On dealing with Russians or better DON'T deal with Russians.
The Russian Spy-Mafia State, or, the Avant-Garde of Mankind
By Bruce Sterling
December 29, 2011 | 10:49 am |
*People like to pretend that Russia is some kind of huge enigmatic freak, because it is, but it’s also full of signal lessons for trend-spotters. Though the Russians suffer extreme problems, they’ve got very few problems that aren’t also everybody else’s problems.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n01/stephen-holmes/fragments-of-a-defunct-state
“…the historically unprecedented nature of the Putin system comes into focus only when we remember, as Harding himself urges us to, that ‘the Soviet-era KGB was subordinate to the political will of the Communist Party.’
“When the CPSU collapsed, it left behind not only the FSB and its associated agencies but a constellation of other ‘orphans’, highly developed and now essentially autonomous fragments of a defunct state. In a desperate but ultimately successful endeavour to survive in an unforgiving environment, various former subsidiaries went in search of new sponsors.
“Soviet psychiatric facilities, for example, that were once used to torment dissidents, now receive cash-filled envelopes from younger Russians eager to dislodge elderly in-laws from desirable apartments.
“More significant politically are entities like Gazprom, the former Soviet Ministry of Gas, now a huge non-transparent corporation in which the Russian government holds a controlling stake, and the Procuracy, which retains its formal prosecutorial functions but no longer has to answer to a ranking organisation – appropriate payment by private parties can be enough to initiate or suspend a prosecution….”
(((Of course Anna Chapman gets a look-in:)))
“A similar story of disarray was revealed in 2010 by the arrest of the ten ‘spies’ deployed in the US by the Foreign Intelligence Service, a spin-off from the KGB: ‘The 55-page FBI dossier reveals in humiliating detail the frequently amateurish and bungling behaviour of Moscow’s agents in America,’ Harding wrote at the time. Here was post-Communist Russia in a nutshell: the operation that deployed the would-be femme fatale Anna Chapman as a clandestine operative ‘looked’, Harding writes, ‘like a job-creation exercise for the well-connected offspring of Russia’s elite. (Chapman’s father is a high-ranking “foreign service” official.)’
“Examples of this sort suggest that as institutional loyalties recede kin loyalties naturally replace them. The privatisation of estates in the exclusive Rublyovka district west of Moscow is another illustration of the pattern.
“‘In Soviet times,’ Harding writes, ‘KGB generals were allocated properties in the area, but had to vacate them when they retired from the service.’ The FSB generals who received land free from the state in 2003 and 2004 received it in their own names and so were able to bequeath it to their biological heirs rather than having to surrender it to successors recruited, with minimal regard to kinship, by an impersonal government bureaucracy. The pervasive role of nepotism in the distribution of both public property and financially exploitable positions in government and state-controlled enterprises is a sign of the institutional corrosion of the system….”
m.wired.com
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