It has come to the attention of many people that Russian oligarchs and businessmen have an alarming rate of falling out of windows. The likelihood of this happening is highly correlated to their having expressed any criticism of Putin’s war on Ukraine. Let’s face it: Death is the ultimate form of censorship.
I started collecting stories of this phenomenon and then discovered that The Hill had gathered some or most or all of them.
In a story, called “Murder, Putin Wrote,” Mark Toth and Jonathan Sweet told the strange tale as of a month ago (it may need updating in the event other oligarchs have accidentally defenestrated):
Russian oligarchs continue to fall out of windows around the world at what seems to be a precipitously increasing rate. The latest, Pavel Antonov, reputedly the richest deputy in Russia’s State Duma, fell to his death on Boxing Day in Rayagada, India. Alexey Idamkin, Moscow’s Consul General in Calcutta, essentially told TASS, “Nothing to see here.” Two days earlier, the Russian sausage-maker magnate turned politician’s traveling companion, Vladimir Budanov, suddenly died of a “heart attack” while celebrating Antonov’s birthday.
Perhaps it was a coincidence. Then again, likely not. In all likelihood, the sausage-maker, who in June had criticized Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine, simply knew too much about how Putin’s sausage was being made and, more to the point, just how corrupt Putin’s Kremlin has become since he assumed the Russian prime minister’s office in August 1999.
In the West, notably, there is a widespread misunderstanding of the oligarchs’ position and standing in Putin’s pyramid of power in Moscow. They are not, as a group, self-made commercial or industrial titans, but rather are mostly former confidantes or henchmen of Putin’s. Think of them as the human combination codes to Putin’s vaults and the vaults as the various Russian industries and market segments they control on Putin’s behalf.
Combination locks — or tumblers, to be more exact — can, as needed, be changed, and Putin’s favored way of doing so apparently is for disfavored Russian oligarchs to be invited to take a tumble out of an open window. Since the war began in February, according to CNN, at least one dozen “Russian businessmen have reportedly died by suicide or in unexplained accidents,” six of them alone from within Gazprom, the Kremlin’s state-owned colossal energy conglomerate.
Other deaths, each worthy of a CBS “48 Hours” or “Dateline TASS” segment (if it existed), include Alexander Buzakov earlier this month, who was the general director of Admiralty Shipyards, a St. Petersburg-based shipbuilder of Russian military submarines. Ivan Pechorindrowned in Vladivostok. He had been the senior executive at the Corporation for the Development of the Far East and Arctic (which was focused on Putin’s pre-war economic pet project, the Northern Sea Route). Anatoly Gerashchenko, who was head of the Moscow Aviation Institute, died under mysterious circumstances in September after falling down a flight of stairs.
The $64,000 question is why they are dying and who and/or what Russian organization is behind their deaths. Many in academia and some Russian experts, especially early on in the war, argued that Putin was likely to be overthrown by his oligarchs as they chose rubles over the Russian president’s desire to reincarnate himself as a modern-day Peter the Great. This, however, as noted above, is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the limited maneuvering room for power afforded oligarchs in Putin’s mafia-like pyramid structure.
Understanding this pyramid is key. Putin sits at the top and his position of power is secured by the Federal Security Service (FSB). Operating from Lubyanka Square in Moscow, just blocks from the Kremlin, they serve as his Gestapo-like secret police, armed enforcers, and Secret Service-like Praetorian guard all rolled into one. Underneath and subservient to this layer, jockeying for scraps of political power, lie the Russian state-controlled media, oligarchs, and the Russian Orthodox Church headed by Patriarch Kirill.
Notably missing from this third tier is the Russian Defense Ministry and the country’s military forces. By design, not since Russian Minister of Defense Georgy Zhukov, a Soviet hero of World War II and marshal of its armies, intervened to arrest Lavrentiy Beria after Joseph Stalin’s death in support of Nikita Khrushchev, has the Russian military had any significant political clout in Moscow. Not then — and, notably, still not now.
Please open the link and keep reading.
