This is the gulag that Oleg Kozlovsky built
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Originally, I was about to pass over Oleg Kozlovsky’s epic published by the Washington Post on Monday. Even by WP’s notoriously abysmal standards of Russia coverage, giving space to a petty criminal (“At age 23, I have been arrested more than a dozen times, have twice served short terms in prison…”) seems a bit overdo.
(In his own peculiar way, Mr. Kozlovsky is a sincere, if somewhat immature and delusional, young man. He calls himself a “pro-democracy advocate” and aspires to become Russia’s incarnation of Mahatma Gandhi and Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Mr. Kozlovsky’s problem, however, is that he lives in gulag. No, not that gulag that he claims ex-President Vladimir Putin has transformed Russia into. He lives in a mental gulag, the gulag that he built by and for himself.
In contrast to the Stalin gulag that had killed and imprisoned millions of innocent people, Mr. Kozlovsky’s gulag is a lonely place (see picture on the right). It’s only populated by Mr. Kozlovsky himself and a bunch of “omonovtsy” (OMON is the Russian riot police). Apparently, the omnipresent K.G.B. agents are out there too, hiding behind the OMON lines. Oh sure, there is always a cameraman snapping pictures for Western media outlets.)
Then, something has caught my attention. Here it was:
“As you read this, I am in prison in Russia.”
Wait a minute. Is Mr. Kozlovsky saying that he wrote his WP piece when sitting in the pen? What the hell the prison is it where inmates can freely write opuses for foreign newspapers? Besides, I’m curious about the logistics of the writing process. Was Mr. Kozlovsky allowed to use a laptop in his cell or was he dragged in shackles to a desktop in the library or in the warden’s office? Does the prison have cable or wireless?
Whatever the case, the gulag that Mr. Kozlovsky built seems to have excellent Internet connection.
Mr. Kozlovsky’s real tragedy is that he isn’t a “leader of a youth movement” as he claims. He’s a pawn. A pitiful pawn at the hands of much older and much more cynical “pro-democracy advocates” who, in contrast to him, aren’t rushing to sacrifice their lives and freedom at the altar of “democratic Russia.”
Of course, I’m talking about Mr. Kozlovsky’s boss, the leader of Other Russia, Garry Kasparov, and the best buddy of the latter, the fuehrer of the banned National Bolshevik Party, Edward Limonov.
While Mr. Kozlovsky was struggling to break into the annals of the American journalism, Kasparov and Limonov were having good time in a plush Moscow hotel holding the first meeting of the so-called “National Assembly.” Composed of about 700 “deputies” (who have “elected” themselves by the rules established by themselves), the “National Assembly” is supposed to become, in the inflamed minds of Kasparov and Limonov, an “alternative parliament.”
My first reaction was like, a parliament of which country? Obviously, not Russia, for Russia already has a parliament.
But then, it came to me: it’s a parliament for the gulag that Oleg Kozlovsky built.
