PUTIN WILL STOP AT NOTHING
by Anne Applebaum
Spectator.co.uk , UK
April 19 2007
About two years ago, Mikhail Kasyanov, ex-prime minister of Russia,
made a private visit to Washington. Off the record, he told a handful
of journalists that he was disturbed by the authoritarianism of
President Putin. Then, in maybe a dozen or so more ‘off the record’
meetings, he told more journalists, several politicians and a
lot of other people in Washington that he was disturbed by the
authoritarianism of President Putin. In other words, he might as well
have got himself a megaphone and walked down the street, shouting his
intention to oppose President Putin. There was no reaction in Russia.
Round about the same time Garry Kasparov, the former world chess
champion, decided to abandon his chess career in order to oppose
President Putin. ‘Russia is in a moment of crisis and every decent
person must stand up and resist the rise of the Putin dictatorship,’
he wrote in the Wall Street Journal, definitely not off the record.
Again, there was no reaction in Russia – though an angry fan did hit
him over the head with a chessboard. (‘I’m lucky the national sport
of the Soviet Union is chess, not baseball,’ he said afterwards.)
Both men are now vocal opponents of President Putin – though any way
you look at it, they don’t have much in common. Kasyanov is a slick
talker, a technocrat and a former insider who is, fairly or not,
suspected of corruption. Kasparov is a blunt-speaking outsider,
half-Armenian and half-Jewish. No one suspects him of corruption,
since his chess career made him plenty rich.
But if the two have little in common with one another, they have even
less in common with the rest of President Putin’s open opponents.
They have little in common, for example, with Anna Politkovskaya, the
extraordinary journalist, Chechen war reporter and Kremlin critic who
was murdered late last year. They have little in common with Lyudmila
Alekseyeva, a former and current leader of the Moscow Helsinki Group
– a venerable institution created in 1976 to force the Soviet Union
to live up to the international human rights treaties it had signed,
now re-organised to protest against the creeping authoritarianism of
Putin’s post-Soviet Russia. They have little in common with Eduard
Limonov, a writer and ex-punk rocker whose National Bolshevist Party,
though best known for thuggishness and stunts, also opposes Putin.
Moreover, none of these opposition figures seems to have anything at
all in common with President Putin’s loudest opponent either: Boris
Berezovsky, the exiled Russian oligarch, who told the Guardian last
week that ‘we need to use force to change this regime’. Asked if he
were plotting a revolution, he said ‘you are absolutely correct’
– thereby inspiring mocking headlines in Moscow about Berezovsky
following in the footsteps of Lenin.
Actually, I should rephrase that. It is perhaps possible to imagine
a bond between Kasyanov, a politician who knows the value of money,
and Berezovsky – though the former denies it. But a political pact
between Berezovsky and, say, Alekseyeva? A slick mogul who hungers
for media attention, and a ferocious, white-haired lady who hungers
for justice? Not a chance.
On the contrary, if there is anything that characterises this new
generation of Russian dissidents, it is their deep differences. Some
want street demonstrations, some want television time. Some are
incensed about the Chechen war, some are interested in personal
power. Some live in British country houses, others in grubby Moscow
flats. No wonder they have yet to formulate a cohesive movement.
Oddly enough, in their mixed motives and varying backgrounds this new
generation of dissidents does resemble its Soviet predecessors. They,
too, were unpopular. Peter Reddaway, then the leading scholar on
the subject, reckoned that at its zenith in the early 1980s the
dissident movement had made ‘little or no headway among the mass of
ordinary people’. Today, the mass of ordinary people are probably not
merely indifferent but actively hostile to Kasyanov with his liberal
economics; to Kasparov with his mixed ethnic origins; to Alekseyeva
with her high principles; to Limonov with his madness. Yet despite
this – or perhaps because of it – the Putin regime increasingly
treats these new dissidents in much the same manner as the Soviet
regime once treated its dissidents.
Until recently, the Putin doctrine of managed democracy was
relatively mild and rather clever. Although television was entirely
Kremlin-controlled, small opposition newspapers were allowed to exist,
so long as not too many people read them. Although they would never
receive serious airtime, small opposition political parties were
also allowed to exist. Anyone who went too far was slapped down,
of course: they could receive visits from the tax police or, if
they got too powerful, they could be arrested by the tax police,
as was the oil baron Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Still, this system was
mild enough to allow President Putin to go on posing as a ‘reformer’
for many years, and to continue being invited to the G8.
