Limonov vs. Putin

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When I first expressed my desire to write a book about president Putin, editors and friends said to me 1) that I will need “kompromat” [compromising material]; 2) that in order for the book to be convincing, I will need a lot of “kompromat”; 3) that I need to get “kompromat”.

After giving it a thought, I almost decided not to use “kompromat”, for the following reasons: I don’t have connections in the elite; I don’t have agents in the Kremlin or in the government, those who would have passionately desired to get me exclusive information about the president, which means that I can’t get “kompromat”. Besides, I thought, in his past life Putin surly hasn’t left written confessions about committing illegal or criminal activities, so I won’t be able to prove anything for sure. After all, London’s exiles, Berezovsky, Litvinenko and others didn’t succeed to prove anything when they put forward the version that it was the FSB, which blew up the houses in Russia in fall 1999 in order to bring an ex KGB officer to power. Nevertheless, they succeeded in planting a doubt in the masses. After almost deciding that I won’t use “kompromat”, I finally did the exact opposite. I dedicated the first chapters of my book to V. V. Putin’s life until March 22nd 2000, in other words before the day he became RF president. In doing so, I enumerated all the scandals related to Putin’s name and the accusations put forward against him in different times by different people. And what I did was right. Let the reader decide for himself if he should believe a president with such a life experience.

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