Oligarchy in Russia - Alexei Navalny’s telling mistake

[D. Schlenk]

https://mronline.org/2021/01/28/oligarchy-in-russia-alexei-navalnys-telling-mistake/


Oligarchy in Russia – Alexei Navalny’s telling mistake


Jan 28, 2021


On the subject of oligarchy and the treasure storehouses
which oligarchs build for themselves, Alexei Navalny reveals
that he’s following a U.S. and NATO script: this takes no
account of how President Vladimir Putin rules Russia, or the
choice most Russians believe is the preferred alternative to
Putin – that’s rule by a combination of officers and civilians
acceptable to the military. In the past, the name for that
was the Stavka.

Most Russians believe the Army abhors the oligarchs and will
eliminate them, along with their corruption, unless Putin
can be persuaded to do so himself. For more than twenty
years now he has been reluctant; but there is still time. In
this effort Navalny’s films are a useful tool – a Russian one,
but not one contrived with the assistance and operated for
the benefit of Navalny’s foreign supporters.

The details of the Gelendzhik palace in the film Navalny
released on January 19 are not new. They have been investi-
gated and widely published by Russian reporters since 2010.
In that time they have had no impact on the understanding
Russians have of Putin, or his public approval rating.

The Russian evidence is that a group of Russian businessmen
conceived of the project as an attempt to curry favour with
the president. There is no evidence in Navalny’s film, nor
in the Russian reporting which has preceded him, that Putin
accepted it. As Sergei Markov commented on Ekho Moskvy
radio:

Now Navalny says this again, but does not mention that
there is no evidence of Putin’s presence there. Because
the impudence of lying has increased many times in ten
years… But there is no smoke without fire. What is the
reality? This palace [comes from] a group of rich people
who are also personally well acquainted with Putin, and
[who] decided around 2005 to build a house for him when
he resigns from the post of president. But Putin refused
to accept such a gift from them.

This leaves the indisputable fact that the culture of
bribery continues to flourish in Russia, and that Putin has
failed to deter, diminish, or liquidate it. This isn’t news
– all Russians believe it. Navalny’s Anti-Corruption
Foundation has been preaching to the converted. The conver-
ted, however, will not support Navalny to replace Putin, as
Navalny himself and his western supporters insist. To
Russian minds, Navalny is a foreign successor for Putin’s
oligarchy, not a Russian replacement, nor an end to the
system introduced by Boris Yeltsin with U.S. endorsement.

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Left, False Dmitry I — www.headstuff.org
Right: twitter.com

Russians have had several hundred years to recognize a false
Dmitry when they see one. There were four in the 17th
century, financed and armed by Warsaw; one in the 1990s,
sponsored by Washington; Navalny is False Dmitry VI of the
Black Forest.

Linguistic analysis of Navalny’s video on the Gelendzhik
palace indicates the English subtitles were written first,
and then translated for Navalny to speak in Russian. The
English is American, not British; and certainly not the
English of the German and American operatives who provided
the video production technology, editing, and special
effects at the Black Forest Studios in Kirchzarten, Germany.

According to a German press report from Kirchzarten,

the studio bosses remember that at the beginning of
December, a request by email came from a production
company in Los Angeles. There was talk of a documentary…
In terms of content, the Black Forest Studios have
nothing to do with the film, the studio owners emphasize.
They only provided the technology and the location and
organized the shooting.

Navalny’s Russian represents a garble of English phrasing,
with stylistic mistakes plain to native ears. “He is trying
to speak with logic,” according to one Russian linguistic
analyst, “but he uses a lot of phrasal constructions of
non-colloquial structure common to bureaucracies and
corporations.” According to another linguistic analysis by
Pavel Danilin, director of the Centre for Political Analysis
in Moscow,

let’s recognise that in Russian this combination of words
is unwelcome. Unless you are a schoolboy translating the
text… Navalny received his text from English-speaking
comrades, the original text was in English.

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Black Forest Studios in Kirchzarten, located 30 kms north
of Navalny’s Black Forest chalet at Ibach.
Source: www.blackforest-studios.com

The German intelligence agency BND was in charge of Navalny
at Ibach and of his movements in the Black Forest, as well
as between Berlin, Ibach, and Dresden (where Navalny
visited Putin’s 1988-89 apartment).
Had the BND wanted, it could have suppressed the German
press reports now emerging that it was a U.S. intelligence
operation in charge of the film-making at Kirchzarten. In
this fashion a part of the German government aims to
dissociate itself from Navalny’s U.S. operation.

This is an analysis of vocabulary, syntax, and style of
expression. It’s also for adults, not for the young who
have learned their Russian from the school textbooks which
Putin’s Education Ministry has commissioned from the
Rotenberg brothers’ monopoly.

