Ruminations on Russia

My wife (SWMBO) and I sat opposite Stoppard and Arkady Ostrovsky when they arrived in Moscow after Minsk. A classic bad Friday night after a long week we were drinking and eating and drinking to end the week, Stoppard was listening to his guests.

Not sure what made me Google him; this is the result. It's difficult to pick out outstanding sections of this. It's all outstanding; here are some quotations to convince you that I am right. read it.

This is a rubber-stamp "democratic republic", with the last collective farms, the last KGB, the last dissidents in the pre-1990 sense of the word, and - in President Alexander Lukashenko - the last dictator in Europe.

The journalist Dmitriy Zavadskiy was a young man who worked for the Belarusian affiliate of ORT, Russian public television. In July 2000, Zavadskiy was supposed to meet a colleague arriving at the airport. His car was found parked there. He hasn't been seen since.

The reason for his "disappearance", I was told, is that Zavadskiy was working on a story about the Belarusian special forces' presence in Chechnya on both sides. I had a friend with me, Arkady Ostrovsky, who reports for the Financial Times from Moscow and has pretty much covered the waterfront on Russian affairs. I saw Arkady blink and stare, and perhaps bite his tongue.

Last year Irina, now remarried to an American, made a statement before the US House Committee on International Relations. She told me the story she must have told a hundred times - "Anatoly and Victor drove away in Anatoly's car, to go to the sauna. Anatoly asked me to come, but I decided to stay home. Later, witnesses told investigators what happened. Anatoly and Victor left the sauna and got into our car. Immediately after they turned the corner, a car cut them off. My husband tried to back up but he was cut off by a second car. The doors of our car lock automatically if you hit the brakes. So the people who jumped out of those two cars broke the windows and pulled out Anatoly and Victor. Traces of Victor's blood were found at the scene. They were put into separate cars and driven away. Our car, a Jeep, was later towed away by one of the squad."
Irina says she is certain the two men were killed within a day or two. The cherry-red Jeep was never found. According to "information", it was flattened by an armoured troop carrier and buried.

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