Beauty and the Beasts - the Tragic Murder of a Young Russian Politician

The crime scene - Novosibirsk, Siberia, Nov. 26, 2015.

DEBUT

Imagine having your face punched in by thumb-sized hand grenade fragments. The air outside was a frigid  -6 Celsius, but you were bathed in the flow of heat forced through the dashboard louvres. You were also being carelessly intimate with your husband, just a few steps from the entrance to a massive apartment block.  Now you are dead. In the seven seconds it took for the ugly little weapon to detonate, did you even know it threatened to your life?

Within minutes police filled the parking lot, their heavy boots crunching on the hard-packed snow. They huddle in thick coats and fur caps, hands thrust into deep pockets. They pull your body, and that of your husband from the Toyota sedan, and do a careful search for additional explosives.  In minutes your husband's body is bagged and whisked away. Later a flat-bed truck arrives and loads your white RAV- 4, and then it too is trundled out of sight.  All the while you lay there on the packed snow, naked and needlessly exposed to dozens of pairs of greedy eyes.  All of them have made you their trophy, taking countless photos of the kill, and at least to full-length videos.  For over an hour you are humiliated, until finally someone throws a cloth over your smashed head. Just your head. They continue to leave your   trim torso and your sexuality on display. You have never been photographed naked before. This is your screen debut.  Within hours one video is uploaded to the Internet, and the foreign press begins to crow.  Caw, caw. Haw, haw.

She was Oksana Bobrovskaya, a neophyte Russian politician. Young and beautiful, she was in love with life and doted on her  4yr. old daughter. The pretty child was a fixture of the proud mother's social media pages.  Though she was an M.P.in Putin's government (I know all the current connotations) there was no stain on her public record. In fact Mrs. Bobrovskaya had committed no crime, and she was certainly deserving of respect and a little common decency.  Her death was a vicious atrocity, but the world's reaction was uglier.

An Ugly, Disturbing Trend in "Journalism"

Old-style journalism is dead.  Investigative reporting is now very rare, because the consuming public has no patience with in-depth coverage of a story that has already completed its "cycle".  Most newspapers don't even employ photographers any more, because they can easily strip all the visuals  they need from Social Media, or harvest the flood of "leaked" imagery that always accompanies any notorious event. In fact Social Media "channels" are now leading news coverage,  and we all know it.  As the news media struggles to survive, it adopts the sloppy habits of our instant culture, and in the process is virtually shredding its credibility and reputation.   Consider this:

Within hours of the recent Paris Terror Attacks, a group of suspects was cornered and all were killed in the shootout and explosions.  It was immediately claimed that one Muslim female had detonated a suicide vest (she was blown into large chunks by one powerful blast) and she was dubbed "Europe's first female suicide bomber".   The London DAILY MAIL purchased a set of private photographs of that woman and published the "scoop" above the banner "BOMBER IN THE BATH", coyly blacking out her exposed nipple.  Within hours most major news organizations were featuring the photos, and several used the nude in the bathtub image as a lead graphic.  The New York Post dubbed the lady "THUG IN A TUB", and the general public, taking their cue from the news media, called her worse names. Much, much worse.

Of course the whole point of the photo-splash was to develop an aggressive narrative widely shared in news circles.  The way to interdict the steady flow to the Islamic State of "radicalized" Muslim youth, is to discredit individuals. Relishing a "gotcha" moment, they pounced on the Paris woman, describing her as a "party animal" who drank and smoked and used make up.  More she was photographed in an American cowboy hat, and posed nude in a bathtub.  She was not only a "fake" Muslim, but a "scuzz" and as such, she was poster-girl for a bastardized brand of Islam and richly deserving of our collective contempt. (I emphasize CONTEMPT.)  Left unsaid of course, was that the woman in all the photos was behaving exactly the way a majority of young women now conduct themselves.  Better zipper up some of that contempt Mr. Journalist, Sir.  

It wasn't long before we found out that there was no female suicide bomber on November 17th. The woman shredded in Paris was not wearing a suicide vest after all. That was hasty reporting.  In the seconds before death, she actually cried out that she wasn't a militant. ... All over the world news staff began deleting headlines and whole articles, to cover their journalistic tracks.  Winston Smith couldn't have orchestrated a more thorough sweep.   And then it got worse.  It has since been revealed that all of the salacious photos the DAILY MAIL had peddled were not even of the dead "terrorist".   The Lady in the bathtub still lives, and she has taken the matter of her stolen privacy to court.  And of course the many, many News sites that published the story and pictures engaged in the same Orwellian cover-up - they deleted all evidence, or at least the digital caches.  You can't recall and burn a printed edition.

"Suicide Blonde" British tabloid journalism at its worst.

The wrong woman and,  an insult to half of the female population.

