What I Think Is Going on In Moscow

Here's what I think is going on in Moscow - a slow-motion coup or an invisible coup.

There's lots of smart people writing about the events in Moscow - Paul Goble, Tom Nichols, Anders Asland, Andrei Illarionov, Amy Knight, Yevgeniya Albats and others. All of these people should get a lot more attention in Washington than they do, as they are all knowledgeable hands that have studied Russia and the Kremlin for years, and either speak and read Russian or are Russian.  So I think it's important to follow all these people and listen to what they say.

It's a time when unfortunately we have to go back to "Kremlinology," trying to parse official newspapers, rumors, line-ups of people on Lenin's tomb -- in fact, tomorrow, we'll have to see where Putin is standing -- if he shows up -- on the bleachers for the big Crimea annexation celebration. This is what Sovietologists did in the old days -- where was Andropov standing? Who was next to him? How vigorously did they wave their hands? How many times did they repair to the back room for a nip to stand the cold on November 7 during the parade?

There's a concerted posse of Kremlin sympathizers, paid trolls, pro-Putin analysts and outright agents of influence and just plain agents who are working overtime to ridicule, distract, spread disinformation, lie. They want to create the impression that if you ask questions where the Great Leader is of a nuclear country, who has been missing now for 10 days -- with no reliable, validated sightings -- that you're a conspiracy theorist.

If Putin shows up tomorrow, even if looking a bit pale or if Sergei Ivanov seems to have a place in the front row and he doesn't, there will be plenty of these types who will gloat and say that those who worried about helicopters and fires and Instagram notes from Ramzan Kadyrov and the tabloids in Switzerland and Italy were simply neo-cons, Cold War has-beens, dreaming of their glory days. And yes, we will fall into line admitting that Putin threw his back out giving birth to a baby while in Hong Kong with Surkov because he feared Kadyrov would find out he was transgendered. Or something.

What's funny -- eerie funny -- is the Dogs that Do Not Bark. The usual Kremlin propagandists on Twitter and Russian TV and the whole Novorossiya gang are strangely quiet. Or even let slip a few signs of worry, like @Steiner1776 worrying about the Russian flag missing from a Kremlin tower. Was it lowered due to the victims of the shopping mall cave-in in Kazan? Is the Soviet flag going to be raised instead or worse, some old version of the St. Andrew's flag? Not all the national-socialists in the Novorossiya set are Russian Orthodox Reds -- some are secular and communist.

I think it's important to just keep looking at all the data points -- the stories -- even if they are odd or not convincing, and comparing them and discussing it freely. Without open debate of closed societies, you can never hope to open them up.

So here's how I'm putting it together.

I think the writer who says that Primakov has issued an ultimatum -- this appears to be Pavel Pravy and not the anonymous KatrinSha who apparently copied him -- likely has a point, but Primakov himself wouldn't have the sole authority to stage a coup. Old KGB wolves like Sergei Ivanov, who is chief of staff would not have the power alone, even if they have networks.  I think they'd want safety in numbers and they might make a collective or a network. They would need cash for people to travel, to bribe some, to pay off some as Tom Nichols discussed in a scenario where the forced transition, dictated by an ill Putin, would involve a scurry for various interests to get theirs. So that means that Konstantin Malofeyev or Yevtushenkov who shares some business with him or others maybe we don't suspect could be involved, or it could be Igor Sechin and other officers rounded up from various agencies.

Putin has made a lot of enemies not just abroad and among liberals, but at home, because he makes choices and rides hard on people who disrupt his balance, i.e. Aleksandr Dugin whom he got fired from Moscow University. Remember all those people he fired from the Investigative Committee and other agencies awhile ago? It was such a mystery. Did he discover a coup plot?

The removal of the term "Novorossiya" from state TV as a sign of "something" really stands out for old Kremlin hands but this could be nothing or be understood in various ways. Maybe it's like stopping your subscription to the Daily Worker to dispel suspicion. Or maybe it's somebody like Primakov saying, enough of this play-acting and fantasizing, we're just going to keep Crimea, keep Ukraine off balance by keeping low-level war/terrorism/hybrid whatever going there, but it will be totally on our terms with no warlordism and semiboyarshchina -- which is what the shrewd Aleksandr Boroday said was the DNR's and LNR's chief problem.

So here are my theses:

1. This was planned, and planned carefully, and in stages. So the first stage is to "prepare the masses," and that's why the "I am Occupier" was released February 27 and went viral -- with help - and got 6 million views within 2 weeks. Its purpose is to invoke the idea of the  Soviet Union again and the ingratitude of the near abroad and the superiority of Russian civilization.

