On 3 November the Frontline Club hosted an event organised by the Czech Centre London, the insight with Michael Žantovský was part of the ‘Made in Prague’ festival season. Michael Žantovský, who is the current Czech Ambassador to the Court of St James, was discussing his new book called Havel: A Life.
Václav Havel was elected as President of Czechoslovakia in December of 1989 after 41 years of communist rule. His political activities during the communist regime brought him under the surveillance of the secret police and led to multiple prison stints, including a four-year incarceration between 1979 and 1983. His Civic Forum Party played a major role in the Velvet Revolution, and Havel himself was instrumental in dismantling the Warsaw Pact and expanding NATO eastwards.
In January 1990, Žantovský served as Havel’s spokesman, press secretary and advisor. It was in this capacity that he was able to address a sold out Frontline Club about his lifelong friend. Not only could Žantovský provide a unique perspective on Havel as a statesman, but also as a playwright, essayist, dissident and philosopher. Alongside Žantovský sat Edward Lucas, senior editor at The Economist, and he began the questioning around the issue of Havel’s death in 2011 and what effect that had.
“It brought back many a memory and it bought back the importance of the man,” Žantovský said. “It was not quite self evident at the time [because] the last few years of Havel’s life were years of personal decline and also of some public amnesia of sorts and one could be forgiven for having the impression that he was no longer relevant to the events of the day . . . and then he died and it came as a shock to so many people and the public response was so emotional, so spontaneous and so massive that all of a sudden people realised what he meant for history, what he meant for the Czech nation and for the Slovak nation as well and some of us, including myself, realised what he meant to me personally.”
The interview then led us through Havel’s early life as a playwright and focused particularly on Havel’s 1963 play, The Garden Party, which Žantovský commented, “was an excellent metaphor for the Communist system” as it focused upon a “bureaucratic, heartless system which is only concerned with its own self preservation and with the internal struggles and games that it plays”.
Conversation then zoned in upon Havel’s political dissidence to which Lucas asked about Havel’s role in “nurturing the sentiment of independent thought”. Žantovský replied:
“Havel for a time actually went along with the way. He moved out of Prague with Olga, he stayed . . . in his country house, and he was not – he was watched – but he was not overly bothered as long as he stayed where he was . . . as long as you were not publicly active they, the system, did not necessarily hold it against you, you know, they would let you live a nice life if you didn’t bother them.”
Žantovský then went on to describe a series of events which led to the conclusion, in Havel’s mind that, “If the situation is to change he couldn’t wait for the other side to make the first move, he would have to make the first move.”
The rest of the interview covered topics such as his unconventional marriage, the chaos surrounding the abrupt fall of the Berlin wall, and the common misconceptions surrounding Havel’s character. When the floor was opened to for the question and answer session, Žantovský fielded numerous questions about Havel and his relationship with Václav Klaus. Žantovský replied:
“Again [there is] this stereotype that Václav Havel and Václav Klaus were antagonists who were at loggerheads throughout their political lives and couldn’t get along. I think it shows that, you know, for all their differences and they had significant differences and I comment on a couple of those, they were real politicians, and as politicians they both realised at certain points they couldn’t get some things done without each other. . . . They were able to forget about their differences and do the important things together.”
You can order a copy of Michael Žantovský’s book Havel: A Life here.
Watch and listen to the talk here:
]]>It’s not easy to hear of how Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky was killed.
“You need to be sitting down for this story” said chair, Edward Lucas, foreign correspondent with the Economist. “Could those people at the back find a space?”
William Browder was once the largest foreign portfolio investor in Russia with the Hermitage fund before he was thrown out of the country in 2005.
Sergei Magnitsky
“Twenty-five police officers raided my office in Moscow” Browder said, “and 25 more police officers raided the office of my American law firm. . . . One of the lawyers protested at the seizure of these documents and he was beaten so badly he was hospitalised for three weeks.”
Browder hired seven lawyers to find out more about the mess, one of them was a 36-year-old Sergei Magnitsky. They started an investigation that unearthed a high-level attempt to siphon a high-volume of funds. It was a complicated scheme that lead to a false tax refund of $230m that came – not from Browder‘s company but from the Russian taxpayer.
Six out of seven of Browder’s lawyers left Russia for safety. Sergei Magnitsky decided to stay.
“He testified against the police officers who did the raid used to get the documents . . . and one month later the same police officers came to his home . . . and arrested him and put him in pre-trial detention and then began to torture him.”
He was later sent to the infamous Butyrka prison and got very sick after months of serious mistreatment.
“They did move him to a facility that had an emergency room but instead of treating him in an emergency room they put him in an isolation cell and chained him to a bed and allowed eight riot guards with rubber batons to beat him until he died.”
Browder is now trying to push the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act through US congress. If approved, this would allow assets of those responsible for his detention, abuse or death to be seized.
Corruption
Brutal truths about the Russian state unravel through the Magnitsky story. From a citizen’s point of view, bribery is a part of what Masha Gessen, author of a recent book on Putin, says is the “daily humiliation of living in Russia”.
But she said corruption in the country should be concerning from a strategic point of view, too.
“Russia happens to have one of the two largest arsenals of nuclear arms that’s reason enough to pay attention to the fact that . . . it’s extremely corrupt and on the brink of collapse.”
According to Browder the rot runs deep. He cites the beginnings of the investigation that ultimately led to Sergei Magnitsky’s murder.
“I discovered . . . that all the Russian companies I was investing in were basically losing all the money they should have been sharing with the shareholders with a bunch of corrupt officials and corrupt management.”
Putin
Gessen said the Russian president models government on the Russian spy agency – his former employer.
“I think Putin seriously believes that the KGB is the best thing ever invented. And he’s done everything in his power – and that’s a lot – to re-shape Russia in the image of the KGB.
