Moscow-on-Thames: Soviet-born billionaires and their ties to UK's political elite

How party donations, sports teams and lavish London residences have granted access to highest echelons of public life

Businesspeople born in the Soviet Union play a significant role in British business and politics. Some have given money to political parties. Others have made substantial investments in media and industry. All have homes in London, with several visiting regularly from Moscow.

Boris Johnson pictured with Alexander Temerko, who has given more than £1.3m to the Conservative party. Photograph: alexandertemerko.co.uk

Following a week in which Russia and its links to the UK have been in the news, the Guardian has looked into the impact of Soviet-born men and women on recent UK public life.

Lobbying and the media

Alexander Lebedev bought the loss-making Evening Standard newspaper in 2009, installing his son Evgeny as proprietor. Lebedev later acquired the Independent and launched a successful spinoff version, the i. The Standard office is around the corner from where Lebedev worked in the 1980s as an undercover spy based at the Soviet embassy.

As he recounts in his memoir, Hunt the Banker, the KGB approached Lebedev in his final year at university in Moscow. He learned espionage at the Red Banner Institute and joined the KGB’s prestigious first directorate, specialising in foreign intelligence work. After the USSR’s collapse, Lebedev went into banking and the media.

Lebedev funded Russia’s independent Novaya Gazeta newspaper. In 2016, however, he wrote a column in the Evening Standard defending Vladimir Putin after the Russian president’s close friend Sergei Roldugin appeared in the Panama Papers. Lebedev supported Russia’s takeover of Crimea and held a conference there in 2017 to counter what he said was western media “bias”. Russia’s foreign ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova went to his Moscow book launch.

In recent years, Lebedev has come under scrutiny over his close personal ties with Boris Johnson.

Alexander Lebedev (left) and his son Evgeny (right), with the former chancellor George Osborne in September last year, when Osborne was editor of the Evening Standard. Photograph: David M Benett/Dave Benett/Getty Images

In spring 2018, Johnson flew to the Lebedevs’ villa in Perugia, Italy. The then foreign secretary left his security detail behind and was spotted at the airport on his way home, dishevelled and hungover. 

Johnson attended Lebedev’s 60th birthday party the day after winning December’s general election. David Cameron and then Evening Standard editor George Osborne were guests too.

Meanwhile, Lebedev’s billionaire Moscow contemporary Alexander Mamut bought the bookshop chain Waterstones in 2011 for £53.5m. 

Mamut introduced a Russian-language section to its store in Piccadilly Circus, central London. His then teenage son was educated at a leading British private school.

Mamut owns extensive media assets in Russia, including the news website Lenta.ru. In 2014, he fired its editor, Galina Timchenko, after she published an interview with a Ukrainian nationalist. Mamut replaced her with a pro-Kremlin journalist. In 2018, he sold a majority stake in Waterstones to a hedge fund.

The PR executive and former Ulster Unionist MP David Burnside has introduced several prominent Kremlin figures to senior Conservatives. His communications firm, New Century Media, founded a Positive Russia foundation to improve Moscow’s image in the UK. One of Burnside’s employees is Alex Nekrassov, whose late father Alexander was a Kremlin adviser and hardline Putin apologist.

In 2012, Burnside took a Russian embassy diplomat, Sergei Nalobin, to a Conservative party fundraising dinner. Nalobin, the son of a senior officer in the FSB, the successor to the KGB, founded the Conservative Friends of Russia, a parliamentary group. Its 2012 launch party took place in the Russian ambassador’s Kensington garden.

John Whittingdale MP and Carrie Symonds, then a young Tory party worker and now Johnson’s fiancee, were among the guests. Raffle prizes included a biography of Putin and bottles of vodka.

The following year, Burnside invited Vasily Shestakov, an influential MP in Russia’s Duma, to the same Tory fundraising dinner. He introduced him to the prime minister, David Cameron. Shestakov is an old friend of Putin’s and with him co-authored several books, including Learn Judo With Vladimir Putin and Judo: History, Theory, Practice.

Politics

The Conservatives have received more than £3m from wealthy Soviet-born donors – all of whom can legally give money to the party as British citizens. They include Alexander Temerko, a former Russian junior defence minister, and Lubov Chernukhin, a financier whose husband Vladimir served in Putin’s cabinet as deputy finance minister.

Alexander Temerko said he was ‘no friend’ of Vladimir Putin. Photograph: Bloomberg via Getty Images

Temerko has funded the constituency associations of several leading Tory MPs, including the business secretary, Alok Sharma, and Mark Pritchard. Pritchard sits on parliament’s intelligence and security committee (ISC), which on Tuesday published its long-awaited Russia report. The Scottish National party has called on Pritchard to resign from the committee or give the money back.

In an interview with the Guardian, Temerko said he was “no friend” of Putin’s, whom he called an “enemy of democracy”. He said he had zero intention of going to Russia. Temerko has given more than £1.3m to the Conservative party. He would not be drawn on whether the Kremlin had interfered in the EU referendum vote in support of Leave, but said that he opposed Brexit.

An investigation by Reuters, based on conversations with Temerko, alleges that he supported Johnson’s campaign to take Britain out of the EU – at least initially. It said the industrialist had funded some of Johnson’s key allies in parliament, including James Wharton, who ran Johnson’s successful prime ministerial campaign. Johnson and Temerko were close, sharing bottles of wine and sometimes calling each other “Sasha”, it added.

In contrast to Temerko, Chernukhin keeps a low public profile. The former banker turns down interview requests and has not publicly explained why she has given the Conservative party more than £1.7m. Born in the Soviet Union, Chernukhin is the biggest female donor in British political history and one of the Tories’ most important cash supporters.

Her largesse seems directed at whoever is the Conservative leader. In 2014, she paid £160,000 at a Tory fundraiser to play tennis with Cameron and Johnson, then the PM and London mayor. She paid £135,000 in April 2019 for a dinner at the luxury Goring hotel with Theresa May, also then the PM, and several female cabinet members.

Other donations have flowed to Brandon Lewis, the former Tory party chairman. He has received £24,500, according to Electoral Commission filings. He defended the donations in media interviews on Thursday. Cash has also gone to Theresa Villiers, who sits on the ISC. In February, Chernukhin spent £45,000 on another game of tennis with Johnson and Ben Elliot, the Tories’ co-chair. The SNP is calling on Villiers to return the money.

Chernukhin’s husband served as a Russian minister in 2000, during Putin’s first presidential term. He was chairman of Vnesheconombank (VEB), a bank and state corporation with reported close ties to the Kremlin security establishment. He later left Moscow and became a British citizen in 2011. The couple have an £8m London mansion, owned by an offshore trust, a jet and two yachts.

Lubov Chernukhin (fourth from right, next to Theresa May) paid £135,000 to attend a dinner last year with senior female Conservatives at the Goring hotel in central London. Photograph: Elizabeth Truss/Twitter

Another prominent figure is Andrei Borodin, the former president of the Bank of Moscow. In 2013, Borodin attended the Conservatives’ summer ball with his wife Tatiana Korsakova, a model, four months after receiving political asylum. He spent £40,000 on a portrait of Margaret Thatcher.

The payment was made by Henley Concierge, a firm registered to a cottage on Borodin’s £120m country estate near Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire. Borodin said he did not discuss party policy at the event, nor make a donation. Russian authorities have accused him of a massive fraud. Borodin denies this and says he’s the victim of a politically motivated witch-hunt.

Business and property

Super-wealthy businessmen from former Soviet countries also control a dizzying array of UK assets spanning football clubs, oil and gas and multimillion-pound mansions. Their financial clout affords members of this select group considerable influence and access to Britain’s professional and ruling classes.

Perhaps the most high-profile London-based oligarch, thanks to his £140m purchase of Chelsea Football Club in 2003, is Roman Abramovich. The Israeli-Russian billionaire has limited UK business interests outside football, but his extensive property portfolio includes a 15-bedroom mansion in London’s prestigious Kensington Palace Gardens, bought for £90m in 2011.

