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

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’.