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Caligula in Moscow
Garry Kasparov
The Wall Street Journal
February 04, 2005
Democratic reform in the former Soviet Union has been much in the news lately thanks to the victory of Viktor Yushchenko in Ukraine. Citizens took to the streets in the millions to protest and force a new election when his Kremlin-backed opponent tried to steal it the first time around. President George W. Bush came in dead last in the race to congratulate the new Ukrainian president. He waited for his "good friend" Vladimir Putin's own tardy acknowledgment that he had been unsuccessful in undermining Ukrainian democracy as effectively as he is dismantling Russia's.
In Mr. Putin's view, Ukraine provides a dangerous model. He is careful not to make such mistakes as allowing an independent judiciary review election results and letting opposition politicians speak on television. These basics of dictatorship have recently been accompanied by other disturbing scenes on the Russian political scene. In his ongoing battle for total control over every aspect of Russian life, President Putin's weapon of choice has been a justice system that provides anything but justice. An expanding network of judges and district attorneys is being used to persecute the opposition and enrich Putin loyalists. A puppet judiciary has been created to accompany the puppet parliament. To add insult to injury, a man from Putin's St. Petersburg with no judicial experience was just named to the highest arbitration court in the land, a move akin to Caligula's naming a horse to the Senate.
At the World Economic Forum in Davos last week, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Zhukov painted a very attractive picture of Russia to eager potential investors. I would love to live in the country that he described! Vladimir Ryzhkov, one of the few independent voices in the Russian parliament, presented the opposite view, a rather gloomy portrait that coincides with those of most external analysts. While Mr. Ryzhkov challenged the party line abroad, the Kremlin responded by having the attorney general's office initiate an investigation in his home district of Altai, Siberia. What they are looking for won't be clear until they find it, but they always do.
Remember the December auction of the Yugansk subsidiary of the Yukos oil giant, which was won by the unknown entity "Baikalfinancegroup." As I predicted in these pages, they and their $9.4 billion existed only on paper, leaving the prize under the control of a state-owned energy company run by Mr. Putin's deputy chief of staff. The only surprise is how badly the swindlers are covering up their crime. The government ministers and bankers involved are all giving different stories about where this mysterious money came from and no one can say where it has gone. Just like that, the money supposedly needed to pay the Yukos tax debt has disappeared, which really isn't so hard because it never existed.
Illegal expropriation is becoming institutional policy. The Duma rubberstamps Putin decrees. In the criminal courts they have brought back an old Soviet law allowing the state to confiscate the property of the convicted. Not to be outdone, tax authorities can now seize money and property from corporations or individuals without a court decision.
What is remarkable is how little official reaction there has been to Russia's slide into despotism, while institutions such as the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly (PACE) and human rights organizations are openly critical of Mr. Putin. It's hard to think of a time and place in which there has been such a disconnect between NGO outrage and governmental silence.
The recent PACE report by former German Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger condemned the Russian attorney general's handling of the Yukos case and the persecution of the oil giant's officials. The prosecution of Yukos founder Mikhail Khodorkovsky, she said, was intended "to weaken an outspoken political opponent, intimidate other wealthy individuals and regain control of strategic economic assets." In the Jan. 25 PACE session one speaker compared these trials to the czars' practice of dragging accused prisoners through the streets in cages in order to frighten the citizenry.
The Kremlin is not concerned about international opinion because there isn't one. There has been no move to cancel the G7 meeting scheduled for Moscow in 2006. At Russia's current rate of transformation the meeting will be a travesty. Ms. Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger doesn't doubt that a desire to stay on good economic terms with Russia is what keeps the "leaders of the Free World" silent on the mounting human rights violations.
For a tragic example of this hypocrisy compare the reaction to Abu Ghraib to what happened in the Russian town of Blagoveschensk in December. The entire town (pop. 30,000) in the Muslim region of Bashkortorstan was virtually locked down for three days as Russian security forces marauded. Over 1,000 were arrested and at least 100 assaulted.
Meanwhile in Moscow, 19 members of Putin's parliament signed a letter to the attorney general that condemned "evil acts by Jews against Russian patriots" and said that all the anti-Semitic activities in Russia, such as blowing up synagogues and desecrating cemeteries, were organized by Jews to provoke local officials.
The Duma recently passed a law that punishes foreigners who "show disrespect to the state of Russia." Without a pause, the director of the federal agency in charge of the media stated that it's time to filter Internet content. Criticism of Mr. Putin and his regime simply will not be tolerated. Censorship and repression are threatening to surpass oil and gas as Russia's biggest exports.
Students and pensioners have recently taken to the wintry streets to protest. In a healthy democracy politicians would step in to lead an angry crowd. Not in Russia, where there's no political advantage to being against any Kremlin policy, no matter how many voters are against it. The only vote that matters is Mr. Putin's.
With the democratic opposition systematically pushed into the margins, real change will come from the people, not from the top. We are starting from scratch. In places like Russia liberty is more than a filler for speeches. Democracy is more than something that interrupts your life every four years. People born in free countries think that we are exaggerating the loss of freedoms when in reality things are even worse. You see Mr. Putin sitting at the table with the G7 leaders and assume he can't really be all that bad.
This is not a plea for help, but a warning about what we're going to have to deal with soon. The patience of the Russian people is wearing thin. With whom will the West side in this coming battle, the Russian people or the KGB?
- Mr. Kasparov, the world's leading chess player and chairman of the Free Choice 2008 Committee in Russia, is a contributing editor at the Journal.