The Chelsea owner’s wealth is derived partly from proceeds from the controversial privatisation of the oil giant Sibneft after the fall of the Soviet Union. When Sibneft needed an international communications chief it turned to Greg Barker, who would go on to become Conservative energy minister under David Cameron.

Lord Barker of Battle, as he has been known since his elevation to the House of Lords, has also worked for another Russian businessman with the ear of Britain’s powerful elite, Oleg Deripaska. Deripaska attracted public attention in 2008 over claims that he discussed making a donation to the Tories with George Osborne, during a meeting held aboard his yacht in the Mediterranean.

Roman Abramovich, pictured in the stands at Chelsea FC’s Stamford Bridge ground, in 2017 - the last year Chelsea won the Premier League. Photograph: Ben Stansall/AFP via Getty Images

In 2017, Deripaska listed his En+ energy and metals group on the London Stock Exchange and turned to Lord Barker to serve as its chairman. The Tory peer received a bonus of $4m (£3.14m) after helping Deripaska get the company removed from a list of firms hit by US sanctions.

Barker and Deripaska are not the only peer and oligarch double-act on the UK business scene. The legendary oil dealmaker and former BP boss Lord Browne is executive chair of billionaire Mikhaeil Fridman’s Letter One Energy group, which has a one-third stake in the oil and gas company Wintershall DEA.

Fridman and Browne enjoy a longstanding business relationship that includes the foundation of TNK-BP, a joint venture involving British oil supermajor BP and a group of three billionaires, including Fridman, under the banner AAR. The relationship between BP and AAR often proved acrimonious and TNK-BP boss Bob Dudley was at one stage forced to flee the country fearing for his safety. After a power struggle, AAR eventually sold its half in the venture to Russian state-owned oil giant Rosneft. That deal left BP with a near-20% stake in the Kremlin-backed company, making cordial Russian relations vital for BP. Rival Shell also has interests in Russia via the huge Sakhalin-2 offshore gas project.

One of the other billionaires behind AAR, Sir Leonard (Len) Blavatnik, also wields significant influence in the UK. Blavatnik was born in Odessa, in Soviet Ukraine, but has renounced Russian citizenship and is a dual US-UK citizen. Blavatnik has amassed a vast business empire, including Warner Music. He endowed Oxford University by spending £75m to found the Blavatnik School of Government. He also sponsors the Baillie Gifford literature prize and is the main benefactor of multiple London museums and art galleries. Like Abramovich, he owns a mansion in Kensington Palace Gardens, a property that has been valued at up to £200m.

Greg Barker, a former Conservative minister, has worked for the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. Photograph: Martin Argles/The Guardian

But that pales in comparison to the estimated price tag on Witanhurst, often referred to as Britain’s most expensive home. The mansion in London’s upmarket Highgate was bought for £50m in 2008 by the family of the Russian fertiliser baron Andrey Guryev, through an offshore company called Safran Holdings, located in the tax haven of the British Virgin Islands. It has been valued at more than £300m after extensive refurbishment.

A few miles across north London lies Arsenal Football Club, in which the Uzbek-born Russian metals, mining and publishing billionaire Alisher Usmanov was a long-time shareholder – even at one time considering a full takeover. Ultimately he sold his shares for £550m in 2018 to the US sports tycoon Stan Kroenke.

One of London’s most successful Russian businessmen is Andrey Andreev. He has made a fortune of close to £1bn by founding dating apps, including the female-focused Bumble and Badoo.

• Luke Harding’s latest book Shadow State: Murder, Mayhem and Russia’s Remaking of the West (Guardian Faber) is available from the Guardian Bookshop.

(Source: The Guardian)

Coronavirus: Footage captures chaotic scenes in Moscow as ambulances 'queue to enter hospitals'

'This is no longer possible to hide,' witness says

As Russia struggles with an escalating coronavirus crisis, videos and images posted online have shown long queues of ambulances apparently waiting to get access to hospitals in the Moscow region.

Footage shot from a Moscow tower block and posted on Twitter on Friday showed more than 50 emergency service vehicles queueing around the block.

Another user shared street-level footage of what appeared to be the same stretch of ambulances. They said it was filmed outside a hospital on Startovaya Street, in the Losinoostrovsky district of the Russian capital.

"The picture is terrifying. This is no longer possible to hide," the user tweeted.

The queue was reportedly the result of a logistical error, with patients being sent there when no beds were actually available.

Russia reported 2,186 new coronavirus cases on Sunday, bringing the national tally of confirmed cases to 15,770, even as Moscow and many other regions neared the end of their second week in a state of lockdown aimed at halting the contagion.

The number of coronavirus-related deaths in the country rose by 24 to 130, the Russian coronavirus crisis response centre said.

In Moscow – the centre of the national outbreak – the number of patients being hospitalised has also doubled in recent days, one official said.

“I can tell you for sure that there has been no peak yet whatsoever. We are at the foothills of the peak, not even in the middle,” Moscow's mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, said in an interview with Russia's RIA news agency published on Friday.

“I can only say that a serious test lies before us and we need to be preparing for it,” he said.

In a Facebook post, a man claiming to be an ambulance worker posted images showing queues of emergency service vehicles outside what he said was a hospital in Novogorsk, another Moscow suburb.

"Today I work on an ambulance on a night shift," Oleg Pyhtin said. "A patient was brought from Mitino to a hospital in Novogorsk, apparently in Moscow there is nowhere. I have not seen this in six years! Standing in line."

In a televised address on Friday, Mr Sobyanin said the city would gradually begin introducing a system of passes for residents wanting to move around the city so that authorities could enforce the shutdown.

Residents in Moscow have been told to stay at home unless they need to make essential trips to buy food or access urgent medical care. Police said on Thursday they had already caught 400 people ignoring the order and that they faced small fines.

“The situation started to get worse from Monday. The number of seriously ill patients with pneumonia is growing,” Mr Sobyanin said, adding that he felt he had “no choice” but to introduce a permit system.

“Especially when we see that unfortunately not everyone is following the restrictions that have been set.”

Scene outside a Moscow hospital earlier. The queues of ambulances reportedly the result a logistical error — patients sent when there weren’t actually the beds available. But mayor’s office themselves admit hospitals in capital working near capacity. pic.twitter.com/GlddUm2OAr

— Oliver Carroll (@olliecarroll) April 10, 2020

In Moscow, the influx of patients is already pushing hospitals and ambulances towards their limit, said deputy mayor Anastasiya Rakova.

Russia recorded far fewer cases of the new coronavirus than many Western European countries in the early stages of the outbreak, but its official case tally began to rise sharply this month.

Officials until late last month were saying that the situation was under control and that there was no epidemic.

Their tone changed however after Mr Sobyanin, who has taken a prominent role in the crisis, questioned the veracity of official figures and said the real situation was much worse than it looked.

Some anti-Kremlin politicians have criticised President Vladimir Putin for taking what they say has been too low a profile in the push to contain and slow the spread of the virus.

The Kremlin has rejected those assertions however, and Mr Putin made his third television appearance dedicated to the crisis on Wednesday, rolling out economic measures to help businesses hit by the lockdown. 

(Source: Independent)

In Russia, the ultimate scary story is about losing your coat

I am often complimented on how warm my coats look: “You look so bundled up!” It is praise I accept not for myself, but on behalf of the country where I bought them: Russia. I spent a total of two winters there, in Moscow, and each time, I approached the matter of buying a coat with an almost superstitious seriousness, as if the Russian winter were a spirit that watched me as I shopped, waiting to punish me if I made the wrong choice of down, or underestimated the need for moisture-wicking fabric. I was not wrong; I swear, that first winter, the wind felt like a ghost slapping me in the face, chiding me for getting the hood that buttoned rather than zipped. Perhaps that is why, every Halloween, as ghost stories make their return, my mind often wanders to Nikolai Gogol’s “The Overcoat.” Published in 1842, it tells the story of a vengeful ghost, who in life had his overcoat stolen and now in death haunts the city of St. Petersburg, pulling coats off the backs of innocent passersby. Gogol’s story, at its heart, is a frightening tale of poverty and social isolation. It is also a testament to the power of hauntings that take place on a larger scale, where ghosts seek to collect debts not for individual transgressions but for the failings of an entire society.

