People on my feed are actively discussing Panyushkin’s move to *The New Times* magazine. You can feel however you like about Panyushkin and *The New Times*, but from the standpoint of promoting the magazine, it’s a brilliant move. As the main left-liberal publication, TNT simply blows everyone else out of the water. A complete exclusive on all the inspirational, heartbreaking, exposé-style texts. *Novaya Gazeta*, with its Gorbachev-and-Lebedev-backed promos (referring to Mikhail Gorbachev and Alexander Lebedev), is left nervously smoking on the sidelines. By the way, just yesterday I finished Panyushkin’s book *Gazprom: The New Russian Weapon*. His attempt to produce an objective analysis of Gazprom’s recent history led to an amusing result: the book is an outright apology for Putin. Yes, it’s full of all the usual liberal naïvetés about “Gazprom-as-a-weapon,” “gas blackmail,” “a_state_within_a_state,” and “Gazprom_even_has_its_own_amateur_talent_show_how_awful_is_that.”
But the main thought that keeps forcing itself into your head as you read the book is this: what a great thing Putin did by driving out that whole disgusting gang. All those Goldovskys, Gusinskys, Berezovskys, Vyakhirevs, Chernomyrdins, and the rest of them, along with their children and relatives. Of course, he drove them out only to replace them with his own people, who are also appalling crooks—just slightly less appalling. Putin-style crooks are more cynical, but they still operate in secret. They are fully aware of their own crookedness and therefore hide from us in the Swiss canton of Zug. That is only a little better, but still better, than the messianic type of crook, who operated openly and claimed a moral right to cheat and steal. It’s no accident that criminal law treats the secret theft of property (larceny) as a less dangerous offense than the open taking of property (robbery). That, it seems to me, is what Panyushkin’s book is really about: “The history of Gazprom—from robbery to theft.”