Yes, you read that right. This has just come out. Front page story. Not only has his life been threatened, but the story also has threatened the lives of his wife, economist Yekaterina Zhuravskaya, and their two children.
For those who do not know who he is, Guriev was the Rector of the New Economic School in Moscow until over a years ago when he was pressured to resign and left Moscow for Paris, where his wife and family have been. Zhuravskaya and Guriev have been visting at Sciences Po.
The immediate cause of this outburst was a speech Guriev gave recently in London denouncing the invasion and annexation of Crimea by Russia. The article stated that this speech "put him and his family in danger." Really. This is what things have descended to.
Oh yes, the article says more. It contains a more general denunciation of him, claiming that his PhD was written by ghosts and that everything he did was funded by US agencies. It is a full court press.
I shall further note that I know Sergei personally, and that I published a paper by him when I was editing JEBO. He has a long and impressive vita, and these accusations are like the worst of the old Soviet Union, completely unacceptable.
I wish him and his family all the best in this very dangerous situation.
Barkley Rosser
3 comments:
Direct assassination could be expensive and fraught with fears of errors. It is sad to see this degeneration.
“I see men assassinated around me every day. I walk through rooms of the dead, streets of the dead, cities of the dead; men without eyes, men without voices; men with manufactured feelings and standard reactions; men with newspaper brains, television souls and high school ideas. Kennedy himself was 9/10ths the way around the clock or he wouldn't have accepted such an enervating and enfeebling job -- meaning President of the United States of America. How can I be concerned with the murder of one man when almost all men, plus females, are taken from cribs as babies and almost immediately thrown into the masher?”
― Charles Bukowski, Sunlight Here I Am: Interviews and Encounters, 1963-1993
Another interesting quote I found tonight: “Every culture has its distinctive and normal system of government. Yours is democracy, moderated by corruption. Ours is totalitarianism, moderated by assassination.”
― Unknown Russian
I will note that I linked to this post on facebook and several people shared it. Sergei Guriev, who is an FB friend of mine, thanked me for doing so. He states that he hopes that he and his family are not in immediate danger, but he appreciates this threat being publicized.
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