VINTAGE RUSSIAN POSTCARD

“The Overcoat” follows Akaky Akakievich, an aging, awkward copy clerk who is mercilessly ridiculed by nearly everyone in his life over his lowly social status (he is a titular councilor, a relatively insignificant position in imperial Russia’s “table of ranks” system). At work, his superiors lord over him with a “cold despotism.” Despite this, he finds pleasure in his work, in its mundane simplicity: “In copying, he saw some varied and pleasant world of his own. Delight showed in his face; certain letters were his favorites, and when he came to one of them, he was beside himself.” However, as winter approaches, Akaky’s peace is disturbed by a familiar villain: “There exists in Petersburg a powerful enemy of all who earn a salary of four hundred rubles or thereabouts. This enemy is none other than our northern frost.”

Akaky, whose old coat is too tattered to withstand the frigid air, begins saving for a new one, forgoing the small pleasures that make his otherwise dreary life pleasurable (drinking tea, lighting candles in the evening). But Akaky comes to find joy instead in the dream of a new coat: “it was as if his very existence became somehow fuller, as if he were married, as if some other person were there with him, as if he were not alone but some pleasant life’s companion had agreed to walk down the path of life with him—and this companion was none other than that same overcoat.” We share in his horror when, on his very first day wearing his new coat, Akaky is robbed of it. To make matters worse, as titular councilor, he does not have enough pull to get the authorities to take his case seriously. The cold air and society’s indifference sends him to an early grave, but soon afterward, a rumor begins to spread throughout the city: “A dead man had begun to appear at night in the form of a clerk searching for some stolen overcoat.” In death, Akaky gets his revenge.

Gogol’s story could be classified as what Wellesley professor Kathleen Brogan defines as “cultural haunting.” Unlike stories of individuals being haunted by what transpired in an isolated location (haunted castles, Gothic abbeys), in cultural hauntings, societies as a whole face a reckoning. Ghosts, in these cases, are often the victims of endemic injustices who refuse to be forgotten: “Through the agency of ghosts, group histories that have in some way been threatened, erased, or fragmented are cooperated and revised.” Indeed, Akaky’s ghost is indiscriminate; he pulls “from all shoulders, regardless of rank or titles, various overcoats.” He is not looking to terrorize the two men who robbed him, but the city, the society, that left him out in the cold in the first place.

In North America, ghost stories have also worked to counter our national historic amnesia. In Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” the headless horseman, a Revolutionary War mercenary for the British, reflects a young republic still fractured and insecure in its allegiances. Ghosts haunt us for the crime of slavery, as in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and more recently in the Canadian poet M. NourbeSe Philip’s collection Zong!. The latter revisits the 1781 mass murder of African slaves who were tossed into the Atlantic as part of an insurance scheme. Zong!, Philip tells us, ““haunt[s] the spaces of forgetting” by calling on the ghostly voices of the drowned Africans to finally testify. In Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places, Colin Dickey revisits the slave plantation, the mental asylum, and cites of haunting to disentangle the social anxieties that pervade our ghost stories, like the popular trope of “Indian burial grounds” in horror films such as Poltergeist II: “The narrative of the haunted Indian burial ground hides a certain anxiety about the land on which Americans—specifically white, middle-class Americans—live,” namely “the idea that we don’t, in fact, own the land we’ve just bought.”

Ghost stories are vehicles through which we can explore our anxieties over cultural appropriation, patriarchy, and militarization. In White Tears, novelist Hari Kunzru portrays two white hipsters haunted by the spirit of the black blues musician whose work they exploit. In “Especially Heinous,” a short story from the collection Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado satirizes the popular TV series “Law and Order: SVU” by having ghosts of women and girls whose deaths went unsolved haunt Detective Olivia Benson. In Cemetery of Splendour, Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul depicts a military hospital for soldiers who have a strange sleeping disease. It turns out the hospital was built over the cemetery of ancient kings whose ghosts are still at war with one another. The kings feed off the energy of the soldiers, causing their narcolepsy, in a powerful allegory of the country’s seeming endless cycle of violent coups.

At the end of “The Overcoat,” a policeman sees Akaky’s ghost and follows it into the night, until the spectral thief suddenly stops, turns around, and asks him: “What do you want?” The policeman, in a terror, replies: “Nothing.” What do we want from our ghosts? As we commit ever-new forms of violence, such as the destruction of the environment, we will take on new hauntings. In Iceland, there was recently a funeral for a glacier. That same polar melting is pushing salt water into forests along the mid-Atlantic coast, killing trees and creating what are now known as “ghost forests.” The same cold air that tortured Akaky might one day be nothing more than a ghost of itself, reminding society of its past crimes.

(Source: The Paris Review)

Secrets, lies and a child: William Boyd on the truth behind Chekhov’s marriage

In 1902, as he pondered The Cherry Orchard, Anton Chekhov had another question on his mind: who was the father of his wife’s unborn child?

On 25 May 1901, Anton Chekhov, aged 41, married the actor Olga Knipper, eight years his junior. The marriage provoked great surprise and consternation among his friends and family. In Russia at the time, Chekhov was as famous a writer as Tolstoy and, in addition, a passionate and amorous man who had enjoyed more than 30 love affairs. He was also a regular visitor to brothels. And, even more significantly, he was the ultimate commitment-phobe. Many women had fallen in love with him and wanted to marry him but he always quickly backed away. Then suddenly, clandestinely, he married.

Knipper was a second-generation Russian, of German Lutheran stock. She came from a bourgeois family that had hit hard times, and she had audaciously and tenaciously decided to become an actor, driving herself to rise out of genteel penury. At the time she met Chekhov she was an original member of the famous, radical Moscow Arts Theatre. She caught his eye in 1898 when she was playing Irina Arkadina in The Seagull. Many of his lovers were far more beautiful and beguiling than Olga. She was petite and vivacious, and the fact that she’d had to struggle so hard to make her way in the world gave her an energy and near-ruthless determination that Chekhov responded to.

Unlikely couple … Anton Chekhov with his wife Olga Knipper. Photograph: Mondadori via Getty Images

Their affair began in 1899 but it was shadowed by Chekhov’s terminal illness, tuberculosis. He was a doctor and knew exactly the inevitable, fatal potency of his malady. As it grew more severe, he sensed the end of his life nearing: perhaps this was what spurred him finally towards matrimony.

However, Knipper – devoted, capable and energetic as she was – could never be his nurse. She had a career in Moscow, she was in demand as an actor. Chekhov’s ravaged lungs meant he had to flee the bitter Russian winters. He went to the warm south, to Yalta in Crimea, and built a house there, only returning to Moscow and St Petersburg – and his wife – when the weather improved. It became a marriage à distance, one carried out through almost daily correspondence. It’s through this correspondence, and its evasions, that we have recently come to learn the truth about an event that darkened his last years and, indeed, could have ended his short, unlikely marriage. This new information – this revelation – is detailed in the forthcoming French edition (in December) of Donald Rayfield’s great biography, Anton Chekhov: A Life (1997).

 Chekhov was no fool. He even wrote to one of the surgeons at Olga’s operation seeking an explanation

Knipper and Chekhov often talked about trying to conceive a child – not an easy thing to accomplish if you’re living half a continent apart from each other. From time to time she would take leave from the theatre and catch the train south to Yalta to spend a few days with her husband. The significant visit took place in February 1902. Rayfield has discovered a letter (dated 1960) from EB Meve, a Russian writer who wrote about Chekhov and medicine and who had studied the Knipper/Chekhov archive in Moscow. The date is significant – these letters were sealed and the archives were not widely open to scholars until the 1990s. Given that in Russia Chekhov then enjoyed near sanctified status, Meve’s deliberations at the time were controversial, not to say shocking. He wrote about his findings to Chekhov’s nephew, Sergei Mikhailovich Chekhov.

