Asya Denezhkina. Quiet pool

Quiet pool
The presidential election has turned into a farce

Asya Denezhkina

Publication date: February 11, 2004

And van Petrovich, apparently, has extraordinary guerrilla skills, because he somehow managed to cross the Russian-Ukrainian border, so much so that there were no marks left anywhere. Either the customs is not working well, or the search system is working, or something is fishy here. They say that Rybkin could have entered Ukraine through Belarus. But why does a Russian presidential candidate need to make his way “to friends” in a roundabout way? He flew to London normally, by plane, put border stamps in his passport, but he could have also flown on fishing boats under the cover of night... Moreover, he got back from Kyiv to Moscow as a white man, and not through Lukashenko’s fiefdom.

Now a man with the harmless surname Rybkin is suspected of all mortal sins - alcoholism, meetings with the Ukrainian opposition, and personal communication with Boris Berezovsky. Ivan Petrovich turned out to be a downright revolutionary functionary.

Although, it is quite possible that Rybkin was really kidnapped, they demanded that he fulfill some conditions, and maybe they even injected him with something so that the unexpected return of Berezovsky-Elenin’s assistant would look not like the return of a formidable opponent of the current president, but a buffoon. So the head of the Civil Liberties Foundation, Alexander Goldfarb, believes that “something drastic happened to the man (Ivan Petrovich”) . US citizen Oleg Kalugin, previously seen as a KGB general, believes that Russian intelligence services have recently succeeded in the development and use of psychotropic drugs. However, Kalugin rightly notes that Rybkin is by no means a figure of the caliber to carry out such a complex operation to “neutralize” him.

Of course, the version “every year on December 31st my friends and I go to the bathhouse” is most understandable to a Russian person. We drank, accidentally ended up in Kyiv, sobered up and went with local friends on a five-day overnight fishing trip. Perhaps Rybkin’s election headquarters, with such a staging, tried to arouse sympathy among the population for their candidate, to appeal to each drinking person personally. Like, nothing human is alien to our Ivan Petrovich. Elect Rybkin as president, he will lead, and then go on a drinking binge - and do what you want.

Another option is that they simply wanted to attract attention to candidate Rybkin. The number of mentions of his name in the media over these five days clearly exceeded the maximum possible during the entire election campaign. In addition, the Kremlin could have asked Rybkin to disappear, because the campaign is boring in principle, and the people need at least some kind of intrigue. Now, if Glazyev had disappeared, then for Putin it is not clear what else it would have turned out to be, maybe even a second round. By stealing Glazyev, one could turn him into an ideological martyr. So, if the attackers really wanted to disrupt the elections or harm Vladimir Vladimirovich personally, then Glazyev would be the victim. The election campaign continues...