The ginger Svengali alleged to be the mastermind of Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s conversion to Internet Islam … seems pretty harmless in this NYRB report. But read the comments as well as the short piece. Update from a reader:
It’s funny that you should note the comments on the NYRB article – Catherine Fitzpatrick is a well known “eccentric” in the Russia-watching circles. (And by eccentric I mean nutty and conspiratorial.)
Another:
Long-time reader, early subscriber here. I write to register how offended I was that you would highlight on your blog an ad hominem attack on Catherine Fitzpatrick. (Full disclosure: I knew her in NY in the ’70s and ’80s, but have not been in touch since.) She’s a long-time human rights activist on Russian and Eastern European fronts. In her work with Aryeh Neier at Helsinki Watch in the 1980s she defended, sometimes with distinct personal bravery, more dissidents than you and I ever will. She is a very well-known scholar of Soviet/Russian affairs, and her Russian fluency is so superb that she was a translator of many major books in the 1990s (including Yeltsin’s autobiography). She was an “early adopter” of all things Internet. (Her association with Second Life led, by my reading, to the controversy that led your reader to call her “nutty.”) In short, political perspectives aside, she and you (and I) have a lot in common.
The Dish 