How is it possible for a 44-year old native Russian-speaker
with two Moscow university degrees and years of experience
in Russian public speaking to make such clumsy mistakes?
How is it possible for this figure to fabricate the stories
of his poisonings so often that he can’t remember the last
fabrication he told, or the contradictions between them he
expects his audience to ignore? The answer is that he is a
presenter with a script composed by others.

It seemed so when I first interviewed Navalny at his Moscow
office in 2008. At the time he had bought a small number of
shares in the state oil and gas companies Rosneft, Gazprom-
neft, Surgutneftegas, and Gazprom, and was taking his
minority shareholder rights to local courts to require the
companies to open their financial records. One of the
objectives was to determine whether there was transfer
pricing in the export sales the companies operated with
Gennady Timchenko’s Gunvor trading company. Navalny’s office
was light, airy, filled with desks and brand-new equipment.
But there was no one there except Navalny.

It was plain Navalny was fronting for others. But his
campaign for transparency and accountability in Russia’s
most important line of business was running in parallel with
my reporting. The veracity of the message was what counted,
not the character of the messenger, or the calculation of
the messenger’s paymaster. It was therefore Navalny’s
message I quoted directly.

A decade later in 2018, when Navalny published his evidence
of the link between the aluminum oligarch Oleg Deripaska
and the Kremlin official Sergei Prikhodko, our effort at
investigating the truth was still running in parallel, and
I reported accordingly. Navalny’s film drew almost 5 million
views; Deripaska’s Instagram reply, 2,685. Prikhodko remains
in power as First Deputy Head of the Government (prime
ministry); Deripaska too.

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Source: johnhelmer.net For the archive on Prikhodko, click
to read. He died in Moscow on January 25.

A year ago in March 2020, when Navalny published his
investigation of the abuse of state money in the operation
of the RT media organisation, he was late by more than a
decade. When I reported on Margarita Simonyan’s management
of RT in March of 2009, the Hong Kong-based publication
which first printed the story was sued by Simonyan. Her
terms required an apology; a scripted interview with her;
the removal of my story and the sack for me.

Since last August Navalny’s Novichok story is evidence that
the truth of his anti-corruption research has been replaced
by lies in the service of an attempt to seize presidential
power. He is still fronting for his paymasters, but now his
lies are aimed with an entirely different purpose. For the
archive of these lies, click to read.

Navalny’s idea is that Putin is the single mastermind of
Russian rule and that he dictates to the oligarchs the
tribute they should pay – in treasure for him to accumulate
and display for himself, his friends and girlfriends in
private. This is an Anglo-American cartoon about how
oligarchy works everywhere, including the UK and the U.S.
– in Russia in particular.

Exactly how the Russian oligarchy operates, steals, and
rules has been the focus of the investigations of Dances
with Bears for thirty years now. These investigations reveal
little evidence that Putin has been the mastermind. The
conclusion to these stories is that what Putin might have
done, or ought to have done, or publicly promised, he didn’t
do. The weakness of his character, not the strength of his
mind or hand, explains how he rules.

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Ex-UK Prime Minister Theresa May and President Putin —
editorial cartoon by Steve Bell, The Guardian, March 15,
2018.

However, the war imposed on Russia since 2014 – that’s the
fighting fronts of the Donbass and Syria; the worldwide
economic sanctions; the cyber and information war – has also
overtaken the thieves whom the U.S. Treasury calls Putin’s
cronies. They are being replaced with men more necessary to
Russia’s governance and Putin’s survival, starting with the
military. The more the spiderweb cartoon has directed U.S.
and NATO targeting of the civilian oligarchs, the more
potently Putin has been obliged to embrace, and to follow,
the General Staff and Defence Ministry.

The value of the hundreds of case studies reported on this
website and in the accompanying books is that they allow a
systematic record of how Putin rules, case by case. What is
revealed is that the closer you look for Putin in each
story, the less you can see of him. This is a provable
truth more telling than the warfighters and regime-changers
in Washington, London, and Brussels will acknowledge.
Disagree with this, you may, but for your interpretation
you have no alternative but to start at the case studies.

This is the big mistake of Navalny’s palace video. Putin
isn’t to be seen there – and without him the film reveals
no more than most Russians already know about the stealing
of state money by the oligarchs. But Navalny’s ambition to
replace Putin himself as president requires this
fabrication. It’s a mistake which exposes Navalny more
thoroughly than he imagines he is exposing Putin.

