Anatoly Sobchak: Criminal Mentor To Vladmir Putin

[Michael K.]

Editorial:  

Vladmir Putin is being played up as the natural ally of the conservatives against Obama's excesses, by the US military intelligence press, a web of inter-related sites including Milton Kapner's, "Real Zionist News", Ken Adachi's, "Educate-Yourself", The "Oath Keepers," and other front sites created the John Birch Society.  

This view is sentimental and without merit, and in fact constitutes the most dangerous propaganda effort at present.  The goal has long been to unify the Northern Hemispheric countries into one UN army.  This will be accomplished by encouraging a conservative reactionary socialist revolution against the Obama-led US government, in favor of a right wing Zionist oligarchy based on the Russian model.

The purpose of this article is to explore Putin's background through his mentor, exposing the factual nature of Putin's leadership style, criminal history and association with Zionist oligarchs.  Thereby, it is hoped that conservatives alienated by Obama will not make the mistake of letting the Russians into their country through the open front door, welcoming them as potential liberators from "liberal" tyranny, when in fact the ascendancy of a "(Judeo-) Christian" US-Russian socialist alliance has long been the Zionists' intended outcome.


Anatoly Sobchak and Vladmir Putin.  Note Putin's attire: red, black and white, "Knights of Malta," classic right-wing socialist color scheme.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/mar2000/sobc-m10.shtml

Anatoly Sobchak (1937-2000): leading representative of capitalist "reform" in Russia

By Vladimir Volkov
10 March 2000

In the early hours of February 20, Anatoly Sobchak, the former mayor of Saint Petersburg, died in Svetlogorsk in the Kaliningrad district. A confidant of acting President Vladimir Putin, Sobchak was on an election tour in support of Putin's candidacy in the coming elections when he died. He was buried on Thursday, February 24 at the Nikolsky cemetery in Saint Petersburg.

The cause of death was first reported to be either a heart attack or kidney failure. The autopsy carried out in Saint Petersburg confirmed the original diagnosis: Sobchak died of massive heart failure...

However, another version of Sobchak's death is also being circulated in the Russian media, according to which he was murdered. The news program "Serkalo" (Mirror) broadcast on Russia's RTR channel ran an interview with two close acquaintances of Sobchak, actor Oleg Basilavshily of Soviet folk play fame, and TV reporter Bella Kurkova. Both said Sobchak had been feeling very well recently. They said he was full of energy and his health condition was stable. They doubted the truth of reports that the former Saint Petersburg mayor had died of a heart attack.

These doubts could receive added fuel from an interview, published February 22, which Sobchak gave to the newspaper Kommersant-Daily shortly before leaving for Kaliningrad. When asked by the reporter whether he had recovered from his illness, Sobchak replied: "I had an extensive round of treatment this summer, as a result of which I feel fine and can work normally." Then he added: "There have been attempts to kill me, to destroy me. But, thank God, I am healthy and feel full of power and energy."...

In the words of Alexander Belyayev, who ran the Saint Petersburg City Council when Sobchak was mayor, "The death of Raissa Gorbachev, Yeltsin's resignation from the presidency and the death of Sobchak mark the end of the epoch of first changes, romantic hopes and peaceful revolution. These are important figures in our country's history. Their significance lies in their formulation of modern Russian ideology. In a sense, Sobchak is the spiritual father of those Saint Petersburgers who are now working their way towards the top positions in Moscow, most significantly, Vladimir Putin."...

APN underscored the contradictory nature of Sobchak's political role, writing: "Sobchak despised the organs of state security with every fibre of his soul. And yet he fostered the rise of KGB Lieutenant Colonel Putin, who has now concentrated the greatest power in the land in his hands. This, surely, symbolises the ambivalence and profound inner contradictions of Sobchak's generation."...

A lawyer turned politician

As is known from countless publications and memoirs, the relatively young, assiduous legal expert from Leningrad soon attracted the attention of Mikhail Gorbachev, who gave him his full support. Gorbachev regarded Sobchak as a loyal supporter of his reforms.

But as the perestroika period drew to a close, Sobchak switched sides and joined Gorbachev's opponents, participating in June 1989 in the "Inter-Regional Deputies Group", which had been formed to support Yeltsin and a program of radical capitalist reforms.