Knipper arrived in Yalta on 23 February 1902 and left four days later. She and Chekhov had not seen each other since October 1901 and, naturally, they spent their time alone together. After a near five-month absence they tried – we can safely assume – to conceive a “little half-German” as they put it.

On 1 March Olga wrote that on the train journeying back to Moscow she felt ill: pain in the belly, nausea. She wondered if she were pregnant. On 24 March she complained about feeling ill again with severe abdominal pain. Then in a letter of 31 March she wrote that she was so ill she collapsed and was taken to the Clinical Obstetric Institute and a foetus was aborted by a surgeon named Dmitri Oskarovich Ott, obstetrician to the tsarina, no less.

And this is where Knipper’s subterfuge begins. She implies to Chekhov that this child, this “failed Panfil” as she called it, had been conceived during her four-day visit to Yalta and was a six-week-old embryo. A miscarriage of a six-week embryo does not require the presence of famous surgeons and a laparotomy – any surgical intrusion into the abdominal cavity was extremely risky in 1902 – so it must have been a far more serious condition. To reiterate: Chekhov was a doctor; he would know that after this short period of time there would be no significant sign that Knipper was pregnant. The 1 March pain attack would have been baffling. Her agonising abdominal pain a few weeks later was equally mysterious.

Chekhov reads The Seagull to actors of the Moscow Art Theatre, 1899, with Olga Knipper standing to his left; Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko stands far left. Photograph: SVF2/UIG via Getty Images

After the operation Knipper became seriously ill with peritonitis, a condition that lasted through the summer of 1902 and during which she was nursed by her ailing husband. Rayfield’s research and analysis provide more details that cast clearer light on the half-truths and duplicities.

She was indeed pregnant, but many months so – with a child fathered by someone other than Chekhov. All the facts point to a diagnosis that in March 1902 Knipper was suffering from an ectopic pregnancy and the foetus was removed by Ott from a fallopian tube. The usual time for an eruption of an ectopic pregnancy is between eight and 10 weeks from conception. Given Olga’s collapse in March this would indicate conception around the end of January. In January Knipper was in Moscow and Chekhov in Yalta – 800 miles apart.

Chekhov was no fool and he even wrote to one of the other surgeons present at Olga’s operation seeking an explanation. During her post-operative illness he behaved with quiet restraint and dignity, though he did go away himself for a few weeks on a trip to the Urals. Chekhov, of course, was aware of his own chronic tubercular condition and of time running out. During this period, however, he began to ponder the subject of a play that would become The Cherry Orchard, which was heavily inspired by his story “A Visit to Friends”, a portrait of a man who cannot commit to women who love him.

So who was the father of Olga’s unborn child? In the 1960 letter to Sergei Chekhov, Meve points out that there are many enthusiastic mentions of an actor called Aleksandr Vishnevsky in Olga’s correspondence precisely around the beginning of 1901 and clearly implies that he thought Vishnevsky was the father. Vishnevsky (1861-1943) had known Chekhov in childhood and was also an actor at the Moscow Arts Theatre, someone very much part of Chekhov’s circle of acquaintances and with whom he corresponded. In photographs Vishnevsky appears a fair haired, burly, handsome man. But Meve’s allegation is circumstantial. Rayfield suspects that Olga’s lover was in fact one of the directors of the theatre company, Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko. He and Knipper had been lovers before she met Chekhov, and Chekhov was close to Nemirovich-Danchenko as well. Rayfield makes the point that Chekhov remained on friendly terms with Vishnevsky but relations with Nemirovich-Danchenko cooled – though, paradoxically, both men were solicitous in their caring for Chekhov through the summer of 1902 and he saw a great deal of them at his bedside. Those must have been very strange encounters.

In any event, when Knipper was restored to almost good health in August, Chekhov had a little less than two years left to live and was failing fast. He slipped away – to her anger – and returned to Yalta and warm weather. They continued their sparky correspondence and saw each other infrequently. After the triumph of The Cherry Orchard in 1904, it was Olga who suggested a palliative trip to Germany in July, to a spa at Badenweiler, and it was there that Chekhov, gravely weakened, died from his tuberculosis. He was 44 years old.

After Chekhov’s death Knipper became the indomitable keeper of the Chekhovian flame for the next half-century and more. And as such she was able to present to the world a portrait of her marriage that left out all the disingenuous, awkward and bitterly unhappy elements. The true story has been a long while emerging. Olga tellingly wrote in her memoirs: “Whenever in my life I really wanted something … I always succeeded and never regretted going my own way.” She died in 1959 at the age of 90.

p.s: William Boyd’s new novel, Love Is Blind, is published by Viking in September.

(Source: The Guardian)

My grandfather, who finally came back from the second world war in 1981

Katja Petrowskaja gained a grandfather when she was 10. He turned up after an absence of 40 years – but where had he been? And had he done or seen something so horrific it made it impossible for him to return? She resolved to find out

I had two grandmothers with floral names: Rosa and Margarita. They were too old to enjoy their retirement, and they were alone. What I didn’t have were grandfathers. One had died on my second birthday and I don’t remember him. The other, Vasily, suddenly appeared when I was about 10, out of nowhere, with the words: “I am back.”

Until that point, I hadn’t known about his existence, so I was astonished, amused and happy to get a grandfather.

I spent my childhood in the ancient city of Kiev, the biggest city in the Soviet Union after Moscow and Leningrad. We lived in a 14-storey apartment block on the left bank of the majestic Dnieper river. Our entire neighbourhood district was built after the second world war and seemed to have no past, only a shiny Soviet future. We always said “the war”, as if it were the only one, and everything around us was about this war. No family was spared. The perished were our common heritage, almost the only property we had, and each family story seemed to reflect a tiny part of a big history.

My family was small. I had almost no relatives because of the war. Whole family branches had perished. But there were many who had fewer relatives than I did. I had no reason to suffer. However, I always dreamed of a big family at a long table.

A few months before Vasily returned home to his wife and younger daughter after a 40-year absence, I remember hearing a confused old woman ask loudly on a tram, “Has the war already ended?” as if she was talking about the next stop. She was not that wrong. My grandfather “came back” from the second world war in 1981.

The explanation I was given at the time was that he had disappeared at the beginning of the war, during the encirclement of Kiev in August 1941. He was captured by the Germans and spent years in their camps as a Soviet prisoner of war. The family knew that he had survived but, for some reason, he just didn’t come home. But now here he was, back finally.

It was a very vague story, satisfying perhaps for a child, but disturbing later. I never asked him directly where he spent these 40 years, or how he reached “home”. At the time, the family treated it as good news: the second world war was finally over, now, at the beginning of the 80s, because my grandfather had come back. It was a miracle of the sort I knew only from books.

A family photo of Rosa, Vasily and Lida, showing the tear where Vasily had been removed. Photograph: Courtesy Katja Petrowskaja

As a child, I was in love with Greek mythology, with the Trojan war and the return of Odysseus. The return of my grandfather fitted in with these tales, and I was proud that my once beautiful grandmother had waited all those years for him. Rosa had never remarried, or even let anybody get close to her – Penelope, Odysseus’s wife, waited only 20 years. I felt that my ancestors were gods and heroes, or almost.

My mother took Vasily in, and he spent the last year of his life at our place, sitting in an armchair and smiling. That armchair seemed to be the apex of his existence. He was confident and radiant in his silence, as if he had a dark secret and was happy that his grandchildren were spared it. I have spent years since then trying to understand his silence, and his return. Between the armies near Kiev in 1941 and the armchair in our apartment in the early 80s, a black hole slowly grew.

He was a beautiful old man and I felt very protective of him – he was my newly born grandfather, somehow younger than I was, and I had to look out for him.

Years later, as I began to search out his story, he catapulted me into the middle of the war. I followed him, along with masses of soldiers, from Kiev to Volodymyr-Volynskyi prisoner-of-war camp north of Lvov. Then I followed him to another PoW camp in one of the most beautiful Austrian landscapes near Salzburg, then to the site of the concentration camp at Mauthausen.

