Pal Palych not forever

Life, Nabokov said, vilely imitates literary fiction. Leading his hero Cincinnatus Ts. to the scaffold, the writer seemed to see in real life the expression on the face of the State Secretary of the Union of Russia and Belarus Pavel Borodin at the visa control post at Kennedy Airport, where he was told that he had been detained at the request of the Swiss prosecutor's office.

The “Borodin case” becomes the “Russian case”. And the further the scandal unwinds, the more tangible and sharper the smell of provocation enveloping this case.

As an international high-ranking official, the detainee, of course, had a diplomatic passport. According to Granei.Ru's interlocutor at the Russian Foreign Ministry, the US consular services, under various pretexts, delayed the granting of a visa to Mr. Borodin using this diplomatic passport. In the course of consultations with the American embassy immediately on the eve of his departure, the Secretary of State of the Russian-Belarusian Union allegedly received personal guarantees from the US Ambassador to the Russian Federation, James Collins, regarding the impossibility of any "technical difficulties" when entering on an ordinary Russian passport with a multiple-entry visa.

All this, you see, is very regrettable. However, from now on, dear reader, we will risk leaving you alone with two versions of the police drama that is happening to our hero. Only fiction, unsteady literary fiction, which life will vilely imitate.

Version 1 . It was not by themselves that the Americans suddenly came up with a plan to lure the ex-Kremlin manager out of Russia and hand him over to the bloodthirsty Swiss prosecutors, supporters of this version believe. They ask themselves: was the action at Kennedy airport the result of a collusion between American intelligence agencies and interested people in Moscow?

For example, the anti-Clinton campaign, raised in the Russian media in connection with the catastrophe of the nuclear-powered ship Kursk, was also, according to Grani.Ru sources close to the leadership of the Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation, a kind of pass from the Kremlin to the winning Republican team.

According to the "conspiracy version", the provocation against Pavel Borodin was organized precisely at the suggestion of the Russian special services, which went out on their own initiative against the Americans. Intelligence officers and diplomats are supposed to have received secret but unequivocal instructions on this matter from a "group of security officials" in the entourage of the Russian president, headed by Secretary of the Security Council of the Russian Federation Sergei Ivanov. Perhaps Vladimir Putin himself did not even know that "Pal Palych is not forever." The "St. Petersburg Chekists" themselves could have figured out how to push the unloved hero of the Mabetex case into the cell of the Brooklyn Federal Prison by someone else's hands. Thus, the authors of this version believe, they hoped to move Putin towards a decisive break with the Yeltsin Family and the beginning of a "personnel revolution." In addition, this way the new Washington administration clearly demonstrated the good will of the Kremlin to fight corruption.

Version 2 . On the contrary, other experts interviewed by Grani.Ru answer, why did the inhabitants of the Kremlin give the Americans a man who knows so much about their ins and outs? Most likely, "Operation Borodin" was developed exclusively by the Americans, and "ours" missed it.

"Operation Borodin," the adherents of the second version continue, opens a series of anti-Russian actions that should show the world a new face of the tough and pragmatic foreign policy of the George W. Bush administration. To a certain extent, this is a response to Moscow's integrationist activity in the near abroad and -shocking", in the words of the well-known New York Times columnist William Safire, the behavior of the Russian government in matters of the external debt of the Russian Federation.

Which of these paths led our hero to the American dungeon will obviously become clear in the very near future.

It is only clear that during the forty days that Mr. Borodin will have to sit in prison while waiting for the "package from Geneva", we will see a colorful farce action of our political beau monde. Like what happened at the foot of Nabokov's scaffold, where Cincinnatus Ts., against the will of the executioners, wished to lie down himself.