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Buddha said, “A man who starts to live for his soul is like a man who brings a lantern into a dark house. The darkness disappears at once. You have to be persistent in this, and your soul will have this light.”
A Calendar of Wisdom
Leo Tolstoy and Peter Sekirin
In my presentation, I explained why I believed the apartment bombings were a provocation intended to assure Putin’s accession to power. My remarks became part of a film, entitled Disbelief, which premiered in 2004 at the Sundance Film Festival. A Russian-language version was put on YouTube and circulated on DVDs in Russia. Darkness at Dawn was also translated into Russian, with long excerpts published in the press. Unfortunately, the people capable of helping to make the bombings a serious political issue were disappearing. In 2004, Anna Politkovskaya, Russia’s leading investigative journalist, called on the Russian presidential candidates to answer the outstanding questions surrounding the apartment bombings. Alexander Litvinenko continued to update his book and speak out on the case in London. Politkovskaya was shot dead in the elevator of her apartment block on October 7, 2006. Litvinenko died of radiation poisoning on November 23 after ingesting radioactive polonium, which was put into his tea in a London sushi restaurant. The deaths of so many persons who had investigated the apartment bombings, all of them with the exception of Litvinenko my personal friends, left me as one of the few people still arguing that this monumental provocation could not be ignored. On May 17, 2007, testifying before the House Foreign Relations Committee on Russia’s foreign policy, I explained the role played by the apartment bombings. In a widely quoted passage, I said this: With Yeltsin and his family facing possible criminal prosecution, a plan was put into motion to put in place a successor who would guarantee that Yeltsin and his family would be safe from prosecution and the criminal division of property in the country would not be subject to reexamination. For “Operation Successor” to succeed, however, it was necessary to have a massive provocation. In my view, this provocation was the bombing in September 1999 of the apartment buildings in Moscow, Buinaksk and Volgodonsk. In the aftermath of these attacks, which claimed three hundred lives, a new war was launched against Chechnya. Putin, the newly appointed prime minister who was put in charge of that war, achieved overnight popularity. Yeltsin resigned early. Putin was elected president and his first act was to guarantee Yeltsin immunity from prosecution. In the meantime, all talk of re-examining the results of privatization was forgotten.41 For this I received some odd recognition. When Russia’s First Channel screened a “documentary” alleging the September 11 attacks in the United States were orchestrated by the U.S. government, the station invited me to appear on air to comment on the film. I declined.
The Less You Know, the Better You Sleep
David Satter
I don’t know if people followed through, but based on what I’ve seen in my office, a good number may have had momentary awakenings, done a little soul-searching, added more to their lists—and then neglected to tick things off. People tend to dream without doing, death remaining theoretical. We think we make bucket lists to ward off regret, but really they help us to ward off death. After all, the longer our bucket lists are, the more time we imagine we have left to accomplish everything on them. Cutting the list down, however, makes a tiny dent in our denial systems, forcing us to acknowledge a sobering truth: Life has a 100 percent mortality rate. Every single one of us will die, and most of us have no idea how or when that will happen. In fact, as each second passes, we’re all in the process of coming closer to our eventual deaths. As the saying goes, none of us will get out of here alive. I’ll bet right now you’re glad that I’m not your therapist. Who wants to think about this? How much easier it is to become death procrastinators! Many of us take for granted the people we love and the things we find meaningful, only to realize, when our deadline is announced, that we’d been skating by on the project: our lives.
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone
Lori Gottlieb
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