Cold Political Wind Blows Across Russia
In just a month, Russian voters will elect their next president in what would appear to be a welcome sign of the consolidation of Russian democracy. But beneath the surface of electoral politics -- not very far beneath -- there are disturbing signs that the foundation of Russian democracy is beginning to buckle.
One measure of democracy's health is the fate of dissenters. Russia does not fare well in this respect. Harassment and assault of journalists have become routine, and sometimes they have been killed or narrowly escaped death. Elena Tregubova, the author of a bestselling book that contained an unflattering insider's portrait of President Vladimir V. Putin, narrowly avoided being killed this month by a bomb planted outside her apartment. Ivan Rybkin, one of Putin's leading critics and a candidate for the presidency, mysteriously disappeared for six days and just as mysteriously resurfaced last Tuesday and later claimed he was kidnapped.
Was the Rybkin incident a dumb publicity stunt or something sinister? The latter interpretation is based on the fact that Rybkin is linked to Boris Berezovsky, the exiled oligarch and arch critic of Putin. Rybkin has no chance to defeat the president, who enjoys enormous popularity and dominates the state-controlled airwaves, but Putin has been systematically going after the oligarchs. In addition to Berezovsky, another tycoon, Vladimir A. Gusinky, is in exile, and Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former head of Yukos Oil, languishes in prison on corruption charges.
Russians have little sympathy for the oligarchs, seeing them -- not without reason -- as the corrupt beneficiaries of ill-gotten gains. But what drives Putin's campaign against the plutocrats is not how these men became rich but the fact that, upon doing so, they either acquired political ambitions or started funding political parties and civic organizations.
Putin has no tolerance for criticism or rival centers of power. Indeed, in a now-famous meeting he told the oligarchs that he wouldn't look into their financial history providing they stayed clear of politics. And under his watch, private Russian television networks have ceased to exist and newspapers and magazines that were once fearless critics of the government have been subject to legal harassment and are now resorting to self-censorship.