In June 1991 Sobchak was elected mayor of Leningrad. One of his first official acts was to change the name of the city to Saint Petersburg. He remained mayor until July 1996, when he lost the election to his former deputy Vladimir Yakovlev, the current mayor of Saint Petersburg....

Until July 1999 he remained in voluntary emigration in France, and appeared before the public there at lectures held at the Sorbonne and other universities. He published numerous articles and two books, one of which was entitled A Dozen Knives in Sobchak's Back. At the same time, the Russian Chief State Prosecutor's Office opened proceedings against him on charges of corruption and misuse of authority.

The political atmosphere in Moscow changed in the spring of 1999. The impeachment proceedings against Yeltsin failed, and Chief State Prosecutor Yuri Skuratov, who had launched the campaign against Sobchak, was removed from office. This enabled Sobchak to return to Russia.

Sobchak now made his last attempt at establishing himself as a major political figure, but lost in the 1999 parliamentary elections when he stood in his old Saint Petersburg constituency. From that point on until his death, he was an active supporter of Putin, becoming his official confidant and adviser.

From "patriarch of democracy" to supporter of "iron rule"

The evolution of Sobchak during the last 10 years of his life is characteristic of the transformation that occurred in the post-Soviet regime as a whole.

Sobchak began his political career as an opponent of totalitarianism and state violence, an advocate of civil liberties, and a defender of justice and law against despotism. But as things developed, these democratic impulses increasingly took on a purely declamatory character.

The logic of the capitalist reforms demanded the implementation of a hard-line policy that would secure a historically unparalleled distribution of former state property to a thin layer of private owners. A form of Social Darwinism accordingly became the mainstay of Sobchak's politics.

When the terrible social consequences of Yeltsin's reforms became increasingly apparent and (mainly Western) newspapers began publishing articles about the poverty of Russia's average citizens, Sobchak demonstratively and categorically denied that there were any legitimate grievances. Typical was his response, while on a lecture tour in the US (at the University of Michigan), to a member of the audience who quoted a New York Times article describing the catastrophic social conditions in Russia. Sobchak responded by saying the Times article reminded him of the methods used by Stalin's Pravda.

After his return from French emigration in mid-1999, Sobchak declared that Russia needed a new politician in the Stalin mould. Sobchak suggested that this new leader need not be as bloodthirsty as Stalin, but he would have to be every bit as severe and iron-fisted, as this was the only way to force the Russian people to get down to work. At the same time, he published a new book entitled Anketa—Documents Toward a Biography of Joseph Dzhugashvili-Stalin.

http://www.opendemocracy.net/od-russia/dmitri-travin/russian-justice-don%E2%80%99t-cross-leader

Who killed Petersburg's Vice-Governor?

Another interesting case, is that of Yuri Shutov. It is not too well known even in Russia, though some time ago it was being widely discussed in Petersburg, where Shutov committed his crimes and Putin started his political career.

In 1991 Shutov was one of the assistants to a very well known politician of the time, Anatolii Sobchak, who was head of Leningrad City Council. Another assistant was Vladimir Putin. There is no doubt that they knew each other well and that they were already at loggerheads then.

Soon Shutov was dismissed from his post and became a relentless opponent of Sobchak. He published a book called «The Heart of a Dog» (echoing the title of Mikhail Bulgakov's novel, which was hugely popular in Russia at the time), containing a very unflattering portrait of Sobchak.

Putin on the other hand became a very close associate of Sobchak, who was by then mayor of Petersburg. During his official trips abroad or when he was on holiday, he left Putin in charge. That was obviously when Putin started regarding Sobchak's team of officials as his own. One of the members of that team was Mikhail Manevich, who was head of the City Property Management Committee.

In August 1997 Manevich was already Vice-Governor of St Petersburg, when he was gunned down by a sniper in the centre of the city.  The case has never been solved. But in February 1999, when Putin was head of the Federal Security Service, Yuri Shutov was suddenly arrested. In 2006 he was sentenced to life imprisonment for the organisation of several murders. Manevich's was not one of them: it had not proved possible to establish a link between Shutov and the shots fired in August 1997. But on the day sentence was pronounced, I received a telephone call from the representative of an extremely influential figure. He told me that Shutov had been sent down primarily for the Manevich killing and that I as a journalist could make this clear to my readers and radio audience.

