Commenting on Boris Berezovskii's brief recent visit to Georgia and on the tycoon's opposition to the Kremlin, Deputy Duma Speaker and LDPR leader Zhirinovskii said that Berezovskii will share the fate of former Soviet leader Leon Trotsky, Ekho Moskvy reported on 3 December. Trotsky opposed Soviet dictator Josef Stalin and went into exile in 1929. Throughout the 1930s, he actively opposed Stalin, and he was assassinated in Mexico City in 1940 by a Stalinist agent, who stabbed him in the head with an ice pick. "Berezovskii is playing the role of Trotsky, and he will end up like Trotsky," Zhirinovskii said. TV-Tsentr commented on 3 December that Berezovskii considers himself a statesman and said that, with his trip to Tbilisi, the tycoon wanted to mimic U.S. President George W. Bush's surprise 28 November trip to Baghdad to celebrate Thanksgiving with U.S. troops there. In fact, however, Berezovskii is nothing more than "the coordinator of the anti-Russian line abroad," the station remarked. VY
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