I was haunted by the idea that he had seen or done something during imprisonment that was so inhuman that it had made his return to his family impossible. I searched for a specific point in his journey, his “point of no return” – something that might explain his absence for so many years.

A photograph of Vasily taken in the 1970s. Photograph: Courtesy Katja Petrowskaja

I was searching for him in the archives, and even there he almost didn’t exist, as if he were a fiction. I found out that he was encircled, together with a million other Soviet soldiers, and became one of more than six million Soviet prisoners of war, who were excluded and erased from memory. They were considered traitors; they didn’t belong among the “victors” over fascism. Rather, they became double victims of the Soviet system: imprisoned by the Germans, because they were so poorly armed and led, and then, if they survived, imprisoned by the Soviets. Suddenly, I realised that his small story spoke of the fate of millions and, in looking for him, I was caring for all of them.

My grandfather was lucky to spend only two or three years in Soviet “filtration camps” following the war. I discovered afterwards that, in fact, he had come home from the camps, but only for a short time – he could not live with his family any more and so he left again. Why? Was it survivor’s guilt? The impossibility of a normal life?

The story might be simple: he had another family – he was helping the widow of a friend who had died and stayed with her and lived for a time after the war moving between two families, but my grandmother threw him out. He then spent many years alone in a small village in western Ukraine, returning to Kiev when he was old. He came back to Rosa at the end of his life and maybe it was too late. When I say that I remember them kissing, my mother gets angry with me.

We have only one family photo that survived the war: it is of my grandmother Rosa (pregnant with my mother), my grandfather Vasily and Lida, their elder daughter. It is torn in half, as if someone sought to remove Vasily, but then thought better of it. Perhaps it was done just after the war, when he returned briefly, only to leave again. Rosa and Lida stayed together and Vasily was cut off.

Then, four decades later, there he was, sitting and smiling, happy to be home, to be with us. His silence was something I was not used to, because all of us were talkative, energetic, always full of untold stories. It might sound like a joke, but Rosa and Lida and their ancestors had, for some generations, taught deaf children to talk. It was the family vocation. But Vasily was mute.

Vasily was the only Ukrainian in the family, all the others were of Jewish origin, a thousand miles away from tradition, but it did not matter in this war. Without this grandfather, we lacked connection to the soil.

Katja Petrowskaja with her parents and brother. Photograph: Courtesy Katja Petrowskaja

He was the only one who had his own garden plot on the edge of town, so I got a grandfather and a garden to boot, allowing me to experience a small fairytale at the end of my childhood. My parents, and everybody we knew, had huge libraries at home, their only property and joy. My grandfather had a piece of land, a dacha, which I visited only a few times.

All his neighbours planted potatoes and tomatoes, putting their property to some practical use, but Vasily turned his dacha into a paradise full of roses, encircled by white raspberry, which I had never seen before, and in the middle of the garden stood one paradise-apple tree.

I really don’t remember him talking, apart from a few words such as “yes” or “good”, but I do remember the names of roses, and these are the words he left me: Dolce Vita, October Stars, Chinese tea roses, Gloria Dei.

I don’t remember his last days, but I do recall him standing in the middle of his rose paradise, cultivating his garden.

(Source: The Guardian)

The Trump-Russia story is coming together. Here's how to make sense of it

The news is coming so fast and furious, from so many sources and in so many fragments, that it takes more than a scorecard to keep up with the Trump-Russia connection. It takes a timeline -- a "map," if you will, of where events and names and dates and deeds converge into a story that makes sense of the incredible scandal of the 2016 election and now of the Trump Administration.

For years Steve Harper produced timelines for the cases he argued or defended in court as a successful litigator. Retired now from practicing law, Harper has turned his experience, talent, and curiosity to monitoring for BillMoyers.com the bizarre and entangled ties between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump and the murky world of Russian oligarchs, state officials, hackers, spies, and Republican operatives. You can check out the over 700 entries right here. But for an overview -- and some specifics -- of recent developments, I called up Steve to give us a sense of the emerging story.     
Bill Moyers: You're the consummate trial lawyer with a celebrated reputation for summing up the closing argument for the jury, but from our work together on the timeline I know you also have the instincts of a journalist. So write the lede to the story this far: What's the most important thing for us to know about the Trump/Russia connection as of today?

Steven Harper: Everything the Trump campaign told you about the connections between Trump and Russia was a lie.

Go on.
Well, there are a number of different dimensions to the issue, but let's just take the easiest one. The other day The Washington Post published a very good article that said for all of Trump's denials during the campaign of any connections between him, his campaign and Russia, it turns out there were 31 interactions. And there were 19 meetings. Furthermore, what Trump and his people have been doing since then is everything they can to keep the public from being aware of the truth. And this feeds into the obstruction story.

How so?
Up to and including the firing of James Comey, Trump did everything he could to try to shut down, slow down or stop the investigation. First, he tried to shut down the investigation of Mike Flynn. Then it turned out that Mike Flynn is probably just a piece of a much larger problem, which is Russia. Trump admitted to the Russian ambassador and to the Russian foreign minister shortly after he fired Comey that now he's got some relief from the Russia problem -- in other words, Comey's gone! But what's happened since then is the continuing effort to interfere with the investigation, even in the form of tweets -- all of which sure look a lot to me like witness intimidation for some of the key players in the saga.

And then there's a third component, which is in a way the most insidious -- the willingness of the congressional GOP to be complicit in all of this. We're talking now about a prescription for disaster for democracy. It's all part of the same story. If you think about it, every single person who has said something about there being no connection between Trump and Russia during the campaign has been caught in a lie about it. Even with this fellow George Papadopoulos, the talking point immediately became, "Well, he didn't get in trouble for anything that he did, he got in trouble for lying to federal investigators." Sure, and what was he lying to federal investigators about? About whether or not there were any contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia. And that's the part that everybody glosses over in terms of the talking points on the Republican side.

George Papadopoulos was the youngest of Trump's foreign policy team and not a prominent public figure. Now Trump loyalists say he wasn't taken all that seriously by the campaign.
That's another remarkable thing, of course -- all the policy advisers all of a sudden are relegated to the status of low-level, unpaid volunteers, even though they sat in a meeting of foreign policy advisers with the presidential candidate himself early on. When they turn out to be suspects in this investigation, they all drop to the bottom of the heap, and it's as if Trump had never heard of any of them.

It's usual in a case like this to move the paramount figures to the expendable list, no?
Oh sure, absolutely, and I fully expect before this is over, you're going to get to a point where Donald Trump will say, "Oh, yeah, Donald Jr. -- you know he was only my son for a very limited period of time." It's absurd. And it started with Paul Manafort -- the same Manafort who actually delivered decisive delegates to Trump during a crucial period of the campaign. When the heat was turned on Manafort, they all said: "Oh, well, he played a limited role for a limited period of time." Yeah, he was only manager of the campaign, how about that?

Perhaps Trump, who aspired to be a great American president, will confess: "And I was just a real estate guy." [laughter] Robert Mueller is moving quickly with the investigation now. We have new news almost every day. What's the most recent development that strikes you as most important?
Three different strands have now begun to coalesce. There's a core strand running through it that I call the "follow the money" strand. Perhaps most of what happened throughout the campaign, if you view it from Vladimir Putin's side of the transaction, looks quite reasonable and makes a great deal of sense. Putin wants to eliminate sanctions on Russia, both because they affect him personally in a financial way and because they affect his country's economy in a big way. So you dangle in front of Trump the prospect of a Trump Tower in Moscow. We always knew that Trump wanted a Trump Tower in Moscow, because Trump told us he did. But what we didn't know was that during the campaign, the Trump organization was actively negotiating for such a development.

But two other strands have come together, and we need to understand them for all this to become a cogent narrative. The second strand involves political operatives. It turns out we're hearing about people like George Papadopoulos, who obviously was in communication with the Russians, and that strand is now probably taking Mueller -- certainly taking me -- further up the food chain. Papadopoulos implicated Sam Clovis, the former co-chairman of the campaign. And with people like Stephen Miller and Hope Hicks, you're getting right to the inner circle of the Trump campaign. All of a sudden last year, these low-level underlings, as they are now being described to us, were getting remarkable access, and they're getting responses from within the campaign. They're not sending emails off into cyberspace that no one ever answers; they're hearing back from some of these higher-ups.