 

2. Boris Nemtsov had to be killed, but not only because he was going to lead an anti-war parade -- that would have had at the most 16,000 people in my view, given the remote location, the problems in preparing it, the arrest of Nemtsov for the two weeks before it, etc. And  not only because he was going to release a report on the war -- lots of people have done that, and more can always be done, but his contribution would have been to make it interesting, viral in Russia, and compelling to foreigners. He had already done a video with a million views about MH17, with Leonid Martynyuk.

I think the reason Boris would have to be killed was because he would have easily gotten the 100,000 signatures that any candidate for president in emergency elections after the demise/withdrawal/death/overthrow of the existing president needs to have. This is what Robert Coalson helpfully explained at RFE/RL. It's actually easier to run for president after a death/overthrow like that then in the normal course of things (it seems to me). Why did they have to do this? Because they had nothing to imprison him on.

Navalny couldn't run because he had a suspended sentence -- and at any time they could make that real, and now asked to on Friday.

Prokhorov would have been a possibility as he was a safe choice to run against Putin in the past, but just last Friday, another thing happened seemingly on schedule, he was forced to resign his own party, which he had funded and founded, because it was hijacked by hardliners who backed the "anti-Maidan" parade February 21. That basically put him out of politics.

Ilya Ponomarev is a possible candidate but he went abroad because there, too, authorities were trying to pin some fabricated case on him and he had numerous threats and provocations.

So really, there was only one threat -- Nemtsov -- and the coup-plotter had to remove him so that he wouldn't mess up the succession.

3. The Chechen angle is just the wallpaper to distract and put over all this, not only because Chechens are always made scapegoats but because this formed a convenient way to get rid of Ramzan Kadyrov's people and discredit him. Putin is Kadyrov's main protector, so to get rid of Putin, you have to get rid of Kadyrov. Now, that may be very hard to do; some forces, possibly Putin himself because he signed the decree, tried to clean up Kadyrov's messes at one point -- there were all these people killed and Chechen policemen seeming to be the killers. Sergei Bobkov was sent there to do the job; he left on vacation after awhile to "spend more time with his family". Kadyrov makes it hard to clean up things because he kills people. He does seem a little panicky now with all his professions of loyalty to Putin and endorsement of Dadayev, and maybe the Kavkaz Center story is true about his own chief of staff getting Dadayev's sister to sing about her brother's murder .

4. The Delimkhanov angle doesn't gel for me. There was an elaborate set-up to leak this through Novaya Gazeta, then reinforce it via Navalny connecting the dots, then having others like Slon.ru write about it. I don't see what Delimkhanov's motive is -- either for Adam, the senator, or the head of Sever Battalion, Alimbek. Perhaps as Federation Council senator he wants to ensure the elections goes well, i.e. that was my theory about Nemtsov and the 100,000 signatures. But truly, what's his angle? Is this ethnic Russians just getting Chechens to play fall-guys? Is this just a bigger version of "round up the usual suspects"? Why are the Delimkhanov's going to go up against Kadyrov?  Why don't they like Nemtsov, who was no threat to them? Maybe the Moscow Chechens don't like Kadyrov or have some scores to settle with him, but how does killing Nemtsov help that? So far, it's only shaken all of them making any of them vulnerable to removal from power.

So -- need more people to show their work on tying Delimkhanov to all this.

5. Remember this investigation by Novaya Gazeta which I translated back in May 2013? This, like "Bastrykin's Humiliation" shows you how the IC is unable to capture corrupt and murderous bodyguards of Kadyrov and even if they do, have to let them go. Everyone talks about the FSB's war with Kadyrov; it's important to remember the IC has a losing war, too, which means they are resentful, because they had to let criminals go. Yet Bastrykin isn't doing the talking on the Nemtsov case; Bortnikov is. Even so, he's motivated and will probably make Chechens be guilty in any way he can, or do what he has to do to fight Kadyrov -- so count him in on the anti-Putin plot too. If Yury Chaika, the prosecutor, is Putin's man, then Bastrykin is anti-Putin.

