Go to the mobile version of this Web site.

Login | Contact Us | Site Map | Paid archives | Electronic edition | Subscription Questions | Extras

Russia, back to the past

Step by step, Kremlin is chiseling away at freedom

The Rocky

Published December 21, 2008 at 10:38 p.m.

Text size  

More Editorials

More stories »

Welcome to the Soviet Union, circa 2008.

Americans may have thought all would be well - and democratic - after the Iron Curtain came down and capitalist Boris Yeltsin danced his jig. It may have seemed that the feared KGB had been replaced by the seemingly innocuous FSB, and that one of its former directors was a man that the U.S. would work with (according to soul-searcher President George W. Bush).

But first we saw capitalists like Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who also happened to be a critic of government corruption, go down - and in the onetime tycoon's case, get shipped to Siberia as the Russian government dismantled and expropriated his Yukos oil company's assets. To this day, the government continues to heap new charges on Khodorkovsky to keep him behind bars.

Then critical journalists began to fall under suspicious circumstances, from Forbes editor Paul Klebnikov, shot to death in front of his office in 2004, to Magomed Yevloyev, an online journalist shot in the head while in police custody on Aug. 31. There was also the 2006 assassination of journalist and Kremlin critic Anna Politkovskaya and the subsequent polonium-210 poisoning of former spy Alexander Litvinenko - killed in Britain just two weeks after accusing Vladimir Putin of killing Politkovskaya.

The member of Russia's Duma whom Britain accuses of being behind the Litvinenko slaying is also proving to be a most vocal ally of the Kremlin's latest attempt to purge and punish dissent.

"If someone has caused the Russian state serious damage, they should be exterminated," Andrei Lugovoy, a onetime KGB officer, recently said in an interview with Spanish newspaper El Pais. "Do I think someone could have killed Litvinenko in the interests of the Russian state? If you're talking about the interests of the Russian state, in the purest sense of the word, I myself would have given that order." Though, oddly enough, Lugovoy maintains he didn't.

The troubling quotations surfaced as a new bill in the Duma was brought to the world's attention: The definition of treason would be expanded beyond passing state secrets to damaging Russia's "constitutional order" and "sovereignty or territorial integrity." Kremlin opponents quickly realized this broad definition could send them to a repopulated gulag, as the proposed law effectively banned protests. And if that wasn't enough, the Duma recently approved discarding jury trials for those charged with treason.

Former world chess champion Garry Kasparov and other Russian opposition leaders met the other day to form the peaceful anti-Kremlin movement that takes its name from Poland's legendary anti-communism movement: Solidarity. But unfortunately - especially in the light of the treason law likely to pass in the pro-Kremlin Duma - this Solidarity is unlikely to bring about the same triumphant result as the Polish Solidarity of the 1980s.

Putin, faced with a term-limited presidency going into March elections, shrewdly handpicked his successor, Dmitry Medvedev, who dutifully named Putin prime minister. There's no reason to believe Medvedev would counter the trajectory Putin has set in a return to Russian repression.

"We are hurtling back into a Soviet abyss, into an information vacuum that spells death from our own ignorance," Politkovskaya wrote in The Guardian two years before her death. "All we have left is the Internet, where information is still freely available. For the rest, if you want to go on working as a journalist, it's total servility to Putin. Otherwise, it can be death, the bullet, poison, or trial - whatever our special services, Putin's guard dogs, see fit."

Comments

  • December 23, 2008

    1:55 a.m.

    Suggest removal

    DrGeneNelson writes:

    As a Ph.D. radiation biophysicist who studied Polonium-210, I strongly concur with your editorial. It is important to appreciate that Polonium-210, which decays to half its strength in a short 138 days is produced in the former Soviet Republics. Thus, the Litvinenko murder is tied via multiple pieces of evidence to the Soviets. Polonium-210 is one of the most toxic substances on Earth to ingest, with an extremely small dose causing a rapid and painful death.