Putin will stop at nothing

18 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

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?