft stated well after that he had presented the jewel to the president of Russia.
The incredible episode is narrated by Masha Gessen, a journalist from Russia, in the book “The Faceless Man: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin”. Published in Portuguese for the first time in 2012, the compromising biography is now relaunched by Intrinseca.
In a way, the ring episode is the least serious among those narrated by Gessen. The book talks about the succession of assassinations of the Russian president’s disaffected, which would have been carried out by a special division of the FSB – the secret police that succeeded the reckless KGB, from the times of communism. Putin himself was head of the KGB, before entering politics in 1999, invited by then-President Boris Yeltsin.
The big problem with Gessen’s meticulous investigation lies in the fact that at most it can deal with profound verisimilitudes, without the support of evidence that would give the narrative a more transparent content. Evidence does not exist when episodes supposedly provoked by the FSB are reconstructed. We are, therefore, in a kind of forest without dogs, where the faith that we attribute to those who know the dark corridors of the Kremlin prevails.
The assassination of opponents was not a practice inaugurated by Putin. It comes from the days of the dead Soviet Union and entered the period that was believed to be controlled by democracy unscathed.
Galina Starovoitova was then the best known of the victims. Petersburg anthropologist, deputy and leader of a group that defended human rights and electoral justice, she was shot twice as she entered her apartment on the night of November 2, 1998.
The list of other victims is long. It features Alexander Litvineko, a former KGB officer who was in exile in London and was poisoned in late 2006 by a radioactive device called polonium-210. It is a product extracted only in Russia and strictly controlled production. The FSB could have used it, and it is hypothesized, with the authorization of the president’s office.
Investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya was poisoned, cured, but shot to death on October 7, 2006. She was deeply knowledgeable about the Republic of Chechnya, whose secessionist guerrilla Vladimir Putin harshly repressed. Or Sergei Yushenkov, a young liberal businessman, murdered hours after registering a new party for which he intended to run in 2003 for head of state.
There is a large contingent of deceased whose death certificates carry an unofficial question mark. Let’s say it’s possible that a certain dissident died of a heart attack or that a certain oligarch was killed by a rival. It turns out, however, that the victims were all on a path of friction with Putin, which, Gessen argues, puts the Russian president in a suspect position.
But just as serious as the physical elimination of opponents is the suffocation of Russian democracy that Putin practiced. By suppressing, for example, direct elections for the choice of 89 Russian governors. Or ruthlessly pursue leaders who could overshadow him, like world chess champion Garry Kasparov, who barely managed to campaign because “superior orders” unleashed venues for his rallies or blocked the runway for the plane he was carrying aides on.
Elections are successively won by Putin and his party, by percentages of votes that are impossible to ascertain, since there is no independent electoral authority. With power so concentrated in the hands of so few—and this is not conveniently explored in the book—corruption becomes a parallel instrument of power.
Why is it that none of the three television networks, all of them government, does not investigate the costs of the real palace that the president built on the edge of the Black Sea? And why is it not verified if the information that he is the owner of a personal fortune of US$ 20 billion is real?
In autocracies such as the Russian one, such facts are not ascertained, as are the decision-making mechanisms —and it is a period not covered by the book—that led to the invasion of Ukraine and the war against the neighboring country.
With a wealth of experience honed over 4+ years in journalism, I bring a seasoned voice to the world of news. Currently, I work as a freelance writer and editor, always seeking new opportunities to tell compelling stories in the field of world news.
