2023-08-24 12:02:42
Time.news – For sure there is only that he is dead. The words with which Tommaso Besozzi recounted the death of the bandit Salvatore Giuliano in Castelvetrano on 5 July 1950 on the European Championship fit perfectly with the story of the personal militia chief Wagner, Evgenij Prigožin, who crashed on 23 August 2023 with his Embraer Legacy 600 private jet from the skies of Trer ‘. From Sicily to Russia, from the mafia system to the Soviet and post-Soviet one, from machine gun shots and Berettas to those of anti-aircraft: problems of banditry and subversion born of violence and resolved in violence.
Nobody believes the occasional accident, not even those who don’t believe in conspiracy. While the plane with the former cook, self-proclaimed general and superpatriot of all the Russias crashed to the ground, in Italy on La7 by irony or cynicism of fate a Russian documentary on Ivan the terrible was broadcast, a manifesto on the taking and on the imposition of power without scruples and at all costs.
Wagner group militiamen
Times and forms change, but not the systems. The death of the leader of the mercenary army solves a big problem a Vladimir Putin, who just two months ago found himself displaced by the march then abortive towards Moscow of the former friend’s militias which dealt a severe blow to his internal and external credibility and undermined the Kremlin’s system of power.
Observers ventured that the apparently consensual neutralization of that unclassifiable coup attempt would have been the prelude to a not so peaceful or inconsequential showdown. The epilogue did not surprise international policy experts or even those familiar with the history of those latitudes.
Putin, engaged in rewriting the history books and in the re-evaluation of the greatness of a criminal like Stalin, creator of the red empire, for the color of the flag and the blood he made to flow in rivers, does not lack the ruthlessness in looming in the shadows behind of shootings that providentially eliminate opponents and inconvenient journalists, and even of apparently harmless tea laced with polonium without him even touching the samovar.
On the other hand it comes from KGB school. Stalin in 1944 commissioned director Sergei Eisenstein to make a film about Ivan the Terrible that he had to be apologetic of himself and of his political vision and power. That same year, in August, while Warsaw was revolting against the Nazis, he gave the order to the Soviet anti-aircraft to open fire against the Allied four-engine aircraft that departed from the Apulian airports to parachute weapons, ammunition and medicines to the fighters of the Armia Krajowa, after having first denied that in Warsaw there was an uprising and then permission to fly over the territories controlled by the Red Army and to land at Soviet airfields to refuel.
The analogies with the death in 1943 of Władysław Sikorski
Russian anti-aircraft, whether it’s a 1944 B-24 or a 2023 Embraer, doesn’t get compliments. And not even the secret services when it comes to eliminating uncomfortable characters. If there are planes involved, it’s even easier. July 4, 12943 the head of the Polish government died in a plane crash in Gibraltar in exile and Commander-in-Chief of the Polish Army, General Władysław Sikorski. He had demanded an independent international investigation to be entrusted to the International Red Cross after the discovery in the spring of the Katyn massacre, with thousands of Polish officers executed with a shot in the back of the head and buried in the Belarusian forest.
© AGF
Josef Stalin
The mass graves had been discovered by the Germans after the revelations of some Byelorussian peasants and an international commission made up of renowned experts who were guaranteed maximum freedom on blood samples and necropsy and scientific examinations, unanimously concluded that the massacre had occurred in 1940, when the area was under the control of the Red Army. Among the members was the pathologist Vincenzo Palmieri. Sikorski demanded the truth and the Kremlin in response on April 25 broke diplomatic relations with the Polish government in London.
Winston Churchill then intervened which forced Sikorski to give up, as he feared a rift in the anti-Hitler coalition. But there was no guarantee that the general could not address US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Returning from an inspection of Polish troops in the Middle East, for a meeting with General Władysław Anders, the four-engine B-24 Liberator piloted by the faithful and experienced Czechoslovakian lieutenant Eduard Prchal had made a technical stopover in Gibraltar. On July 4, 1943, 16 seconds after takeoff, the plane crashed.
Only Prchal had miraculously saved himself, declaring that the B-24’s rudders were unresponsive. Suspicion of sabotage became apparent. The investigation was conducted by the British secret services which concluded instead for the thesis of the fortuitous accident. At the summit, in Gibraltar, was Kim Philby, who in 1962 will be discovered to have always been a double agent in Stalin’s service, and in 1963 will flee to the Soviet Union celebrated as a hero.
However, Sikorski’s death eliminated a formidable antagonist from Stalin’s geo-political horizon: in Yalta he will be able to impose his perspective on Poland, incorporating a piece of it in 1945 and making it a satellite country. And it will remain so until 1989. While Putin himself reaffirmed the state secret status of the documents on Katyn, preventing them from being consulted, on the Gibraltar incident in 2014, the National Institute for Remembrance in Warsaw closed its own documentary investigation (not all papers are available: for those of the Kremlin there is little to do) finding no confirmation of the conspiracy hypothesis, however leaving a door open in case new evidence emerges. Which could only come from Moscow, where secrets, it is well known, are difficult to penetrate, from Ivan the Terrible to Putin without interruption.
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