I assume that at that time the authorities had no doubts whatsoever that it was Shutov who organised the murder of the Vice-Governor, although no formal proof of this was laid before the court. The killing of such an important figure as the Vice-Governor was regarded as a direct challenge to the authorities, and personally to Putin, who was at that time President of Russia. What's more, Manevich was a key figure in Putin's team, possibly even a personal friend. So it's hardly surprising that one way or another Shutov ended up in prison for life.

Putin probably felt exactly the same about the defiant attempt on the life of Chubais, a very high-ranking official and Putin's personal choice for the head of UES. The logic behind the actions taken against Shutov and Kvachkov is clearly one and the same. What is curious is that in November 1999, when the district court in Petersburg had decided there were grounds for concluding that Shutov had been wrongfully arrested in February, he was once more taken into custody, this time by the Special Rapid Response Detachment, actually in the courtroom. So with Shutov they didn't even wait until the next day, as they had with Kvachkov.

http://rumafia.com/person.php?id=143

Sergey Mironov was involved in a public scandal for the first time in the spring of 1996, when he was forced to come into conflict with members of the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly, deliberately deceiving them. The essence of the conflict is as follows: on the eve of the election for governor of St. Petersburg, acting Mayor Anatoly Sobchak wanted to postpone the election to June of 1996, a month earlier, so that his competitors did not have time to conduct propaganda work. On behalf of Sobchak his assistant Vladimir Putin agreed with Mironov and falsified the results of the last vote, the elections were postponed. Later it became known that a quorum of deputies was not there that day. Nevertheless, Sobchak lost the elections anyway.

http://www.xoxol.org/putin/putin26.html

"The Real Vladimir Putin," by Paul J. Saunders, from The Washington Times, January 6, 2000, p. A15.

While the administration has rushed to burnish Mr. Putin's reformist credentials by highlighting his long service in St. Petersburg (still Leningrad when he arrived), under the city's former mayor, Anatoly Sobchak, this and other periods in Mr. Putin's career are ambiguous at best. First of all, very little is yet known about his decade-and-a-half as an officer in the KGB.  Mr. Putin left his last post, in East Germany, just as communism collapsed there.  This has led some to suggest that he may have been involved in operations intended to defend the dying regime of Erich Honecker.  Other reports accuse Mr. Putin of having been involved in the illicit privatization of Soviet property in East Germany.  If Mr. Putin is to be associated with the lofty goals of the "radical reformers" in St. Petersburg, where he served as deputy mayor from 1994 to 1996, he is no less associated with their venal excesses.  While serving as deputy mayor, Mr. Putin was accused of holding foreign property and bank accounts and was investigated by a commission of St. Petersburg legislators for granting export licenses in a shady barter deal.  The commission recommended his dismissal, which Mr. Sobchak resisted.

When Mr. Sobchak lost an ugly re-election race in 1996, Mr. Putin moved to Moscow as a protégé of another St. Petersburg veteran, the notorious Anatoly Chubais.  Soon thereafter, Russian prosecutors launched an investigation of Mr. Sobchak; he left Russia for medical treatment during the investigation and did not return until earlier this year...

Mr. Putin's later conduct as director of Russia's Federal Security Service, the principal successor agency to the KGB, raises further doubts about his relationship with Mr. Chubais and other oligarchs in the so-called "Family" — the Yeltsin inner circle. Mr. Putin played an active role in squashing high-profile corruption investigations and at one point even appeared on national television to confirm the authenticity of a videotape purported to show the country's prosecutor general entertaining prostitutes.  The prosecutor had been leading inquiries into the behavior of Mr. Yeltsin's daughter and the tycoon Boris Berezovsky, among others.

The fact that Mr. Putin's first official act was a decree granting Boris Yeltsin and his family immunity from criminal prosecution (among other benefits) suggests that Russia's acting president also had to cut a deal with the Family to win power.  Statements that Russia's crony privatization cannot be reversed seem to reflect this as well. Because his popularity is largely a manufactured phenomenon — created by carefully managed coverage of the conflict in Chechnya by media outlets controlled by the government and the Yeltsin entourage — Mr. Putin will remain dependent on the Family at least until Russia's March elections, and possibly beyond.