It’s also a discovery about how governments operate –
democratic ones and every other kind, including the Russian
kind – that has been well-known to everybody since time
immemorial; and to university professors since 1911.
That was the year when Robert Michels, a German-born
sociologist working in Italy and France, published the first
edition of what he called the “iron law of oligarchy”.


Robert Michels, Political Parties — A Sociological Study of
the Oligarchic Tendencies of Modern Democracy. First
published in German in 1911, then Italian in 1912, with the
author’s additions, it was translated into English by Eden
and Cedar Paul in 1915. In 2001 their edition was published
on the internet by Batoche Books (Canada) at this link.

“Democracy leads to oligarchy,” Michels wrote,

and necessarily contains an oligarchical nucleus… It is
indisputable that the oligarchical and bureaucratic
tendency of party organization is a matter of technical
and practical necessity. It is the inevitable product of
the very principle of organization… The formation of
oligarchies within the various forms of democracy is the
outcome of organic necessity, and consequently affects
every organization.

For his evidence, Michels focused on the politics of the
democratic and socialist parties in Europe, including the
British; and on the administrative bureaucracies of those
states. He ignored commercial corporations except for those
in the U.S.; there he observed “the existence of an aristo-
cracy of millionaires, railway kings, oil kings, cattle
kings, etc., is now indisputable.” For Michels, aristo-
cracy was synonymous with oligarchy.

He mentioned Russia, still tsarist in 1911, in passing
references to the 19th century Russian revolutionary
writers, stopping at Mikhail Bakunin (dead in 1876). Lenin,
Trotsky, Stalin and other Bolsheviks were ignored; the only
communists Michels recognised were German of Karl Marx
vintage. To all of them today, the contemporary opposition
and the ruling Russian ideologies, including Putin’s, are
implacably hostile. However different they are from each
other, they share the idea of oligarchy as a target.

Sociologically certain as this idea is, it is better under-
stood by Russians today than by Americans or British,
French or Germans. This is a paradox Michels explained as
his iron law – oligarchy is everywhere, and must be opposed
by democrats everywhere.

In war, the transformation into oligarchy is even more rapid
than usual. Speaking of the world war which was under way in
1915, when Michels added to the book’s English edition, he
observed: “Speaking generally, it may be said that the war
has further accentuated the oligarchical character of party
leadership.” Today in Russia the war is also changing the
character and membership of the oligarchy of which Putin is
a part, and which dictates to Putin his public script. The
American and NATO war is militarising the Russian oligarchy.

The war is also closing the records of Russia’s corporations,
the commercial shareholding ones as well as the state enter-
prises, to a degree not seen in Moscow for the past fifty
years. Never again can there be a foreign court case like
the decade-long long lawsuit in London’s High Court over
corruption inside the state shipping company Sovcomflot;
nor an open debate by Russian historians of evidence subject
to standards of proof like those of Justice Elizabeth
Gloster’s in the trial between Boris Berezovsky and Roman
Abramovich, also in London.

U.S. sanctions have struck at the businesses of Putin’s
cronies ineffectually. But by compelling them and every
other Russian business to conceal and camouflage their
operations and assets, the sanctions campaign is destroying
the openness of Russia’s capital markets and the freedom of
the Russian press to investigate them and report. The free
press of Russia which existed in 2014 is now regimented by
information warfare; this hobbles investigative journalism
like mine as an aid to the enemy. To be clear, this Russian
press is not half so regimented and unfree as the press of
the Anglo-American world.

More than a century ago, Michels understood exactly. He
warned against the press

utilised by the leaders in order to make attacks (more or
less masked) upon their adversaries; or to launch grave
accusations against persons of note in the world of poli-
tic[k]s or finance. These attacks may or may not be
established upon a sufficient foundation of proof, but
at any rate they serve to raise a dust storm.

The London, New York, Berlin and Paris media and their
journalists do nothing but raise dust. Bull dust.

In the history told every week by Dances with Bears, where
is Putin and what does he decide? The answer is that for
the most part he avoids deciding by delegating to others;
changes his mind; takes one decision only to revise it;
vacillates; equivocates; temporises. The reason for this is
the iron law of the Putin period – he is the creature and
the mouthpiece of the Russian oligarchy. Such a form of
rule, and ruler, must continue to succeed itself until
Russians decide otherwise.

They will. Navalny won’t.

Note: in the original of the lead illustration, published
in February of 2019, Vladislav Surkov, a Kremlin advisor at
the time, was rolling out for public display the regime
structure for the future in which Valery Gerasimov, Chief
of the General Staff, and Sergei Shoigu, Defence Minister,
join Igor Sechin, chief executive of Rosneft, in giving
Putin his marching orders. For elaboration, read this. A
year later, on February 18, 2020, Surkov was removed by a
Kremlin decree.