But in the past year or so, that carefully calibrated tolerance for
a manifestly weak political opposition has begun to deteriorate. The
visits from the tax police are now augmented by visits from the secret
police. Independent groups of all kinds – environmentalist, human
rights, even educational – find it difficult to register legally. Most
of all, two extremely open and brutal murders of two well-known people
– Politkovskaya and Alexander Litvinenko – appear to have changed the
terms of the game. Politkovskaya was shot in broad daylight, in her
apartment building, by a confident killer who left his weapon at the
scene of the crime. Litvinenko, as we all know, was murdered in central
London with radiation poisoning. These were not murders carried out
by people who were anxious to prevent bad publicity, or indeed cared
in the least what the rest of the world thinks about Russia.
Most recently, the language used publicly about President Putin’s
opponents has begun to change too. No longer tolerated as powerless
oddballs, they have begun to appear in the press in a new,
more demonic guise. Kasparov is a particular target: last week,
the website Pravda.ru called him a ‘political pawn who has sold
his soul to the traitors who plot Russia’s demise’ as well as a
‘wild-eyed Azeri Berezovsky supporter’ who ‘sits amidst his Western
habits in his millionaire apartment’. The same article called the
new dissident organisations a ‘motley army of deviants, criminals,
wannabe politicians, fraudsters and gangsters on the fringes of
Russian society’. Nice, no?
Embedded in the insults is a deep, Soviet-style paranoia about
foreigners, who are suspected of supporting this motley army of
deviants with money and asylum. Though America is usually the main
target – the claim that the US funds Chechen terrorism comes up
regularly – Britain has begun to play a prominent role in this
line of public propaganda too. Since agreeing to speak at a small
opposition conference, organised by Kasparov and Kasyanov, the
British ambassador has been followed and harassed by a group of
thuggish nationalist Kremlin supporters, one of whom accused him of
assault. (‘When I go out of the house to buy cat food, they follow me
and start waving banners,’ he has said.) Now that London has become
the residence of choice for exiled oligarchs and ex-KGB dissidents –
Berezovsky is wanted by Russian police, after all – it isn’t hard
to find headlines referring to the ‘British Bullshit Corporation’
(following a news item on Siberian pollution: ‘Suppose the BBC tried
for once to report the truth about Russia instead of distorting it?’)
and articles gloating over the British hostages captured by Iran
(Pravda.ru wrote gleefully last week that the hostage incident had
‘humiliated’ Britain, destroying forever the ‘myth of their stoicism’.)
Soon, no doubt, the Russian government will be printing posters of
fat British capitalists in bowler hats squashing Russian workers with
their shiny boots. A recent survey reported that more than a quarter
of Russia’s leaders – in the presidential administration, government
and parliament – had served in the KGB or another intelligence
service. A whopping 78 per cent appear to have had some relationship
with intelligence services, clandestine or otherwise.
Slowly, Russia’s new political class is bringing not just a change
in rhetorical tone, but a familiar kind of violence. Last weekend,
some 2,000 members of the political opposition – among them Kasyanov,
Kasparov and Limonov – organised a march in Moscow. They were met by
9,000 club-wielding riot police. At least 170 people were arrested,
among them Kasparov, who was charged with ‘shouting anti-government
slogans in the presence of a large group of people’.
Kasparov has deemed these harsh new police tactics evidence that the
regime is ‘scared’. Others suspect the Kremlin fears a repeat of the
Ukrainian Orange Revolution, whose adherents used street protests to
change the regime. I am not so sure. The new aggression might, on the
contrary, be evidence that the Kremlin is now so self-confident that
it no longer needs to make any gestures to Western public sensibilities
at all.
There are many reasons why this might be so. That 80 per cent public
support – backed up by a television monopoly which gives no time to
potential opponents – is part of it. High oil prices are even more
important. Soviet dissidents at least knew that even in the darkest
times, they could get some attention paid to their cause in the West:
in 1980 a group of Russian women political prisoners sent a message to
President Ronald Reagan, congratulating him on his election. It arrived
within three days, to the President’s delight, infuriating the KGB. But
nowadays, the West is so anxious to please President Putin, and so
keen to buy his gas and oil, that Kasparov and Kasyanov can’t count
on much press coverage. Reagan is not in the White House; it is hard
to imagine a letter from a Russian prison raising many eyebrows today.
In the end, though, some of that self-confidence surely comes from
a sense of vindication. For a brief period, in the early 1990s, it
looked like the KGB was finished. Now it is back, and more important
than ever. If nothing else, the past decade has proven to Putin and
his colleagues that the values they imbibed during their years in
the Soviet secret services were the right ones. They no longer care
if others disagree.
Anne Applebaum is a contributing editor of The Spectator and a
Washington Post columnist and member of its editorial board.