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Saturday 5 July 2008

Putin will stop at nothing

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

Round about the same time Garry Kasparov, the former world chess champion, decided to abandon his chess career in order to oppose President Putin. ‘Russia is in a moment of crisis and every decent person must stand up and resist the rise of the Putin dictatorship,’ he wrote in the Wall Street Journal, definitely not off the record. Again, there was no reaction in Russia — though an angry fan did hit him over the head with a chessboard. (‘I’m lucky the national sport of the Soviet Union is chess, not baseball,’ he said afterwards.)

Both men are now vocal opponents of President Putin — though any way you look at it, they don’t have much in common. Kasyanov is a slick talker, a technocrat and a former insider who is, fairly or not, suspected of corruption. Kasparov is a blunt-speaking outsider, half-Armenian and half-Jewish. No one suspects him of corruption, since his chess career made him plenty rich.

But if the two have little in common with one another, they have even less in common with the rest of President Putin’s open opponents. They have little in common, for example, with Anna Politkovskaya, the extraordinary journalist, Chechen war reporter and Kremlin critic who was murdered late last year. They have little in common with Lyudmila Alekseyeva, a former and current leader of the Moscow Helsinki Group — a venerable institution created in 1976 to force the Soviet Union to live up to the international human rights treaties it had signed, now re-organised to protest against the creeping authoritarianism of Putin’s post-Soviet Russia. They have little in common with Eduard Limonov, a writer and ex-punk rocker whose National Bolshevist Party, though best known for thuggishness and stunts, also opposes Putin.

Moreover, none of these opposition figures seems to have anything at all in common with President Putin’s loudest opponent either: Boris Berezovsky, the exiled Russian oligarch, who told the Guardian last week that ‘we need to use force to change this regime’. Asked if he were plotting a revolution, he said ‘you are absolutely correct’ — thereby inspiring mocking headlines in Moscow about Berezovsky following in the footsteps of Lenin.

Actually, I should rephrase that. It is perhaps possible to imagine a bond between Kasyanov, a politician who knows the value of money, and Berezovsky — though the former denies it. But a political pact between Berezovsky and, say, Alekseyeva? A slick mogul who hungers for media attention, and a ferocious, white-haired lady who hungers for justice? Not a chance.

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