Putin will stop at nothing

21 April 2007

Anne Applebaum says that dissidents against the authoritarian regime, many of them in London, are raising the stakes. The President’s response is to get even tougher — and to target Britain in his new propaganda war

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.