Moscow Mogadishu

March 31, 2009 by Michael Keating

Paul Klebnikov   was the American-born editor of the Russian edition of Forbes Magazine. Klebnikov made his reputation as a investigative journalist looking into the business dealings of high-level Russian politicians and aspiring oligarchs. On July 9, 2004 Klebnikov was gunned down on the streets of Moscow in apparent retaliation for his professional activities. To this date the case is still open and no one has been successfully prosecuted for the murder.

To commemorate his memory, friends and family established the Paul Klebnikov Fund  which is designed to promote civil society and rule-of -law in Russia and to reward outstanding Russian jurists or journalists who have made lasting contributions towards this cause.

The 2009 winner is the journalist Leonid Nikitinsky who writes for the Novaya Gazeta.  He was at U. Mass Boston yesterday and this is what he had to say:

According to Nikitinsky today's Russia is not abiding by the rule-of-law but rather by the rule of what he calls:  the `ments'…A `ment' (derived from Russian prison slang) can be anyone who has any sort of state authority, anyone who wears `leather straps' as Nikitinsky stated. They can either grease the wheels for you or stop you in your tracks, but what they all have in common is a license to steal.

Acting according to `no ideology or vision or responsibility' these thousands of bureaucratic `locusts' as Nikitinsky characterizes them, perform only one visible social function: the transfer of assets from ordinary Russians to themselves through endless bribery and extortion. They manipulate arrests, prosecutions and trials. They intimidate juries, blackmail witnesses and even make inconvenient enemies disappear. They will stop only when you write out the check and maybe not even then if they detect that you have more to give.

Despite Putin's so-called `vertical power structure,' the sheer number of `ments' running rampant throughout the national system makes control virtually impossible. It merely hides `a spreading anarchy' which, accoding to Nikitinsky, the Kremlin is very concerned about.

 In the written comments accompanying his talk he states:

By crude analogy the `ments' dictatorship is not unrelated to Somalia under warlords, or parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan run by armed militias of local tribal chieftains. “Dictatorship of `ments'” is driving Russia to anarchy. Unless the process of `mentization' is reversed Russia could end up the world's largest failed state. The situation is dire.

Indeed.