Scandal of day
FAITHFUL IGOR
For Igor Sechin December 31, 1999 was really a momentous day. After the sensational resignation of B. Yeltsin and the designation of V. Putin as his successor, Sechin became the head of the president's office, officially the Deputy Head of the administration of the President of Russia.
Sechin is a typical representative of the "Peterburg command" (i.e. people who worked with V. Putin in Sankt Peterburg or in the FSS). His struggle with his direct boss A. Voloshin for influence over the president was really fierce. Sechin used all his secret service potential led by the head of the FSS (Patrushev), but for a number of reasons the expected result was not achieved. In the first place, Patrushev and his deputies (picked out one by one by V. Putin when he was still the head of that special service organization) did not decide to speak out openly against Voloshin without the president's corresponding verbal agreement. In the second place, the FSS people did not want to pull the chestnuts out of the fire to satisfy Sechin's ambitions. In the third place, and this is probably what is most important, Putin himself did not desire the fall of "Iron Shurik" (A. Voloshin is called this way in Moscow behind his back) to whom he was obliged for many things.
The most interesting thing is that Sechin himself understood the excessive arrogance of his plans and decided to change his tactics. Now his main object was to take the main financial flows under his control. Sechin was the instigator of the financial destruction of NTV and TV-6. He tried to play the leading role in the creation of a new media consortium on the base of the E. Kiselev team. It is doubtful that Voloshin would like such activity by Sechin, but being an experienced courtier, the head of the administration did not enter into open conflict with Sechin. "Faithful Igor" (Sechin) as before was next to the president, as before was, like his friends from the Federal Security Service and Ministry of the Interior, unsinkable. A person, who only yesterday was the personal secretary of the future president of Russia, rose to the peak of the pyramid. They say that Putin is attracted by the personality of Faithful Igor, to whom he is linked by a period of joint work in the administration of the president of Russia. As our source learned, "Faithful Igor" is involved with questions relating to privatization of Russian diamond mines in South Africa in the interests of the Family. It is this fact in particular that makes Igor Sechin unsinkable.
Via security service channels, Sechin accuses Voloshin of secret contacts with Berezovsky. Of course, "Iron Shurik" is no angel, but we don't think that he is such a fool as to contact the fallen-into-disgrace oligarch. But Sechin, as became known, regularly sends messengers to BAB in order to clarify his plans, and mainly to completely avoid falling out with the person who actively participated in the political destruction of the Primakov-Luzhkov union and created the Family. At present a paradoxical situation has been created in Russia, wherewith the Family, fallen-into-disgrace oligarchs (Gusinsky, Berezovsky) and new financial parvenus (Deripaska, Abramovich) form a holding under the conditional name of "New Family." The paradox of the new formation is that the present president was not included in the New Family. At the same it should be noted that Faithful Igor is the guy forming the New Family behind and in secret from Putin. As regards Voloshin, he is following the movements of his deputy, but is not doing anything to interfere. He is waiting to see how it all ends. While Putin is loudly combating international terrorism, is traveling around to different countries and continents, floating in the beams of Russian-American friendship and timidly criticizing his Prime Minister, a colossus is created under the name of New Family.
In this situation, M. Kasyanov, the head of the government, with all the ambiguity of his part in the era of late Yeltsinism, continues, strange as this may seem, to remain the only public politician whose loyalty to one of the political groups has not been revealed. In general, it seems as if BAB and the New Family, demonstrating an outside unacceptance of one another, move as if along two rails of a railroad in a parallel course away from common sense (which Kasyanov more or less personifies), hoping that Putin will get on those rails as the locomotive and will obediently follow their wishes. He won't follow them? Then in 2004 another locomotive will appear on the rails instead of the present one, this new one being more pragmatic and compliant, which not only smartly privatized everything, but smartly electrified all of us. In Russia, the most important thing is to find your gate, barrier, switch. The only thing you need is to have something you have to open-close, turn on and off. And foreign countries will help.
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