Kagarlitsky's Appointed Director of IPROG on Surikov's Request

Burtsev.ru

07.15.06

According to Anton Suirikov's latest revelation, he was the one who requested that Boris Kagarlitsky was appointed the director of the Moscow Institute for Globalization Studies (IPROG) in 2002 when Mikhail Deliagin, the founder of the Institute and its first director, had accepted a position in Mikhail Kasianov's government. Deliagin, a long-time associate of Surikov, is also a prominent member of the right-wing “Rodina” party, banned from running in the last Moscow elections for a racist video aired for its electoral campaign.

Surikov latest revelations come from his public correspondence with Oleg Grechenevskii, a long-time dissident and human-rights activist from St. Petersburg, who has been writing extensively on “Filin's gang” - the group led by the military oligarch Vladimir Filin, allegedly involved in narcotrafficking, illegal arms trade, and money laundering.

In Surikov's words, he asked Deliagin to appoint Kagarlitsky director of IPROG after Kagarlitsky had told Surikov that wanted the job. This request came two years after Kagarlitsky, then the head of the political section of the neoliberal Moscow weekly Novaya Gazeta, published his article on “the conspiracy in Nice” in which he described Surikov as “the 'former' officer of army intelligence” and fingered him as the person responsible for organizing the meeting between Shamil Basaev and Alexander Voloshin. 1  Kagarlitsky's article also describes Surikov's meeting with Basaev in late August of 1999 and all but explicitely connects Surikov and his associates to the Moscow explosions in September 1999. This is how Surikov describes his contacts with Kagarlistky when the latter was preparing that article.

“In the beginning of 2000 Mr. Kagarlitsky visited me on his own initiative to talk about the alleged conspiracy between Mr. Basaev and the Kremlin in the summer of 1999. He asked me several questions. I responded at length to those questions that related to me personally and to the political situation in general. As to several of his central questions, I did not give him any answers at all... By the way, I have no intention to answer these questions in the future as well. I read Mr. Kagarlitsky's article of January 24, 2000 in Novaya Gazeta only after it had been published. I was neither thrilled nor disturbed by it. Back then I did not think it was of great importance. This publication did not affect my relations with Mr. Kagarlitsky at all. I just want to emphasize that I did not initiate his publication nor was I his main source of information for it.”

Surikov's account is remarkable in several ways. As it was his tactics before, he continues to avoid confirming or denying the “central questions,” i.e., the allegations about his participation in the “conspiracy in Nice” and the very fact of the meeting between Basaev and Voloshin. This tactics allows Surikov to perpetuate the conspiracy story without formally acknowledging his part in it. Secondly, he braggs of not being “disturbed” by the allegations of him taking part in a grave international crime. Consider that Kagarlitsky article has since become a staple of anti-Russian propaganda and, as such, a part of public consciousness, especially in the West, where the images of new Russian rulers blowing up their citizens fall into the carefully cultivated soil of Russophobia. Yet Surikov seems not at all concerned with the bad name Kagarlitsky's story gave him in the eyes of great many people around the world. This in itself is disturbing. Nor did Kagalitsky seem to have had any problems asking the man he accused in terrible crimes for a job in IPROG and later having the ”former” intelligence officer Surikov working under his directorship on a number of supposedly “left” projects like the first Social Forum and even the United Socialist Front.

According to Surikov, he was introduced to Kagarlitsky by Anatoly Baranov, a long-time associate of Surikov and the owner of Pravda.info and Forum.msk.ru. Baranov also is the chief editor of the CPRF web site kprf.ru. Their meeting took place in the United States “in the early 1996.” It is not known what was the nature of Kagarlitsky's visit to the United States. But it has been long established that Surikov's first public contact with Fritz Ermarth, the high-ranking CIA official, took place in the spring of that year. It has also been known that Surikov and Ermarth worked together in the anti-Gore campaign of 1999, which peaked in the so-called Russiangate, or the BONY scandal. 2 Ermarth, who retired from the CIA in 1998, played central role in this operation. But he was clearly only a front man for some powerful Republican cabal behind him.

Two years after his meeting with Surikov in the US, Kagarlitsky was invited to give testimony to the Banking Subcommittee of US Congress (10 September 1998). The very fact of a prominent Russian Marxist being asked to testify before US Congress is rather unusual, especially considering that Kagarlitsky has no training in economic and financial matters. Kagarlitsky's testimony was very much in line with Ermarth's subsequesnt critique of Gore's Russian politics. Could it be that the idea to invite Kagarlitsky to the Capitol Hill came from Ermarth and his circle?

Finally, Surikov confirms the central role of Ret. FSB General Alexei Kondaurov in financing the activities of IPROG during Kagarlitsky's tenure. In the waning years of the Soviet Union Alexei Kondaurov occupied important positions in the Fifth Political Directorate of the KGB. His boss was General Philipp Bobkov. Eventually Bobkov wound up a head of the security service of Vladimir Gusinsky, the omnipotent oligarch and media mogul of Yeltsin's epoch. Kondaurov, after several years of service in FSB, accepted a similar position in Khodorkovsky's YUKOS. He became a millionair and played active role in the attempt to”privatize” Ziuganov's CPRF in 2003. The attempt, led by Filin's group and YUKOS, with the help of Ziuganov's “intimate friend” Alexandr Prokhanov, with Boris Berezovsky behind him, eventually had failed. But Kondaurov secured for himself a seat in the State Duma from the CPRF. According to Vladimir Filin, Kondaurov sponsored not only IPROG, but the “Left Front,” one of Kagarlitsky's political projects, “until last September.” 3 

What brought together the prominent leftist Boris Kagarlitsky and the man who could well have been his interrogator in 1982, when Kagarlitsky's group of young socialists was arrested by KGB, is a question that deserves a separate journalistic investigation.

Примечания

1  For a detailed analysis of that story, see the recent essay by Peter Dale Scott “The Global Drug Meta-Group:Drugs, Managed Violence, and the Russian 9/11.” On Kagarlitsky's explanations of his association with Surikov, see our report from the 2005 press-conference of the Left Front in Moscow Boris Kagarlitsky Defends Himself Against Accusations in Cover-Up

2  Surikov wrote about Ermarth's role in Russiagate a number of times. One such account is in his 2002 article “Did Berezovsky Buy Off Communists for US Intelligence?” <http://english.pravda.ru/main/2002/10/09/37954_.html>, published under the pen names “Anna Kolchak” (in English) and “Eintingon” (in Russian).

3  See interview with Filin at <http://forum.msk.ru/print.html?id=9687>