UNREPENTANT SCRIBBLERS

It might seem unfair to single out the DAILY MAIL, but they earned my contempt with their "Bomber in the Bath" nonsense.  Consider this:

"Glamorous Russian M.P. is blown up while having sex with her husband in the back of their car 'after he detonated explosives in a fit of jealousy' "  That's rather a mouthful, and given that the Daily Mail has a reporter in Siberia, how do they manage to put a story together?   And why bother?  After all, a Russian woman totally unknown to MAIL readers, was having sex with her husband in their own car, when he (allegedly) committed an act of murder-suicide.  The powerful motive (journalistic motive, not the husband's) is delivered in a sub-headline: "Oksana Bobrovskaya, 30,  was in Vladimir Putin's United Russia Party".  Once again we see a coherent strategy at play, and one that is shared by papers throughout Europe and North America.  Denigrating an individual who exists within a group you despise, is a guaranteed method to diminish the group itself.  Putin is despised by every squishy Liberal from Paris to Pittsburgh, and in fact we are collectively waging undeclared economic and political warfare against the Russian Federation.  Our media will pounce on any figure or story that could discredit the Mr. Putin's "regime". If there is sex in the story, all the better. The Prols will drool over it.

"Glamorous"?  Really? Mrs. Bobrovskaya had two photo-packages

taken by a Novosibirsk studio that specializes in family

portraits. One set to promote her candidacy, and the other set
Christmas portraits.  She looks great, but not "glamorous".  Most of

the shots were scraped by media  from her  Instagram account.

A beautiful, caring mother.  Keep this charming image in mind

when you remember her - not the beastly ugliness that follows.

SO WHAT REALLY HAPPENED?
Novosibirsk is Russia's third largest city. Mrs. Bobrovskaya's political party, United Russia, has not faired well of late. In 2014 they lost the mayoralty, and Moscow had sent in "political technologists" to train and support local candidates. Bobrovskaya was a federal M.P., representing United Russia and had not been associated with scandal. Her husband, a former member of the Security Services, was reported to be unemployed and brooding. If you believe the husband's alleged motive for killing her, the lady was having an affair with her boss at DISCUS, a major construction company, a man who is also Deputy of the Novosibirsk City Council. The businessman is said to have been her political mentor, and the supplier of the RAV-4 she had been driving since March. The husband, lurid news report insist, was insanely jealous and decided to have one last go at his wife, and detonate a grenade while they were in the throws of passion. Their bodies were found in the back seat of the Toyota, naked from the waist down.


The crime scene was the parking area of a five-storey apartment building located handy to the DISCUS Construction Company. Try to believe this story line... because I cannot.   The husband, who has guns at home, has decided to kill her and himself in the bargain, with a fragmentation grenade.  And he will do it in a public setting.  In sub-zero temperatures she has consented to sex, so they pull into a decidedly unromantic setting - a residential complex. Though it is night, the lot is well illuminated, and they don't even bother to park the car.  The leave the engine to idle, and with headlights on they feed each others passion. Now I drive a Toyota RAV-4  and I can tell you that about the only possibility up front  is mutual masturbation, as a console divides the two seats. Near the building entrance, and overlooked by dozens of apartment windows, they would have had to get out and re-enter the RAV by the passenger doors - a suspicious act in itself. You cannot climb over the seats.   Now remember that the lady is a sitting member of the Russian Parliament and has everything to lose if bystanders recognize her and take photos. (Since she was found naked we know she was acting recklessly.) We already know the two local TV stations will broadcast ANYTHING sordid, because we have ample evidence.

Now remember that she stands accused of having an affair, and if her husband was angry enough to kill her, he would not easily have concealed his suspicions.  With his military training he was capable of killing her with his bare hands, but we are told, he chose to mutilate the woman he loved.  If I were that young man, I would be fragging the boss, and not my wife, but perhaps I do not understand Russian men.  If he did murder her, and this was not a professional frame-up, he might also have tipped off the local news media.  They were on site and filming even before the crime scene was secured.

Closeup pictures of the couple show that he was disembowelled by the blast and she had her face caved in.  About what you might expect from a hand grenade.  No attempt was made to conceal the gore from the media or from the tenants of the apartment block. In fact the crime scene was left entirely open, and the display of her body was so obvious, as to constitute a crime in itself.

I have watched two lengthy videos made at the crime scene, as well as edited footage broadcast in Russia, and I can come to only one conclusion. Mrs. Bobrovskaya's body was callously left on display for news media and passers by to photograph with impunity. Nobody cared enough about her to intervene or even cover her up.  The husband mutilated her, the media denigrated her, and the police humiliated her.  A very thorough job. 

The final act was to share Novosibirsk's disgrace with the wide world.

The final indignity to the victim was recorded by LIFE NEWS, which broadcast the removal of Mrs. Bobrovskaya with her body pixelated.  At first the morgue attendant crossed her ankles, the very first man to acknowledge that this was a woman he was grabbing hold of. Then with a shrug, he spread her legs and had a good look.  CHANNEL 8 had the footage and someone from the station uploaded it to the Internet. These images are graphic of course, but I have spared you the worst of it.

I invite you now to go back to the scraped article from the London DAILY MAIL, and understand that hundreds of newspapers and websites (including Canadian) published the same smarmy account of what happened to her.  More important, be on guard for more stories like this one - moments in which a woman's sexuality is used to humiliate her, and where her dignity is far less important than the opportunity for news writers or propagandists to score cheap political points.  Beauty and the Beasts.

R/C