And the third strand is what I would call the "digital strand." Cambridge Analytica, the Kushners, WikiLeaks -- they've started coming together in a very dramatic fashion over the past two or three weeks. Pundits say they keep waiting for the other shoe to drop. Well, didn't John McCain say, "This is a centipede. I guarantee you there will be more shoes to drop." It seems as though there is just no limit to the number of shoes that keep dropping in this thing. Everyone thought the big bombshell was the June 9 meeting and the Don Jr. emails that had set up that meeting in Trump Tower relating to dirt the Russians were promising on Hillary Clinton. And then we just get this even more stunning series of interactions and communications and exchanges that show the people that Kushner hired to run the digital campaign going to WikiLeaks, and reveal Don Jr. having direct Twitter communications with WikiLeaks about Clinton documents. It's just remarkable. If all of this had hit at the same time, it would have been blockbuster, but because of the dribbling out of it, no one focuses on the extent to which some of these three strands coalesce. And they sometimes coalesce around what I call very hot dates in the timeline.

Let's pause right there. There's a beginning to a story like this. So I hope you're reading a new book out this week by Luke Harding, once the Moscow correspondent for The Guardian of London. The title is Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money and how the Russians Helped Donald Trump Win. Have you been following coverage of the book?
Yes. I haven't read it yet, but I've read a couple of excerpts and summaries of certain portions of it.

Harding, who's a very experienced reporter, quotes the British ex-spy, Christopher Steele, who worked in Russia for years and compiled that notorious dossier on Trump that mysteriously appeared last year. He quotes Steele saying that "Russian intelligence has been secretly cultivating Trump for years." As you and I discussed in August, Trump appears to have attracted the attention of Soviet intelligence as far back as 1987, on his first visit to Moscow -- a visit arranged by the top level of the Soviet diplomatic service, with the assistance of the KGB. 

Trump was of course looking for business in Russia. If you go to Trump's own book, The Art of the Deal, he acknowledges "talking about building a large luxury hotel across the street from the Kremlin in partnership with the Soviet government." And he quotes a letter he got from the Soviet ambassador to Washington saying the Soviet state agency for international tourism is inquiring about his interest in that partnership. Now, one has to ask: There were lots of ambitious real estate moguls looking for deals with Russia in the mid-'80s; why did they select Donald Trump?
And that's the $64,000 question. It's very interesting and Harding notes this as well, and it also was an early entry on our timeline -- that in 1988, when Trump came back from the Soviet Union, he first made noises about wanting to run for president. Which brings us back to the second strand developing in this story, which is the personal contacts, the personal operatives, involved in a pretty straightforward if not classic Russian intelligence operation. Russian agents -- the recruiters -- look for soft spots in their target -- in this case, the US -- and those soft spots become points of penetration. The Russians must have been astonished at how they achieved penetration in Trump's circle -- astonished at the success that they were having across many different fronts simultaneously.

I remember from my own experience in Washington in the '60s that the Russians were always trying to find "soft targets" -- American citizens -- who were drawn to that sort of relationship.
And what could be a softer target for a guy like Putin than a guy who measures the world and everyone's self-worth in dollars?

Much of what Harding reports in his book is circumstantial, but it adds up to what is fairly damning evidence. You're the lawyer -- how much can circumstantial evidence be introduced in an argument in a trial?
Plenty. There are lots of people sitting in jail who were convicted on circumstantial evidence. In fact, how often is it that there is actually what you would call eyewitness or direct evidence of criminal behavior, except in a situation where you can get one of the co-conspirators to turn state's evidence and squeal on the others? People talk about circumstantial evidence as if there's something terrible about it. Circumstantial evidence is the way most people go about proving their cases, whether they're civil or criminal cases. And what separates circumstantial from direct evidence isn't even all that clear. Would you say that the email exchanges between Donald Trump Jr. and the lawyer who was supposed to come to Trump Tower with dirt on Hillary Clinton were circumstantial evidence or direct evidence? It's certainly direct evidence of Donald Trump Jr.'s intent when he says, "If you have what you say you have, in terms of dirt on Clinton, I love it."

Some people keep saying there's there's no collusion. Trump's favorite expression is "No collusion. No collusion. No collusion." All right, let's talk about something else. Let's talk about something the law recognizes as conspiracy or "aiding and abetting." Let's talk about a conspiracy to obstruct justice. In that respect, Trump's own tweets become evidence. So it's not as clear as I think some of the talking-head pundits would like to make it, that no collusion means the end of the inquiry. That's just wrong.

Suppose the circumstantial or direct evidence prove to be true; does it have to be out-and-out treason for Trump and his team's actions to be impeachable offenses?
No. In all likelihood, treason may be the toughest thing of all to prove, because treason, at least in a technical legal sense, requires that you're actually at war. And a decent defense could be for Trump that there's been no declaration of war, so whatever was going on you're never going to get it past the threshold of treason. There are still plenty of legal bases for concluding that Trump has some serious problems. One would be the election laws, including the financing of elections. It's pretty clear you can't accept help from a foreign government in order to win an election, and it seems pretty clear, at least to me, that if they weren't actually using the help -- and that's a big if; I think they were, based on some of the things that I've seen -- there's certainly ample evidence that they were willing to be participating in whatever help anybody would give them to help Trump win the election.

The second category -- apart from election laws and related finance laws -- would be aiding and abetting computer theft insofar as there were illegal hacks into the DNC computers, and WikiLeaks and/or the Trump campaign knew that that happened, knew the hacks were illegal and knew they were willing to do everything they could to take advantage of it in order to help Trump win the election. That's another fertile ground for illegality.

And the third category would of course be what I think will ultimately turn out to be the easiest to prove: the obstruction issues, relating to some of the behavior that we already know that George Papadopoulos, for one, engaged in when he lied to investigators about the nature of the connections between Trump and Russia.

On the money issue, The Atlantic magazine published a very strong piece last week by Bob Bauer, in which he argues that Donald Trump Jr.'s private Twitter correspondence with WikiLeaks provides evidence of criminal violations of federal campaign finance rules which prohibit foreign spending in American elections, as you pointed out. He reminds us that those rules disallow contributions, donations or "anything of value" provided by a foreign national to sway an election. Those rules also bar a campaign from offering substantial assistance to a foreign national engaged in spending on American races. 

Here's a direct quote from Bauer's article: "Trump Jr.'s messages not only powerfully support the case that the Trump campaign violated these rules, but they also compound the campaign's vulnerability to aiding and abetting liability under the general criminal laws for assisting a foreign national in violating a spending ban. … The facts and circumstances here are without precedent in the history of campaign finance enforcement, and it's hard to imagine that any truly neutral analyst informed about the law would conclude otherwise." 

So he concludes that Trump and his campaign face a "whopping legal problem."
I agree with him completely. And here we reach one of what I call "the hot dates" when all these strands coalesce. You have these September-October email exchanges between Don Jr. and WikiLeaks. But now listen to what else you have: On Oct. 12, [Trump's friend and former adviser] Roger Stone tells NBC that he has a backchannel communication with WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks' private message to Don Jr. suggests that Trump publicize the Clinton documents from WikiLeaks. Fifteen minutes later Trump Sr. tweets about those WikiLeaks documents. That's on one day. This is all on Oct. 12. And two days after that, Don Jr. tweets the very WikiLeaks link that WikiLeaks had already suggested that they publicize. That's one point where these strands coalesce. My point is that Bauer's case is even stronger than he may realize when you look at what you and I have called circumstantial evidence of what other things were happening, and how other layers of action were behaving at the same time.

