| Book by famous Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya,
entitled Putin’s Russia, was published in the United Kingdom on Thursday.
The book describes the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, in a devastating
light, Independent newspaper wrote on Friday. It is not published in Russia.
The journalist, working in Novaya Gazeta, calls him “a KGB snoop”
and warns that he is moving the country back to a Soviet-style dictatorship,
the paper wrote. Politkovskaya compares Putin to Joseph Stalin, to an
over-promoted spy and to a miserable humiliated functionary from a Nikolai
Gogol’s story.
“Under President Putin we won’t be able to forge democracy
in Russia and will only turn back to the past. I am not an optimist in
this regard and so my book is pessimistic. I have no hope left in my soul.
Only a change of leadership would allow me to have hope but it’s
a political winter. The Kremlin is turning the country back to its Soviet
past,” the paper quoted Politkovskaya as saying. “Nothing
can be worse than Putin,” she says adding that Russian liberals
are able to become strong leaders despite their failure at the recent
parliamentary elections and other faults.
Politkovskaya blamed Putin of destroying democratic opposition, pulling
wool over people’s eyes, constant lies about Chechnya and social
reforms.
“We no longer want to be slaves, even if that is what best suits
the West. We demand our right to be free,” Politkovskaya was quoted
by the paper as saying.
The journalist fell seriously ill while traveling to Beslan on the first
day of the school siege. She had earlier told she suspects agents of the
Federal Security Service (FSB) of having poisoned her.
The paper reminds that in 2000, her life was threatened by a Russian
police officer because she had spoken out about an individual being kidnapped;
she was forced into hiding. In 2001, she was accused of being a spy for
Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev and was held in a pit for three days by
the FSB without food or water.
Politkovskaya also presented a plan in her book to establish peace in
Chechnya. She wrote a letter to Putin with her ideas. Her plan involved
demilitarisation, international peacekeepers, a crack-down on corruption
and the creation of a federal commission to govern the region, the paper
wrote. “It would be made up of non governmental organisations and
civil society groups who have worked in Chechnya through the two wars
and who are trusted. Of course I didn’t get a response to my letter,”
she said.
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