The Kremlin's True Face

A revealing and disturbing commentary by Yevgenia Albats, writing about Putin's Russia in today's Moscow Times:

I have never been so concerned about the future of this country as I am today. I don't expect the government to start rounding up dissidents, a practice stopped by Mikhail Gorbachev in the mid-1980s. And I don't think they'll reactivate the gulag. There is no compelling economic or political justification for a return to a system that proved so incredibly inefficient, especially since Russia no longer has a need for slave labor.

Instead, I fear that the regime will adopt the practice, popular in some Latin American autocracies, of simply killing people on the streets or making them disappear. This sort of thing occurred in Ukraine not so long ago, and it continues in Belarus today. It may have even begun in Russia: The St. Petersburg journalist Maxim Maximov vanished a month ago. My pessimism is a reaction to the Kremlin's ruthless actions over the past month. During President Vladimir Putin's first term, the Kremlin at east came up with cover stories to account for its policies, such as the need to strengthen the state and regain control by putting the fear of God into the oligarchs. Or the goal of increasing economic growth by attracting foreign and domestic investment. Or the desire to restore a measure of the social justice eroded during the Boris Yeltsin years. Skillfully peddled by the Kremlin's spin doctors, these cover stories were readily consumed both at home and abroad.

But in the last month the Kremlin has shown its true face. The highly publicized Yukos case is just the most glaring example. Few still believe that the reason for the government's assault on Yukos was that Mikhail Khodorkovsky planned to sell the oil major to an American company, or that Khodorkovsky wound up in jail for breaking an unwritten agreement not to venture into politics. Such factors might explain why Khodorkovsky was the first major oligarch put behind bars (after Vladimir Gusinsky and Boris Berezovsky were driven out of the country),but they are not the main reason.

The rest of the article makes sobering reading, especially the reflection that

No constraints on the Kremlin remain any longer. The Kremlin chekists have crossed the Rubicon; they have no choice but to keep following the course they have set in the past few months. There is no best-case scenario for what happens next, but it's easy to envision the worst-case. Russia is on the fast track to becoming a corporate, fascist-type state.