As you know, American intelligence has identified WikiLeaks as a conduit for information that Russian operatives stole from Democrats during the 2016 presidential campaign, and now of course it seems there was a connection between WikiLeaks and the Trump campaign, as you've just outlined it. What do we know about why the Russian government would choose WikiLeaks to release information hacked from Hillary Clinton's computers?
I think it was an outlet that would ensure publicity, maximum publicity. It's a notorious organization. And I think if you want bad stuff to get out there and you want everybody to notice it, WikiLeaks would be the way to do it.

Donald Trump, Jr. greets his father, then-Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, during the town hall debate at Washington University on October 9, 2016, in St Louis, Missouri. (Photo: Rick Wilking-Pool / Getty Images)

Donald Trump Jr. reportedly has released all of his correspondence with WikiLeaks. Does this indicate his lawyers don't think it is incriminating?
I think it is probably more likely the case that his lawyers assume that it's going to come out eventually anyway. So the best way to do it is to sort of dribble these things out, hope for an intervening scandal, like Al Franken groping somebody or Roy Moore upsetting the Alabama election, and then let the mind of the body politic move on to something different. The good news is that Robert Mueller is not going to be distracted by the intervening events, and he'll put all this together.

But how significant is it that when Donald Trump Jr. had all of this information from WikiLeaks, it's now being reported that he looked around the campaign to see if he could find someone who would act on WikiLeaks' information, and it doesn't seem that anyone responded? His appeals seem to have fallen on deaf ears.
What makes you think no one responded? The fact that there's no email trail doesn't necessarily mean that there wasn't a response. We know, for example, that what was happening throughout the campaign were interactions and conversations and discussions in which certainly one of the topics included granting Russia relief from sanctions. I don't conclude that because an email response to Donald Jr. has yet to make its way into the public domain, nothing happened.

So when Donald Trump on Oct. 10, tells the crowd at a campaign rally, "I love WikiLeaks," and accuses the press of not picking up on what WikiLeaks was publishing, he knew WikiLeaks had dirt on Clinton, where it came from, and he wanted to get it out.
You would think so. And I'm most happy, frankly, that Mueller has such an extraordinary team of talented lawyers working with him, because the case from the prosecutor's side is a dream in terms lending itself to a coherent, cogent narrative that strikes me as a really damning case.

Is Julian Assange of WikiLeaks in any danger of facing US prosecution?
Not as long as he stays in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. Let's assume he will stay out of the country for a while. I suppose Trump could pardon him.

Is there any way that Assange could be viewed as an agent of a foreign power at this point, or is he just a rogue player?
My opinion is that during the election, he was an agent acting for the benefit for Trump. He claims that he wasn't dealing with Russian documents. I find that difficult to believe. And certainly, as you said, the US intelligence community is of the view that WikiLeaks was the vehicle through which Russia distributed and disseminated its hacked documents. And I think he's clearly acting on behalf of interests that are Russian interests.

What do you make of Assange and WikiLeaks urging Donald Trump Jr. to suggest to his father that if he loses the election, he should contest the election? What was that about?
Chaos. I think the goal was chaos. That's what takes me back to believing that at some level Russia was behind what WikiLeaks was proposing. Because for Putin there are two ways for him to improve Russia's standing. One is to figure out a way to bring his country up. One easy way would be to get some relief from the sanctions. But an equally powerful way to do it is to bring Western democracies, especially America, down. So what better way to foment chaos than a postelection trauma, if you will, in which Trump is contesting election results in various states and doing all of the things he certainly would have been capable of doing? And of course, WikiLeaks feeds right into Trump's soft spot by suggesting, in that same email that you just mentioned, that this could be good for him too, particularly if what he really wants to do is launch a new media network. So it all fits.

What do you make of the fact that Donald Trump Jr. did not report to the FBI that WikiLeaks was soliciting him last year? Does that put him legally at risk?
The mere failure to report doesn't, but it certainly adds to the question about what Trump Jr.'s true motives and the motives of the Trump campaign were in pursuing the information WikiLeaks was offering. Now, let me give you something else to think about, and see if your reaction causes you some of the heartburn it causes me.

In June of last year -- quite a month, no? -- there was another "hot date." Jared Kushner -- Trump's son-in-law and close adviser -- assumed control of the digital campaign and hired the firm Cambridge Analytica. We talked about Cambridge Analytica a moment ago. Well, Cambridge Analytica's vice president had been Steve Bannon. And about the same time that Kushner hired Cambridge Analytica, the CEO of Cambridge Analytica is reaching out to WikiLeaks with an offer to help disseminate hacked documents.

And then you get to July 22 and WikiLeaks is releasing hacked documents. In August, George Papadopoulos is continuing to push Russia on the campaign team, Roger Stone is continuing to talk about his communications with Assange and WikiLeaks (and it certainly looks as if Stone is predicting more WikiLeaks releases of documents) and the daughter of the part-owner of Cambridge Analytica, Rebekah Mercer -- who is also a Trump donor -- tells its CEO to reach out to WikiLeaks too. And then Donald Jr.'s email exchange with WikiLeaks comes in September. See what I mean? There's a ramping up of the process that culminates in those email exchanges that Don Jr. had with WikiLeaks and that becomes, I think, an important narrative to understanding the story.

I need some Tums. [laughter]
It's good and bad, I guess -- getting mired in all these details. The good news is we learn more facts. The bad news is we learn more facts -- and it may not be possible for Americans to put it all together and conclude that anything significant happened, when actually there's a grave threat to democracy.

Let me pause right there. As Josh Marshall points out at Talking Points Memo, the Justice Department is directly overseeing Mueller's investigation. It has absolute power over the inquiry. Meaning that Mueller is now investigating his overseers. Isn't that certain to have some impact on the process?
I don't think so. Let me tell you why. I think the only thing that will affect the process, and this is the thing frankly that I fear more than anything else, will be if Trump fires Mueller. We know Attorney General Jeff Sessions has recused himself. If he should resign, that would be a great victory for Trump, who could then appoint someone else as an acting attorney general who could then fire Mueller. Otherwise, the ball bounces to Rod Rosenstein. Rosenstein's been on record a couple of times saying that he hasn't seen any basis for firing Mueller. And at this point, I have competing views of Rosenstein in general, but I think on this issue, he realizes that his personal interest and his professional interest and even the country's interest requires that if Trump were to issue an order to fire Mueller or even if he were to try to interfere with Mueller's investigation in some way, allowing him to do so will be a very bad thing for Rosenstein personally. I don't think he'll do it.

There's a precedent for this, of course. Nixon went ahead and fired the special prosecutor investigating Watergate.
Yes, but he had to go through [Attorney General] Richardson and [Deputy Attorney General] Ruckelshaus to do it. Trump would have to fire Rosenstein, then he'd have to fire an associate attorney general named Rachel Brand, who -- based on everything everything I've read about her -- would likely balk and not be inclined to follow an order unless she were satisfied that there was in fact good cause to do it.

What might provoke Trump to risk everything -- firestorm, constitutional crisis, even impeachment -- to fire Mueller?
I think he'll do it if he thinks that things are getting too close. I think he's already been close to doing it in the past. And I think at some point, and I think it's probably a question of when [not if], he will fire Mueller. I really fear that's what's going to happen. And of course the irony is that for the amount of time Mueller has spent on the job, he's achieved remarkable results. He's working very quickly, very efficiently. The median life of a special counsel is just under two years. The average is three years. The Iran-Contra investigation went for six and a half years. Whitewater went for more than eight years. The Valerie Plame NSA leak went for two years. We're what? Just five months in?

And Mueller's already obtained two indictments and one guilty plea.
Precisely.

The indictments are for Paul Manafort and Rick Gates. But the indictments are not related to the Trump/Russia connection, are they?
I think the answer to that is it remains to be seen. That's clearly the way the Trump people are going to continue to try to spin it. But step back for a minute and think about the fact that a campaign manager [Paul Manafort] for a presidential candidate [Donald Trump] has been indicted for money laundering, tax evasion and all sorts of other wrongdoing arising from his work for Ukraine, where Putin and Russia were fomenting trouble. And shortly after he became the manager of the campaign, as we've learned, he was also offering to provide special briefings to a Ukrainian oligarch with whom he'd had business dealings. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see at some point some of these things merge into one another.

