Feigning Ignorance and Real Ignorance
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin recently gave a much discussed interview to a well known journalist at Kommersant, where, among numerous other topics, he issued some additional comments regarding Russia's most well known political prisoner, Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
To be quite specific, below is a quote from the interview, courtesy of a translation posted on Russiawatchers.ru:
Do you remember how you mentioned in your book ‘In first person' that once as a kid playing in the staircase you had chased a rat in the corner?
Yes, that happened to me once. And then it turned to chase me. And I barely escaped.
And after that you understood never to chase someone into a corner again.
I understood that very well. For the rest of my life.
Tell me then, why you did chase Mikhail Khodorkovsky into a corner?
Why did I chase him into a corner? The prime minister answered surprised. He serves a well deserved prison time, but he will get out, and he will be a free man again. No, I really did not chase him into a corner.
Do you follow the second trial?
The second trial? When I found out about the second trial, I was very surprised and asked what the trial was about. He is after all in prison. What second process? But when there is a second process, that means it must be necessary from the point of view of the law. It's not me who is in charge of this!
This suggestion that the Prime Minister was confused over the nature of Khodorkovsky's current second trial, based upon regurgitated and even contradictory charges from the first trial is clearly 1) a joke, 2) an insult, or 3) a desperate attempt to distance himself from a slow motion abortion of rule of law, or a combination of all three at once.
Some would suggest that Putin's attempt to distance himself from the trial is positive news, but it is hard to grapple with such information when the quotes come right alongside promises to "bludgeon" the protesters' heads - a promise which was violently fulfilled on the last day of August.
We've seen Putin and other members of the leadership feign non-involvement and non-interference over judicial matters, and especially anything regarding the Khodorkovsky case, while at the same time repeatedly casting wild accusations against the defendants. Perhaps the most amusingly contradictory statements from Putin were when he compared Khodorkovsky to Bernard Madoff and Al Capone, which may lead one to question why the ineptly corrupt prosecutors had never bothered to try to pursue similar charges against them (the answer: because it would be even harder to fake that case).
It's a known fact that numerous world leaders have raised the Khodorkovsky case before Putin during their meetings, and further it is well known that it is a provocative subject for the premier, sending him into fits of rage. To act surprised over the second trial, while at the same urgently asserting that Khodorkovsky somehow must have deserved the jail time he is serving, is not only intellectually dishonest, but disrespectful of the basic intelligence of citizens and observers.
There is a real ignorance present here, but it is not the feigned ignorance of the premier. It's the persistent belief and hope held by many on the outside that reform will eventually one day go beyond the pleasant liberal lip service, that the reset is working, and that the best results can be had by empowering the worst elements of the Russian leadership. Going along with this illusion that politics is independent of the justice system, as Putin claims, is unfortunately a big step in this direction.
By James Kimer, Guest Commentator to the Khodorkovsky and Lebedev Communications Center