6. A possibility is that the FSO is involved, the Federal Protective Service that guards the president and the grounds of the Kremlin and has like 20,000 troops to work with and holds the nuclear suitcase. So -

- The FSO was mad that Nemtsov called them "stupid" in his Facebook post over arresting the "Je Suis Charlie" picketer. THEY are the ones mad over Charlie Hebdo -- not devout Muslim Chechens. The guy could have had "I am Jesus" on his poster -- they would have arrested him, too. But they definitely don't want "Je Suis Charlie" in their shop. Nemtsov called them "stupid" because he though that if Lavrov went to Paris to be in a solidarity march where people carried signs saying "Je Suis Charlie," then the FSO shouldn't arrest people in Moscow with the same sign. Smart -- but the FSO doesn't think so, and it's their turf.

- Nemtsov was killed in the FSO zone. I don't see any reason to conclude it's NOT in the FSO zone, if the front of the Historical Museum is (where the picketer was arrested), obviously Red Square and St. Basils are, and this is about 100 meters from the Kremlin wall. I think it's in the  FSO zone -- which may consist of concentric circles or something -- but I really don't think this is the Kitai-Gorod Police Precinct's turf. I think this is a special Kremlin area that is one of the approaches to Red Square, and as such, would be watched especially.

- The backdrop of the Kremlin was staged for drama, and from the FSB following Nemtsov all the time, they knew that he liked to walk, and that the walk to his home from the Cafe Bosco in GUM, which he probably went to not for the first time, was a likely place to make the hit.

- I don't understand all this garbage about how Nemtsov wasn't physically followed, when it was 2 days before a march, when his cell phone was leaked and when we have this -- a photo taken by Albats, from a restaurant through the window, where a follower is snapping a picture of Boris' birthday party. This photo was taken last fall. No, it wasn't a tourist or paparazzi as only the NTV-cum-FSB types followed Boris -- and she said there were three such photographers.

Surveillance of Nemtsov was constant and sometimes in plain sight. Here's an example from October via @albats pic.twitter.com/CIx2HnTUce

— Glenn Kates (@gkates) February 28, 2015

 

- The rule for such FSB followers is that they don't intervene in incidents, they report them.

- An FSB agent admitted in an interview with Komsomolskaya Pravda that they had Boris' cell phone records and the killers' cell phone records and could see where they met -- on the bridge. That was awfully fast -- was that an admission they were following Boris already? Or even the others, too? If for some reason they weren't following the others, tied to Delimkhanov, before that, then they easily retrieved their cell phone records and saw their geolocation. The cell phone companies in Russia automatically and instantly cooperate with the FSB and other intelligence agencies and don't fool around with court orders and such because that's how Russia works and those are the regulations if you want to stay in business.

- Zolotov is either in on it -- and he's missing now because he has to be cooled off -- or he is also killed or disabled by some forces within his ranks - he has enemies, too, because he was promoted over other people's heads, and the Interior Ministry was put closer to Putin than the FSO and FSB were, despite all of them having come out from the KGB like from Gogol's Overcoat.

7. Putin is either sick, or having to deal with people unhappy with his refusal to deal with Chechens or his dealing with them, or he has challengers. Putin usually succeeds in "balancing out" his enemies, i.e. removing Andrei Zubov, the professor critical of the Crimea occupation but then removing Dugin, or removing Strelkov from the DNR but putting in first Antyufeyev and then Zakharchenko.

8. It's odd that Putin would be allying with the MVD -- the institution that Brezhnev fought and whose leader ended up committing suicide in 1983 -- rather than his own FSB -- but then, there are faction wars, we might not know about them, anything is possible. It's interesting that Putin, sick though he might be, got himself to the annual meeting of the MVD, but then didn't get himself to the annual meeting of the FSB -- which I'm not sure even took place, and maybe got postponed for his sake.

Maybe it's easier to take over the MVD -- and then you get Interior troops. Maybe taking over the FSB is harder, or the FSO, let alone the army. I have no idea. But there it is, Putin's bodyguard is put in charge over other people's heads of the interior troops -- and now there are rumors that he is missing or dead.

9. Sergei Ivanov is the one said by Andrei Illarionov to be a "general" who could be in the conspiracy to take over from Putin.

Illarionov was wrong when he predicted exact dates of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. But Russia did invade Ukraine multiple times and we've amply established this. So Illarionov may not have everything right here, but he likely has the contours correct.

An important thing Illarionov says which no one has said anything about is how Ivanov "strengthened his ties to the Russian Orthodox Church at a March 11 meeting. No one else has mentioned the ROC at all, as if it just does what the Kremlin tells it to. But it has power and property and parishioners and some clout -- it's a legitimizer for these criminals in power. So coup-plotters allying with them would be a sign.

