And Your First Clue Was?
From the Moscow Times via Robert Amsterdam, an article on the siloviki wars contains this pearl:
In a sign that the public dispute could be worrying investors, investment bank UBS described the recent twists in the complex saga as “discomforting” in a note to investors Thursday.
As I have been writing on SWP since April, 2006, investors should have been discomfited a long, long time ago. Day after day, week after week, there has been a procession of stories detailing the ongoing institutional degradation in Russia. The Storchak affair is only the latest, and admittedly among the most lurid, of these episodes.
In his decision in Final Accounting in the Estate of A.B. (1866) Judge Gideon J. Tucker famously said “no man’s life, liberty, or property are safe while the Legislature is in session.” In 19th century America, this was more than a little bit of hyperbole. In Russia, it is no hyperbole–it is stone-cold truth–to say “no man’s life, liberty, or property are safe while the siloviki are awake.” And they never sleep.
