Should Putin host the G8?

8 July 2006

By allowing Russia to stage the summit we have accepted her as one of us, says Anne Applebaum. This G8 will give its tacit approval to the theft of private assets, the destruction of the rule of law and the violation of human rights

For those with memories as short as those of London investors, it’s therefore worth stopping for a minute to recall the highlights of that transformation. To start with, President Putin destroyed independent Russian television, which is now almost entirely state-controlled. He twisted election results to ensure that he and his allies won by landslides (not that, lacking media attention, his opponents would have won anyway). He recently passed laws designed to make existence close to impossible for Russia’s beleaguered human rights groups, environmental groups and other independent advocates. All the while, he continued his stunningly brutal (and now totally invisible) guerrilla war in Chechnya, which long ago moved beyond any legitimate repression of terrorism and into the realm of massive human rights abuse. The blatant illegality that accompanied the transfer of assets from Yukos to Rosneft — Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the Yukos CEO, was arrested, put through a macabre, Soviet-style show trial and sent to a prison camp where he suffers mysterious ‘accidents’ — put a permanent dent in national respect for the rule of law.

Much worse, though, for anyone who wishes Russians well, are the subtler changes in the Moscow atmosphere. Paranoia is back: recently, when the American Foreign Affairs magazine published an obscure article that idly speculated on the aftermath of a US nuclear attack on Russia or China, the city was instantly awash with rumours of impending nuclear war. Fear is back too: once again, my Russian friends are too nervous to be honest on the telephone. Some of them report visits — perfectly polite, it’s true — from agents of the FSB, the agency formerly known as the KGB, who are very interested in their foreign acquaintances and bank accounts. A Russian visiting America last spring told me that he was surprised by how many people, both in Washington and in Russia, had asked whether he’s really returning to Moscow afterwards — ‘will you dare go back?’ being a question that no one even considered asking five years ago. It is tragic but true: once again, Russia is a place where the blunt-speaking watch their backs.