Wizblog

Confronting Putin

I've heard a few pundits say this weekend that the most important meeting President Bush will have in Europe this week is the one with Vladimir Putin in Bratislava. The chumminess that characterized their earlier meetings is likely to be history if Bush does what he should do, which is to be critical, in public as well as in private, of the Russian leader's brutal repression of individual, economic and press freedoms in Russia and in other post-Soviet states. He has strangled Russian democracy in the cradle, and we cannot continue to pretend that Putin's Russia is an ally of this country. Good luck, Mr. Bush.

Bruce P. Jackson delivered this sobering assessment of Putin's crackdown and Russian democracy's demise to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. Here's an excerpt, but read it all, along with this companion piece, also in The Weekly Standard.

5) Of all the areas where the Russian Government has suppressed the possibility of democracy, it has been most comprehensive and ruthless in its attack on independent media. All significant television and radio stations are now under state control. The editor-in-chief of Izvestia was fired for attempting to cover the tragic terrorist attack on the school children of Beslan, and two journalists attempting to travel to Beslan appear to have been drugged by security services. The state of journalism in Russia is so precarious that Amnesty International has just reported that security services are targeting independent journalists for harassment, disappearances and killing. It should surprise no one that the distinguished Committee to Protect Journalists lists Russia as one of the World's Worst Places to Be a Journalist in its annual survey.

6) Among the most alarming of recent developments, however, is the return of the KGB to power in the Presidential Administration. According to Olga Kryshtanovskaya, a leading Russian sociologist, former KGB officers are regaining power at every level of government and now account for 70% of regional government leaders. Other analysts state that the number of former secret police in Putin's government is 300% greater than the number in the Gorbachev government. In this situation, there is a high probability that military and security services would be used to suppress civil dissent and, indeed, are already being used to this effect.

If the conditions which supported democratic change and reform in Georgia and Ukraine are any guide, President Putin has orchestrated a sustained and methodical campaign to eliminate not only democratic forces in civil and political life, but also the possibility of such forces arising again in the future. I do not think that it is accurate to say that democracy is in retreat in Russia. Democracy has been assassinated in Russia...

...To put it bluntly, the growing view in Putin's inner circle is that in order to regain the status of a world power in the 21st century, Russia must be undemocratic at home (in order to consolidate the power of the state) and it must be anti-democratic in its "near abroad" (in order to block the entry of perceived political competitors, such as the European Union or NATO, invited into post-Soviet space by new democracies.) The war on terror is not central to this calculation and is little more than something to discuss with credulous Americans from time to time.