But he was compelled to murder! Preemptive strikes to save his world from the aggressive NATO threat. He’s innocent. It’s so obvious he’s being set up by Western propaganda, probably orchestrated by Hunter Biden to use his senile father. It’s all on his laptop in found in a Wuhan market by JFK Jr. They caused him to persecute and kill them. Or at the very least, there’s an untapped market for Pella windows!
It would be a shame if Putin himself took flying lessons with out a plane.
GregB,
You did hit all the talking points of our resident Putin-defender/”Democrats are evil but Putin, Trump and Republicans are victims” poster, except you forgot one:
The people who “fell” from windows were all Nazis, so it’s okay.
That was the shortest response you ever made. But very on point.
Preemptive.
Joel,
Thank you! I consider my day a success whenever one of my posts receives one of your backhanded compliments ; )
NYC public school parent
I couldn’t resist. You lose me at about 5 pages (smiley face)
But if it makes you feel better I found an old Krugman quote about the “RESPECTABLE MEDIA ” repeating right wing nonsense with a short disclaimer at the end , “others say ” !
Do we owe him Royalties? You think he meant the paper that pays him?
Thanks for explaining this, Greg. But you forgot to mention the role of CRT in the plot against Putin and Trump cooked up by the January 6th Committee!
ha ha! Absolutely!
Also, CRT has been digging in my flower beds again.
Be careful, Greg! You may find your self going viral on right, right wing social media!
Its either the Russian Bratva or FSB agents, but there isn’t much of a difference.
Then there is the fact that Putin has a close relationship whip with one of the Russian Bratva’s most ruthless crime bosses.
“Poisoned KGB Agent Said Putin Has A ‘Good Relationship’ With One Of The World’s Top Mobsters”
“In it, he claims that Russian President Vladimir Putin had a “good relationship” with one of the most notorious mobsters in the world, a Ukrainian man named Semion Mogilevich.”
The Federal B
https://www.businessinsider.com/semion-mogilevich-relationship-with-putin-2015-1
Defenestration is not a new concept in the practice of offing political enemies.
Apologies for the language, but this writer is quite colorful:
https://jamesfell.substack.com/p/on-this-day-in-history-july-30-ddc
Poison …windows (too new) = no imagination
Putin should own it- Damnatio ad bestias or obicere bestilis (Wikipedia)
For your Saturday chuckle:
Greg
Thanks for the laugh and the introduction to Tiernan.
If you get Netflix, you have to see Derry Girls.
I liked “Bad Sisters” way more than “Derry Girls.”
There’s no accounting for taste! 🤣 Maybe having a Catholic school experience makes the difference.
The ending still has me laughing- 5 min. later.
I don’t know how the students who delivered the lines about the non “similarities” kept straight faces.
So, Stalin appears to Putin in a dream. Putin asks, “Do you have any advice for me?
“Yes,” says Stalin. “Kill your enemies, and paint the Kremlin blue.”
“Why blue?” asks Putin.
Where is the punch line?
Why blue?
Whaa whaaaa whaaaaa (goes the sad trombone🤭)
🫵😜👍
I think the point is Putin doesn’t question killing enemies, just the paint job
Oh, thank you! I’m slow on the uptake sometimes.
My favorite joke when I visited Russia in ‘92
Stalin, Kruschev, and Brezhnev are on a train that stalls. Stalin orders engineers shot. Train won’t go. Kruschev orders engineers reparated. Train still won’t go. Brezhnev says, “Let’s pull down the window shades and pretend the train is moving.”
Like the common joke is Soviet Russia: we pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.
Poor Donald. It was so hard for him watching Vladimir and Rodrigo do as they pleased while he couldn’t even call out the armed services to shoot asylum seekers and beat up and imprison Moms in yellow shirts at BLM rallies. So frustrating to have one’s fat, tan from a can face pressed up against the window of totalitarian absolutism all the time!
Wanted international war criminal Vladimir Putin keeps adding to his list of crimes.
The Defenestration Virus that seems to be going around in Russia has a 100% mortality rate. Good thing that ordinary people so far seem to be immune.