This is something I cobbled together after a trip to Spain
last year. I rather like it, but that doesn’t mean that you will. Suck it and
see, as they say. File under Artsy-fartsy.
. . .
Who is it safe to piss off in Russia and who is it wisest
not to? Well, I can’t say who one can rub up the wrong way with no fear of
reprisals, but it is becoming ever more obvious that Valdimir Putin, c/o The
Kremlin, Moscow, is a lad best kept your side. That seems to be a lesson
Chelsea’s very own Roman Abramovich has taken to heart but which Boris Berezovky
didn’t.
Another of the money men apparently sailing close to the wind is
Alexander Lebedev, who owns London’s Evening Standard, but lives in Moscow.
Incidentally, he is always described as a ‘former KGB agent’ but I’ve always
felt the word ‘agent’ to be so vague as to be almost meaningless. For most of
us it conjures up the image of a highly trained killer who wouldn’t think twice
about accepting a drink from you, then screwing your wife, but I understand the
reality is rather different, that is to say pretty bloody mundane.
I don’t for
a minute doubt that these guys aren’t capable of making a pot of tea with
radioactive baloney (or whatever it was they used to kill the guy who ran ten
miles every day), but 99pc of their time is spent pouring over lists of
holidaymakers arriving in Moscow and St Petersburg and deciding who it might be
worth trying to flog a timeshare in a mooted development in Odessa. Maybe that
was the kind of ‘agent’ Lebedev was. The only other things I know about him is
that he and his son Evegeny have managed to get the Standard back into profit,
despite now giving it away, and the Lebedev pere is up on a charge of ‘hooliganism’
for punching someone on life TV. (See – if he’d been a real agent rather than a
pen-pusher he would most certainly have karate-chopped the man and found
himself on a murder charge.)
One man who has not been doing his very best to keep in Mr
Putin’s good books is Alexei Navlany. In fact, he is most definitely a thorn in
Mr Putin’s side and he is reckoned to have cost Mr Putin an ‘overwhelming’ majority
at the last set of elections. He was also a leading light in the street
protests which followed the election and the regular blog he writes also doesn’t
win him to many brownie points with the Kremlin – calling them ‘corrupt’ is one
of his milder claims.
Mr Navalny now finds himself charged with corruption and has
appeared in court in a town called Kirov, which (I read is 550 miles north-east
of Moscow), quite some distance for us Brits for whom a 40-mile trip down the
road is an unwelcome schlepp. (For the record my weekly commute from Cornwall
to London and back is 234 miles each way and I’m glad I have to do it just
twice a week. It’s not that bad, but I’m glad it’s not much longer.)
Obviously I am in no position to judge how solid, on the one
hand, the case is against Mr Navalny or, on the other, how trumped up the
charge is. He is said to have embezzled 16 million roubles from a timber firm
for whom he was working as an advisor. He claims the charge is nonsense and one
simply trumped up to discredit him. The thinking is that were he charged with
some other offence related to his political work, it might seem to obvious and
that getting him into clink on a charge of corruption would not only get him
out of the way but would also damage his credibility.
Then there’s the matter
of a new law which has been based banning those with previous convictions from
standing for election. But (and I am obliged to be fair here, despite what I
think is more likely than not), all I can do is report what I have read on
various news websites. But it does seem – this is my taking off my ‘impartial’
hat – that not being on Mr Putin’s side doesn’t pay many dividends if you
happen to live in Russia.
