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Thieves must sit in prison

Trộm cướp phải ngồi trong nhà tù.
Putin: Tên giết người tập thể hay nhà ái quốc vĩ đại?
Thời của những tên sát nhân

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Alternately Putin 

OWEN MATTHEWS
Yuri Felshtinsky and Vladimir Pribylovsky
THE AGE OF ASSASSINS: The rise and rise of Vladimir Putin
320pp. Gibson Square. £16.99. 978 I 906142070
Michael Stuermer
PUTIN AND THE RISE OF RUSSIA
253pp. Weidenfeld and Nicolson. £20. 9780297 85509 5

Is Vladimir Putin a mass murderer or a great Russian patriot? Roughly speaking, those are the opposing interpretations of Putin put forward in two recent books.
In The Age of Assassins, Yuri Felshtinsky and Vladimir Pribylovsky follow the fortunes of the KGB and its successor, the FSB, over the past forty years of Soviet and Russian history. They argue that Putin is just the latest and most powerful in a succession of secret police thugs who have always, to a greater or lesser extent, been Russia's real masters. The assassins of the title refer to a series of recent murders of the FSB' s enemies, which the authors lay squarely at the door of Putin and his henchmen - the poisoning in 2003 of the State Duma deputy and investigative journalist Yuri Shchekochikhin, the shootings of the journalists Anna Politkovskaya and Paul Klebnikov, and the fatal poisoning in London of Alexander Litvinenko, a former security agent and personal friend of Felshtinsky.
Felshtinsky and Pribylovsky have dug out a wealth of detail on the rise of Putin, from his days as deputy mayor of St Petersburg, where they claim he was "deeply involved in organised crime", to his lucky break in 1999 when Boris Berezovsky, arch-oligarch and friend of the Yeltsin "family", promoted Putin as a supposedly uncontroversial successor to Yeltsin. They also trace the rise of the FSB as Russia's largest corporation, starting in the 1990s with a web of private security firms which were thinly disguised protection rackets and culminating in today's vast business empire controlled by FSB alumni in the highest reaches of the Kremlin and extending into oil, weapons, diamonds and metals. But, frustratingly, they devote no more than a few pages to what could be the original sin of the Putin regime - the bombings of four apartment buildings in Moscow and southern g Russia in September 1999. More than 300 Russians died in the terror attacks, which were blamed on Chechen rebels and served as the casus belli for the relaunching of the Chechen war, as a result of which Putin, then Prime Minister, was able to cast himself as a strongman and position himself as Yeltsin' s heir.
Felshtinsky and Pribylovsky assemble an impressive array of evidence to suggest FSB involvement in the bombings; indeed, Felshtinsky wrote a book with Litvinenko on the same subject (Blowing Up Russia, 2007). But too many loose ends are left dangling to make the case really stick. One is the crucial evidence of Colonel Mikhail Trepashkin of the FSB, who claimed that one of the bombers was his fellow FSB officer Vladimir Romanovich. Trepashkin was subsequently imprisoned and Romanovich apparently murdered - but that alone doesn't make Trepashkin's allegations true. The Age of Assassins is competent and convincing as it catalogues a series of crimes and misdemeanours perpetrated by Putin and the FSB, from institutional corruption and political trials to stifling the free press and appointing a psychopath to rule Chechnya. But even this charge sheet is a long way from indiscriminate mass murder.
Michael Stuermer's book is written in an entirely different key. Stuermer is a distinguished German political historian and r journalist; he is also one of the Kremlin's favoured Russia experts. He takes as his starting point a belligerent speech Putin made in Munich in 2007. "Some red lines, hitherto 11 blurred by arrogance, ignorance and wishful thinking, were clearly discernible," writes Stuermer, "lines which the master of the y Kremlin wanted to be respected in Eastern p Europe, in the Balkans and throughout Central Asia". He describes how Putin sat busily correcting his Munich text, ignoring Angela and no doubt more is to come", but takes neo-imperialist assertiveness to be an inevitable quality of Russian statehood, rather than irresponsible populist strategy.
Stuermer frequently undermines his academic rigour with lapses into fatuity. He opines that Russia's identity is "forever torn between the materialism and sophistication of Western Europe and the silent heroism and spirituality of the East". To venture such airy opinions, one must at least be authoritative. Unfortunately for his credibility, Stuermer makes it clear time and again that he is ignorant of modem Russian culture and geography, not to mention the Russian language. He refers to "the old GUM magazine building" on Red Square in apparent ignorance that in Russian magazine means "shop", He calls the FSB the "Federal Intelligence Service" (it is the Federal Security Service), and dubs the sinister youth movement conjured by the Kremlin in the wake of Ukraine's Orange Revolution "Nasi", rather than Nashi.
At times, it is hard to believe that these two books are about the same man. Stuermer claims that it was the KGB's "almost unlimited access to untainted information" that attracted "the ambition, patriotism and efforts of Vladimir Putin", suggesting that Putin's application to join the KGB was driven by intellectual curiosity. Felshtinsky and Pribyylovsky describe, in painful detail, just how cynical, money-grubbing and violent that KGB elite was in practice: "Russia became a corporate republic ... a corporation took over the government of the country and put its own President in charge", In Stuermer's account, Putin is, a master strategist bent on rebuilding his nation's lost prestige, and in the process discarding the debris of Yeltsin's failed experiment with democracy. In Felshtinsky and Pribylovsky's, he is the head of a criminal gang devoted to enriching itself and eliminating any challenge to its authority. Stuermer sees Putin from outside and above, a major player on the world geopolitical stage. Felshhtinsky and Pribylovsky see Putin from inside and below, tracing the theft, scheming and killing that surrounded his rise, and the ruthlessness, hypocrisy and fear that have accompanied the undoubted stability and wealth of his years in power. Can both be right?
TLS 27 Tháng Ba 2009