Anna Politkovskaya and the Oil Tsar

Andre Glucksmann remembers his friend in the New Republic:

id Anna Politkovskaya die for nothing? She rang the alarm for the democratic world to hear. But Western Europe's political rainmakers have ungratefully thrown their support to Vladimir Vladimirovitch. This former officer the KGB dresses himself in the finery of a "pure democrat" before Gerhard Schröder (the former chancellor of Germany and the new employee of Gazprom), who pledges his undying friendship along with his cash. As for the president of France, he betrays not a single regret about pinning the Republic's highest honor on Putin's chest. Not one of these two, not one of their peers, ever buried his nose in Anna's writing: They were scared they would discover the pestilent truths for which she paid with her life.

You'd have to committ to early retirement to devote yourself to uncovering the stupidest comment ever made by George Bush. But somewhere near the top of the list would be his assurance that he once glimpsed Vladimir Putin's "soul" and that this meant Russia was with the United States in the defense of democracy and civilization. We know what the Kremlin line is on Islamism (and Islam). But now the old roost of Stalin and Brezhnev specializes in its own species of what Trotsky correctly pegged as National Socialism. (The Old Man was talking of the regnant ideology in Moscow in the thirties, not of Hitler.) It breast-beats "great Russian chauvinism;" it expropriates national resources without regard for national economy let alone any highblown notion of the "people;" it controls the media; it outlaws all forms of dissent; and — in a quaint throwback to tsardom — it truckles to the ancient superstitions of the Orthodox clergy.

So much for the End of History. It didn't even make a pit-stop.