“To lose one Gazprom tycoon this year is unfortunate. To lose five is sheer carelessness” – this is what Wilde might have said had he not died in 1900.
More to the point is what his instructors must have taught about coincidences at Putin’s KGB spying school. When they number more than two, those gurus doubtless said, they aren’t coincidences.
My question, informed by neither analytical intelligence techniques nor by Wilde’s wit, is one I always ask under such circumstances: What are the odds?
In January, Leonid Shulman, the head of Gazprom’s transport service, was discovered dead at his mansion near St Petersburg. Verdict: suicide.
A month later, another Gazprom official, Alexander Tyulakov, was found hanged. Verdict: suicide.
In April, Vladislav Avayev, a former Gazprombank vice-president, his wife and 13-year-old daughter were found dead of gunshot wounds in their palatial Moscow apartment. Verdict: murder-suicide.
In that same cruel month, Sergey Protosenya, a top manager of an energy company linked with Gazprom, his wife and 18-year-old daughter were found dead of the same cause at their Spanish villa. Verdict: murder-suicide.
And the other day, Yuri Voronov, head of a Gazprom-related transportation company, was found floating dead in his swimming pool, with the gun that had killed him left at the scene nearby. Verdict: suicide.
Far be it from me to suspect foul play within the ranks of Russia’s gas monopoly, nominally headed by Putin’s Petersburg friend Alexei Miller, but part-owned by Vlad himself. It’s just that everything I’ve ever heard or read about statistics inclines me towards scepticism.
Since I don’t think suicide is a viral disease capable of causing epidemics, I’m stuck for a credible explanation. Then again, the history of communist and post-communist countries does add many new twists to epidemiology.
For example, just one month in 1984 saw an outbreak of cardiovascular deaths among Eastern European defence officials.
On 2 December, Army General Hoffmann, East Germany’s Defence Minister died of cardiac arrest. On 15 December, Army General Oláh, Hungary’s Defence Minister, died of cardiac arrest. On 16 December, Army General Dzúr, Czechoslovakia’s Defence Minister, died of cardiac arrest. On 20 December, Marshal Ustinov, Soviet Defence Minister, died of cardiac arrest.
All told, one either has to revise one’s understanding of medicine and, for that matter, statistics, or perhaps reassess one’s grasp of evil regimes. Our governments in the West may be variously incompetent, woke, self-destructive and even unjust. But they are qualitatively different from evil regimes, such as the one in Russia.
That’s partly why Western governments are always tardy in mustering a forceful response when such regimes act up. We simply refuse to accept that they come not just from a different culture, but from an alien moral universe largely inhabited, and exclusively run, by evil humanoids.
Now those creatures, in the deceptively human physique of the Kremlin spokesman Peskov and Foreign Ministry spokesman Zakharova, are in the grip of indecent joy over Boris Johnson’s resignation.
He is supposed to have been “hit by a boomerang launched by himself”, thereby providing a cautionary tale: “do not seek to destroy Russia”. This obscene glee is reason enough to mourn Johnson’s departure.
And do I detect a hint that the Russians played a part in whipping up anti-Johnson hysteria? I wouldn’t put it past them.
I’d like to see Priti Patel as PM.
Yes, and she already has a ready-made campaign song: “Priti, I feel Priti…” (I suppose West Side Story was before your time.)
It is easy enough for the Russians to call murders in their own cities suicide, after all, the government, the police, and the media are all one. But what influence might they have in Spain? I would expect the Catalan police to do their job and at least investigate the possibility that the Protosenya family were all murdered. They seem to have immediately jumped to the conclusion it was murder-suicide. They could follow the British example and identify the culprit, then demand extradition. It has not worked for the British government, but at least they tried to expose the truth.
The death of Boris Berezovsky in UK is another mystery.