Oleg Kashin’s open letter to president Vladimir Putin and prime minister Dmitry Medvedev is both a personalised cry of anguish about the failure to arrest the man he believes responsible for an attack that nearly killed him, and a searing indictment of the current Russian political system.



The attack on the journalist in 2010 left him with a broken jaw, fractured skull, broken leg and broken fingers, one of which had to be amputated. None of his valuables were taken.

When the attack took place, there were any number of potential suspects: as one of Russia’s most prominent independent journalists, Kashin had offended a lot of people.

Russian journalist 'nearly killed' in doorstep beating Read more

A few months later, while Kashin was recuperating in an Israeli hospital, he was visited in person by the then-president, Dmitry Medvedev, who wished him a speedy recovery and promised that the case would be solved.

There have been a number of high-profile murders or attacks on journalists in Russia, with few of them solved. Even when the direct assailants are put on trial, as in the case of Anna Politkovskaya, the trail stops before it reaches those who ordered the attack; critics allege because if government officials are involved, they are untouchable.

Last month, Kashin named the men he believed were responsible for the attack, including the governor of Pskov region, Andrei Turchak. Kashin had criticised the politician in a blog post two months before the attack.

He claimed that while the men who allegedly carried out the attack had been arrested, the fact that their testimony appears to implicate Turchak meant the case was too politically sensitive.

Turchak has not commented on the allegations against him, while one of his deputies denied the allegations in an interview with the BBC.

In a statement released on Monday, Putin’s spokesman reportedly confirmed the president’s office had read the letter, but that no comment would be made on the allegations. Medvedev has not responded.

In the letter below, Kashin elaborates on those claims, in an angry tirade against Putin and the system he has built over the past 15 years.

Dear Mr Putin and Mr Medvedev,

My colleagues have already written you open letters about my case. You haven’t responded (and, more importantly, neither has your Investigative Committee), though this actually makes perfect sense: you were asked to “sort it out” but there’s no need for anything like that.

You have complete and absolute control over the adoption and implementation of laws in Russia

I understand perfectly well that you “sorted it out” a long time ago, and you’ve known for just as long that it was your little Governor Turchak who was behind this crime against me. My case was solved a long time ago. You know this and I know this. And I see no reason to pretend that the problem here is that you still need to “sort it out”. Your decision not to act is clear.

You’ve decided to side with your Governor Turchak; you’re protecting him and his gang of thugs and murderers. It would make sense for somebody like me – a victim of this gang – to be outraged about all this and tell you that it’s dishonest and unjust, but I understand that such words would only make you laugh.

You have complete and absolute control over the adoption and implementation of laws in Russia, and yet you still live like criminals. Consider Inspector Vadim Sotskov, who’s been handed my case.

Sotskov put it elegantly when he said recently: “There’s the law, but there’s also the man in charge, and the will of the boss is always stronger than any law.”

Put bluntly: he’s right and that’s reality. Your will in Russia is stronger than any law.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Oleg Kashin in 2009. Photograph: Maxim Avdeyev/AP

I’ve known Sotskov for over a year now. He and I belong to the same generation. At one time, he was even a journalist at Narodnoe Radio. I can easily imagine him in his first year of law school, studying Roman law, still full of enthusiasm, honesty and dreams about changing the world. And what’s become of him now? He’s a terrified bureaucrat, dreaming about keeping his job long enough to earn a pension. Who made him this way? It was you.

For some reason, we weigh the last 15 years of your reign purely in certain materialist terms. Oil costs so much, the dollar is worth so much, GDP rose so many percentiles, and so on.

But it’s not about oil or GDP. History will judge these 15 years precisely on the fate of men like Sotskov.

It was you who turned an enthusiastic young man – someone who hurried to the studio from lectures to read the news on an opposition radio station – into a uniformed cynic, who admits openly that the will of his superiors is more important than any law.

Don’t flatter yourself: the last ​​15 years haven’t been a revival for Russia – the country hasn’t risen from its knees

But don’t flatter yourself: the last 15 years haven’t been a revival for Russia, and the country hasn’t risen from its knees. This time has been a monumental moral catastrophe for our generation. And both of you, Mr Putin and Mr Medvedev, are personally responsible for it.

In Russian society today, even obvious questions about good and evil have become impossible. Is it OK to steal? Is it OK to cheat? Is murder ethical? With each of these questions, it’s become customary in Russia now to answer that things aren’t so simple. All your good works have left the nation demoralised and disoriented.

But you carry on, managing your problems without even realising that you’re digging the hole yourselves. “Things aren’t so simple” is what the angry crowd will tell you in unison, when it comes time for you to run away. I suspect that you’re afraid of this crowd, but just remember that it was you who created it, and you’ve got nobody to blame but yourselves.

Having cut yourselves and your elites off from society, you’ve also cut yourselves off from reality. There’s a wall separating you from the rest of us, and everyone on our side shudders each time the next one of your goons decides to show what a thinker he is by stepping up to a podium and talking about how the population is being controlled by computer chips, about the “Euro-Atlantic conspiracy,” or about how the Americans are weaponising cellular research.

Anti-Soviet joke

Whoever comes after you will have to create Russia all over again, from scratch. This is your only service to history– what you’ve spent 15 years achieving. Your favourite justification for all this (the only one, there are no others) are the troubles of the 1990s, but it’s important to understand that you preserved and strengthened everything about this period that we’ve come to hate today. You didn’t fix anything. You only made it all worse.

You like to think of yourselves as the heirs to two empires, Tsarist and Soviet. You take pride in your neo-Soviet militarism, but if anybody told Dmitriy Ustinov [who created the USSR’s military-industrial complex] that a man was beaten with steel pipes and it was paid for with official state funding [according to evidence presented in court proceedings in St Petersburg], Ustinov would have thought he was hearing a nasty anti-Soviet joke.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Russian president Vladimir Putin leaves the Elysee Palace on 2 October after talks on the conflict in eastern Ukraine. Photograph: Sasha Mordovets/Getty Images

Veterans of Turchak’s factory told me that, 20 years ago, the young future governor would ride around the grounds in a black Volga, firing from a pistol at stray cats. The portrait of your era and your elites will be full of details like this, and you’ve got no reason to expect anything more.

Your main problem is that you simply don’t love Russia. You treat it like another disposable resource that’s fallen into your lap.

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In recent days, I’ve heard many times that all the noise around my case is getting kicked up thanks to some war among the factions who surround you. This is another feature of the system you’ve imposed: nothing just happens, someone is behind everything, and there are conspiracies everywhere.

As a participant in this so-called conspiracy, I can say that a battle among the factions is certainly raging, but the shared goal of all the factions [appears to be] to save your Governor Turchak and his associates from criminal prosecution. I suspect this battle is won.

I can see perfectly well that the worst thing Turchak faces now is a quiet resignation, timed long after any developments in my case. This is the only justice citizens can expect, and it means that your system isn’t capable of any kind of justice at all.

You do what you want, but I wonder how comfortable life can be, when you know that you yourselves won’t be able to count on justice or the law, sooner or later.

Oleg Kashin

Introduction by Shaun Walker. Translation by Kevin Rothrock for Global Voices online