“The KGB’s a closed system, it’s best on personal connections and paranoia, where information comes in and doesn’t go out.”
This is the system that allowed Magnitsky’s death. As Browder said when asked by the audience what happened to his Russian investments, “I didn’t lose any money, I lost something far more precious; the life of a young man.”
]]>Against a backdrop of growing discontent, and widespread allegations of fraud, Russia’s recent elections heralded Vladimir Putin’s re-election to the presidency. The man who many still saw as Russia’s de facto leader will now resume his tenure, four years after ostensibly ceding power to Dmitry Medvedev.
In light of these developments a panel of experienced commentators gathered at the Frontline Club to assess the past, present and future of Putin’s Russia. The evening was chaired by Edward Lucas, The Economist’s Deputy International Editor, in discussion with Masha Gessen, a Russian-American journalist and author, and Bill Browder, an outspoken shareholder activist who was the largest foreign investor in Russia until 2005, when he was banned from the country.
Gessen, author of The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin, described Putin’s Russia as a mafia state in which large-scale corruption at the top relies on small-scale corruption at the bottom. She claimed that Putin “thinks the KGB is the best thing that was ever invented”, adding that she saw him as pleonexic – in that he suffers from the insatiable desire to have what rightfully belongs to others.
Browder agreed, describing his own experience as “the story of how bad things have got in Russia, and emblematic of the bare face of Russia from the beginning to the end.” He began to withdraw his money when he realised that all of his companies were hemorrhaging money to corrupt officials. A saga ensued in which Russian police seized his assets, took control of his companies and – amongst other things – conspired to reclaim $230m that Browder’s companies had paid in tax.
What followed has now become an infamous tale of state corruption and brutality. Sergei Magnitsky, the lawyer investigating matters on Browder’s behalf, was imprisoned and eventually murdered in custody.
His is not the only case of this kind, as Browder and Gessen observed, but the unfailing bureaucracy of all involved led to the publication of an exact account of the events, written by Magnitsky, and a list of those responsible. Lucas described the Magnitsky list as “one of the most effective fires lit under the regime”, and Browder summarised the reasons behind its impact:
“The people who committed these crimes didn’t do it because of religious intolerance, or ideological intolerance. They did this for money.”
Browder suggested that the regime was unsustainable, given the prevalence of events like this, but the panel recognised the inherent difficulty in ensuring a genuine transition of power. Gessen offered her own analysis of the regime’s ability to adapt and protect itself:
“With the whole reset campaign of the last 3 years, there were a lot of people who fell into Medvedev’s trap. The best way to think of Putin and Medvedev is of a president and a first lady: the first lady gets to reach out to people, and perform humanitarian gestures. That humanitarian gesture deceived a lot of people.”
Despite this, Gessen noted that the West is an important influence, even to the most corrupt Russian officials:
“More important than anything else, it’s the place where they keep their money. You can’t keep your money in Russia, there is always somebody better connected than you are.”
And, as the question and answer period drew to a close, Lucas suggested that Putin’s hold on power might begin to loosen if another disaster on the scale of the Kursk or Beslan were to strike:
“He handles these situations very badly. The people who’ve got a huge stake in the survival of the regime may wonder if they can keep it going for a few more years by pushing him downwards or sideways.”
Watch the event here:
]]>Tens of thousands of Muscovites have taken part in protests to demand free and fair elections. But how deep and how far does the disaffectedness go? Join us to discuss the outcome of the presidential elections in Russia and what they mean for the future of the people of Russia and its development on the world stage.
]]>Vladimir Putin is back in presidential office for a third term after four years as Russia’s Prime Minister. We will be asking what the people of Russia think of the man who has dominated the country’s politics for more than 12 years and will now be President for a new extended term of six years?
Convinced the parliamentary polls were rigged in December last year, Russians took to the streets in protest. They have now turned their focus to preventing Putin from returning to the Kremlin.
Tens of thousands of Muscovites have taken part in protests to demand free and fair elections. But how deep and how far does the disaffectedness go? Join us to discuss the outcome of the presidential elections in Russia and what they mean for the future of the people of Russia and its development on the world stage.
Chaired by Edward Lucas, Central and Eastern European correspondent for The Economist and deputy editor of the international section, who has been covering Central and Eastern Europe since 1986. He is author of The New Cold War: How the Kremlin Menaces both Russia and the West and most recently Deception: Spies, Lies and How Russia Dupes the West.
Masha Gessen: Born in Moscow in 1967, Gessen emigrated to the United States aged fourteen. In 1991 she returned to the Soviet Union as an American reporter, and witnessed the fall of the Soviet Union. Now based permanently in Russia she has reported on all the key events in Russian politics for leading Russian publications as well as for Vanity Fair, New Republic, New Statesman and others. She was the first journalist to be black-listed by the Putin administration in 2000 and is author of several books, most recently The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin.
William Browder, the Founder and CEO of Hermitage Capital Management. He is a leading global shareholder rights activist and has been an outspoken voice for better corporate governance in Russia. He was the largest foreign investor in Russia until November 2005, when he was suddenly denied entry to the country and declared “a threat to national security” by the Russian government for exposing corruption at large Russian companies.
]]>]]>Imagine two walls, each 120km (75 miles) long, set at right angles and tapering to a height of three metres. They are covered in names, each inscribed in letters 1.35 cm (0.53 inches) high. That is how big a monument to the 100m victims of communism would be if it were designed on the scale of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC, which commemorates the nearly 60,000 American military personnel who died in that war… Now Estonia’s president, Toomas Hendrik Ilves, has come out with a challenge to his country: to commemorate by name all Estonian victims of communism. “Unfortunately, we still do not know the names of all the victims…. Our job is to find out and chisel them in stone. By name.” link