I am completely obsessed by the Russia story. Can’t get enough of it; watch way too much cable news and read way too many on-line sources, trying to put it all together. The Robert Mueller investigation strikes me as working with ruthless deliberation, flipping witnesses and issuing subpoenas and indictments, and the net is inexorably closing around the President. John Oliver calls the story ‘stupid Watergate,’ and that seems apt; so many of the players have seemed like dolts, not the least of them Sam Nunberg, whose meltdown on cable news show after cable news show earlier this week will be the comic highlight of the movie, when it gets made.
But there’s an angle on the whole thing that I haven’t seen explored much, and it might provide an answer to a question that I keep going back to. Here’s the question that kept pestering me: why hasn’t Paul Manafort flipped? Why does this guy sit there, under house arrest, day after day, and not just cooperate? He’s going to jail; if they charged his assistant, Rick Gates with bank fraud and money laundering, what do they have on Manafort? It might because Manafort is a die-hard Trump loyalist, a True Believer, the most committed pro-Trump partisan in this whole saga. But in every other context, Manafort comes across as the ultimate pragmatist, a survivor, an opportunist. Wouldn’t cooperation with the Special Counsel be his best strategy?
Yes, if reducing his criminal liability and lessening his jail time is his objective. I don’t think that’s what’s going on, though. I think he’s afraid for his life.
I recently read a terrific book, highly recommended; Peter Pomerantsev’s Nothing is True, and Everything is Possible. Pomerantsev is a Brit, but with Russian ancestry and Russian language fluency. He left a producer’s job with the BBC, and moved to Russia for ten years, to work in the Russian TV industry, producing documentaries and reality shows. The Russians learned a very important lesson from the Soviet years. They learned how to use television. The problem, they deduced, with Soviet-era TV was that it was boring. In Putin’s age, that can’t be allowed. No endless televised lectures on Leninist Marxism; Russian TV borrows from the world of Western entertainment. Reality shows, quiz shows, crime dramas, sitcoms. A Russian version of Married With Children is very popular. Pomerantsev learned about a school for young Russian women; lessons in how to seduce powerful men. How to Become An Oligarch’s Girlfriend. His reality show followed one ambitious young woman in particular; you saw the classes in which she learns the art of pleasing older guys, grooming, body language, subservience. Popular show; the school’s applicant pool grew after it aired. That’s Russia today, where high-end prostitution is lauded as a career.
I thought about Pomerantsev’s book when I read the story recently about Anastasia Vashukevich, who also goes by Nastya Rybka, a Belurusan escort girl, now incarcerated in Thailand, who claims to have secretly taped conversations between a Russian oligarch and a top Russian government official while she was with them on a yacht. She says they talked about the US election, and may have been joined by three Americans. She says she recorded 16 hours of their conversations, and she’ll trade them for extradition to the US. Vashukevich was arrested while teaching a sex seminar in Thailand, which she says was just about seduction techniques and how to be a good girlfriend. (!) She says she does not want to be extradited to Belarus or Russia, because she’s afraid she’ll be killed.
The Russian oligarch she was with on her yachting adventure was aluminum magnate Oleg Deripaska. The government official was Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Prikhodko. Deripaska is a billionaire, close to Putin. He’s also a former employer of Paul Manafort. And, in the fall of 2015, Manafort was desperate. He owed Deripaska millions of dollars. So he volunteered to serve the Trump campaign as an unpaid consultant. Eventually, of course, he was named Campaign CEO. When he got the gig, he apparently told Rick Gates, he was relieved. It might ‘make him whole’ with Deripaska.
The glossy surface of Russian TV and the other high profile events that Putin has appropriated–the Olympics, the World Cup this summer, the Miss Universe pageant–serve to hide this reality. Russia is a kleptocracy. It’s hopelessly corrupt; corruption defines the modern Russian reality. Everyone knows it. It manifests itself in a million ways. Pomerantsev talks about the time he decided he needed to get a drivers’ license. He was a Londoner, where you don’t need to drive; in Moscow, public transit isn’t as good (though their subways remain amazing). He went to a driving school, where he was told ‘the bribe for a drivers’ license is 100 dollars, American.’ He told the guy he didn’t want to pay a bribe; he genuinely needed to learn how to operate a motor vehicle. The driving school guy was puzzled. ‘The bribe is 100 dollars,’ he repeated. The idea of someone taking a class and then passing a licensing test was completely foreign.
Law and order is maintained by the Russian mob. The role of police (and they do have police), is to arrest young guys, so they can go to prison and learn how to become mobsters. Any interaction with any government official might (and probably will) involve a bribe. The prevailing ideology is nihilism. They tried Marxism, and they tried Democracy. Neither worked; what does work is force and money. Russia’s vast natural resources, especially oil, gas, steel, aluminum, have created vast fortunes. If ever you see any news stories involving the Russian economy, like Russia’s GDP for example, understand any and all statistical evidence from the Russian government are exercises in fiction.
And they kill people. Over 200 journalists have been murdered in Russia since 1991. Former Russian Press Secretary, Mikhail Lesin, was bludgeoned to death in Washington in 2015. Alexander Litvinenko, an outspoken Putin critic, was poisoned in 2016. Anna Politikovskaya, a journalist who published a book critical of Putin, was murdered outside her apartment by a contract killer in 2006. Her colleague, Natalia Estemirova, was shot to death in the woods outside her home in 2009. Stanislav Markilov, a human rights attorney, was murdered later in 2009. Boris Nemtsov, former deputy prime minister, was shot to death outside his home in 2015. Boris Berezovsky, an oligarch who had a falling out with Putin, was murdered in his flat in London in 2013. Paul Klebnikov, editor of the Russian version of Forbes, was murdered, another contract killing, in 2004. Sergei Yushenkov, a liberal politician, was murdered in 2003. And, of course, Sergei Magnitsky, a human rights lawyer, was arrested and murdered in jail in 2009. His murder led to the US passing the Magnitsky act, barring a number of Russian officials from traveling to the US or purchasing American assets. Other EU countries followed.
Has Oleg Deripaska been linked to murder? Yes. He’s accused of arranging the murder of Felix Lvov, a Russian/American stock trader. Deripaska is known to have connections to the Russian crime syndicate Izmaylovskaya. More significantly, Deripaska was a key figure in what become known as the Russian aluminum wars, in which over a hundred aluminum industry executives were murdered in the 1990s.
In short, Oleg Deripaska is not a guy you want to cross. And Vladimir Putin is not a man you want to criticize. These guys are murderers, many times over. They’re close associates, and they protect each other.
We know now, from reporting in a variety of news outlets, that the Russians wanted Donald Trump to be President, and put enormous resources into making that happen. We also know that the specific Russians involved are deeply corrupt, and completely unafraid of lethality. That threat, the threat of violence and death, lie beneath the whole web of intrigue and collusion that Mueller is investigating. They have their guy in the White House. I suspect they’ll go to some lengths to keep him there. No wonder Paul Manafort has decided not to cooperate.