Also at this conference -- and not mentioned in the press release but whom I spotted in the pictures (4th from the left) is Vyacheslav Nikonov, grandson of Soviet-era foreign minister Molotov, believed to be former KGB, expert on the Republican Party in the US, used for propaganda/disinformation against Amb. Michael McFaul, seen stage-managing the Snowden press conference at the airport where he was demonstratively with a group of lawyers but didn't speak, etc.

If he's present but not listed, others may be.

10. Various people are out of town, i.e. Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu was in Crimea and then Rostov; Rogozin was in Rostov - the delegation of 40 people could have been busy staging a new military offensive or made to seem like they were staging one to get them out of town.

11. The Bolsheviks were long practiced at having body doubles and using subterfuge; the Soviets were long practiced at keeping near-dead leaders alive for prolonged periods; anything is possible in this regard for Putin's appearance tomorrow in St. Petersburg.

12. What's all quite possible is the following:

- Putin may appear to stay in charge and nothing will be comprehensible.

- the war in Ukraine will drag on, with or without new offensives

- the Chechens arrested in Nemtsov's case will remain under investigation for months on end, with their terms prolonged, and they may be tried or they may be quietly released

- there might be some shuffles here and there in the power structures but none of them will make anything clear

- the West will get tired of sanctions and eventually come back to Putin.

- there will be many pro-Kremlin types and "realists" who will be overjoyed with Putin's return, sick or not, and will gloat and triumphantly proclaim over their enemies that it could have been "apres mois le deluge" and could have be so so so very much worse that we must thank our lucky stars.

This is more likely than not, and it will be particularly nauseating to watch the Moscow Bubble journalists -- those perestroika liberals and their Western hangers-on -- pen smug I-told-you-so pieces and take a star turn for their insider status once again.

But somehow, I don't think so.  "Something is wrong in Denmark," as someone had to say from the stage during Hamlet's premiere in Moscow  -- featuring the DNR in jackboots, and choreographed by Radu Politaru -- a Moldovan educated for 10 years in Perm in the Urals, and in Belarus, who came to the Mariinsky and then the Bolshoi.

I think it's as likely as anything that tomorrow, or soon, Putin will retire or say he has to turn over Russia to someone else -- just like Boris Yeltsin had to do, you know? In light of what's happening now, I've really reconsidered all the events of Boris' rule to wonder if in fact he himself faced a slow-motion coup and an ouster. So, live by the sword, die by the sword.

Putin may retire or take a vacation -- and he has enormous wealth stashed away to be able to do that and retain a retinue and influence the situation as much as any oligarch. He will have kompromat on many people and will use it. The next presidential election isn't until 2018 -- that's a long ways away if you are sick or challenged.

Some other things to think about:

- If Putin is sidelined or ousted, it will never be liberals who take over as they have no power, no troops, no leverage.

- Unlike Gorbachev, who was associated with reform, whose removal was able to stimulate hundreds of thousands of people to demonstrate against conservative coup-plotters, Putin will not stir such motions. The masses might think an even harder line could be better for the economy -- what if Bastrykin actually got to mandate the ruble rate to 40/dollar.

- The new people might do some things that the West will see as "better" -- the list of "good things" that happened while Putin was absent is supposed to be a harbinger of that -- but these could be driven by internal dynamics that have nothing to do with liberalism, i.e. avoiding the spectacle of having a nursing mother of 7 put in jail for "treason" -- even the odious Pavel Astakhov, the child rights ombudsman and Kremlin tool got behind releasing her.

Regardless of what the shuffle is at the top, there are a lot of unsettling signs in the struggles of the independent media -- Novaya Gazeta having to stop its paper edition in May and maybe more; Kommersant going way down hill (exemplified by them providing reprints for the IC now, plus their very odd "life of Boris Nemtsov" picture round-up in which they seemed to deliberately pick the very worst photos of Nemtsov to make him seem ridiculous -- and that very odd list of the "best" Russian analysts in the US which was actually a list of all Kremlin sympathizers.

Twitter is likely to be an early victim of whatever new broom is sweeping clean -- Medvedev's account has now been hijacked (apparently easy to do once his email is hacked which it has been a number of times) -- and all kinds of rumors and inconvenient facts mar the effort of the people in charge. Some Twitter knock-off will be created for Russians. Or something will be done to hobble the real Twitter.

A lot of opposition leaders and independent journals have fled abroad or are taking temporary stays abroad like Kseniya Sobchak.

We will find out less and less about what will be more and more that is disturbing -- which is what is going on now.