You mentioned earlier that a new series of Trump advisers are under scrutiny. Hope Hicks is one of them. She's perhaps the closest staffer to Donald Trump. Not even 30 yet, keeps a low profile, been with him a long time, apparently spends more time with the president than anyone else on the White House team. We've learned Mueller wants to talk to her. What have you learned about her and what can she add to this?
She can add a lot, I suspect. And I suspect that Mueller thinks so too, because as you say, she's as close to the inner circle as you can get. She was also present at two really key points in this story -- and many others, I could add. One in connection with what ultimately led to the firing of James Comey in May of 2017 -- she was around for that. And as you may recall, we now have learned that it turns out that Trump had dictated to Stephen Miller, another close aide, what was apparently a four-page rant, or screed, of his real reasons for wanting to fire James Comey. So it's hard to imagine that Hope Hicks wasn't somehow involved in, or at least aware of, what was going on that weekend in Bedminster, New Jersey, when Trump was pouring his rage into that letter.

She was also aboard Air Force One -- and maybe the lesson is you just never want to be on Air Force One with Donald Trump -- when they were coming back from Europe, and Trump, as we learned much later, had a hand, a very heavy hand, in drafting a very misleading statement about what had transpired at that June 9, 2016 Trump Tower meeting between Don Jr., Manafort, Kushner and some Russians with ties to the Kremlin. Hope Hicks reportedly was advocating on behalf of transparency, but it appears that she lost out. And that's just what we know Ms. Hicks was involved in. Who knows what else she was involved in and participated in, but I suspect a lot.

I also think she's got a bit of problem because Carter Page revealed that she had been copied on those messages about what he had learned in Russia, or what he was planning to learn in Russia, when she had denied adamantly there had been no Trump campaign contacts with Russia. So she's got a bit of a consistency issue there, it would seem.

You mentioned Carter Page. He and George Papadopoulos traveled the world, apparently representing themselves as able to speak for the Trump campaign, even though the Trump campaign later said they weren't. You've tracked down many instances of Papadopoulos in particular speaking to foreign leaders on behalf of Trump. Why is that important?
Well, he's given extraordinary access to some very high-level people. He was giving speeches in which he was representing himself as being able to speak on behalf of Trump at least with respect to certain policies. And you know, it's hard for me to imagine that he gets that kind of access unless there's some credibility to what he's saying about what his actual role in the campaign is. And of course we all know from the infamous photo taken at the Trump International Hotel that Papadopoulos was one of a handful of people seated at the table with Jeff Sessions and Donald Trump as Sessions presided over a meeting about Trump's foreign policy and Trump told the group that he didn't "want to go to 'World War III' over Ukraine."

And I believe that's what started the process of making clear to everybody who was on Trump's foreign policy team that easing relations with Russia by easing sanctions, would be something that Trump would be open to. And I think a lot of what happens afterward you can fit into this broader framework of the question: What is Putin's angle in all this? Well, Putin's angle in all this is if he can get the Russian sanctions lifted, he's a winner. And if Trump will help him do that, great. And even if Trump can't help him, even if Trump doesn't win the election, it can't hurt that he's created some chaos in a Western democracy, which clearly is what he intended and what happened.

You mentioned Jeff Sessions. In his testimony to Congress last week, Sessions said it's hard for him to remember meeting with, and conversations about, the Russians because the Trump campaign was in constant chaos. The fact that the campaign was in chaos certainly seems accurate, but would his excuse play at all in a trial?
No. And remember what Steve Schmidt, who was involved in John McCain's campaign, said? He said he hopes that Jeff Sessions never gets a puppy because he's not going to remember to feed it, he's not going to remember to get it watered, he's not going to remember to let it out. That puppy's just going to be in terrible trouble.

But what's interesting about Sessions to me is this: What Sessions said in his recent statements was, I haven't remembered that Papadopoulos raised the issue of Trump meeting with Putin or members of the campaign meeting with representatives of Putin until I read about it in the news reports. But now that I've read about it, now I remember, and listen -- I pushed back really hard and I said that it would not be appropriate for anyone to be meeting with a representative of a foreign government. All of the sudden, it's like the light has gone on in Jeff Sessions' head. Now, you have a situation sometimes in trials where a witness in a previous setting had sworn that he couldn't remember something. And then six months or a year later, all of a sudden they have this epiphany and the memories came flooding out. And there's something counterintuitive about somebody who says they remember more now about a specific event than they did a year earlier when asked about that same specific event. That just doesn't play well with most juries.

And bear in mind, too, something else about Sessions that's worth remembering that I doubt would necessarily be obvious to non-lawyers. Going into those Senate hearings, going into each one of those hearings, Sessions had to know that he was going to be asked about all of this stuff. And he had to know that he needed to be as familiar as he could be with whatever he could learn so that what he gave was truthful, straightforward, candid and ultimately something that the public and Congress would believe. And yet despite that, at each subsequent appearance, somehow there's something new and the attorney general of the United States shrugs his shoulders and says, "Oh, I guess I did know that."

My problem is, I want Sessions to hang on. I don't want him not to be attorney general yet, because the minute that Sessions resigns or Trump fires him, then you have the door open to an acting attorney general, and I don't want to live to see Scott Pruitt [head of the Environmental Protection Agency] or [former New York mayor and Trump ally] Rudy Giuliani become acting attorney general, which is something that Trump could do without even Senate confirmation. It doesn't even have to be those two guys, because we know Trump has a plethora of cronies who will do whatever he says, because Trump says that's what he wants, and if Trump says he wants Mueller fired, that to me is the disaster scenario for the country.

So, to sum up for now: What's the most innocent explanation for everything we know? What if all of this was simply Trump's inexperienced people trying to establish diplomatic rapport with the Russians and hoping to reset America's connection with Moscow?
Well, the most innocent explanation would be a level of incompetence and ignorance and stupidity that I honestly don't think anyone could credibly believe, because the most innocent explanation is that Russia was launching a very sophisticated, multipronged intelligence operation and succeeded, but they succeeded because of the blind ambition and greed of the Trump organization coupled with a lack of judgment and intelligence and a fundamental failure to take into regard anything that would remotely look like patriotism when it came to the defense of democracy, subjugating all of that to the need to win. That's the most innocent explanation. And I just don't think all of them are that stupid.

So what's the most damning explanation for everything we know?
The most damning explanation is that the Russians launched a sophisticated intelligence operation. They found willing partners up and down the line throughout the Trump organization. And up and down throughout the Trump organization, as the details of that intelligence operation became known, the participants lied about it, lied about its existence, lied about their personal involvement in it and now they are all facing serious criminal jeopardy as a result.

One more: I assume most people believe Russia's interference in the election last year is a bad thing, a serious offense, but is it possible that by treating Vladimir Putin and his cronies as an existential threat, we're playing directly into Putin's hands and making him appear a more significant figure in the world than he really is?
Well, he's already achieved that, but the problem is, what's the alternative? Back in January, John McCain and Lindsey Graham were on national television acknowledging the seriousness of the Russian interference. McCain called it the cyber equivalent of "an act of war." And if you acknowledge and recognize the existential threat, do you sit back and let the let the next thing happen in 2018 that Vladimir Putin wants to do? Remember, we have elections coming up next year. The uniform view of US intelligence is unambiguous, and if you don't view it as an existential threat then you're willing, I think, to sacrifice democracy.

We keep hearing, "Yeah, but Trump was still legitimately elected, he won the election fair and square." Now we're realizing that that may not even be true. I don't personally believe that to be true anymore. I rankle every time somebody says he won fair and square, because that's become less obvious every day. So the last line of defense would be, "Well, even if he didn't win fair and square, he's our president, so we've got to sit back and let whatever Putin's going to do to us continue to happen because we don't want our response to raise his standing in the world." Well, I would submit it raises Putin's standing in the world even more to have an accomplice in the White House.

Thank you, Steve Harper.

(Source: Truthout)

p.s. Bill Moyers is the managing editor of Moyers & Company and BillMoyers.com.