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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsPutin’s Culture of Fear and Death
By GARRY KASPAROV
March 1, 2015 5:41 p.m. ET
Boris Nemtsov, my longtime friend and colleague in the Russian opposition, was murdered in the middle of Moscow on Friday night. Four bullets in the back ended his life in sight of the Kremlin, where he once worked as Boris Yeltsin s deputy prime minister. Photos showed a cleaning crew scrubbing his blood off the pavement within hours of the murder, so it is not difficult to imagine the quality of the investigation to come.
Vladimir Putin actually started, and ended, the inquiry while Boriss body was still warm by calling the murder a provocation, the term of art for suggesting that the Russian presidents enemies are murdering one another to bring shame upon the shameless. He then brazenly sent his condolences to Boriss mother, who had often warned her fearless son that his actions could get him killed in Putins Russia.
Hours after Boriss death, news reports said that police were raiding his home and confiscating papers and computers. President Putins enemies are often victims and his victims are always suspects.
Boris was a passionate critic of Mr. Putins war in Ukraine and was finishing a report on the presence of Russian soldiers in the ravaged Donbas region, a matter that the Kremlin has spared no effort to cover up. But the question Did Putin give the order? rings as hollow today as when journalist Anna Politkovskaya was gunned down in 2006, the same year that Putin critic Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned in Londonor when a Malaysia Airlines passenger jet was shot down over eastern Ukraine last year.
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http://www.wsj.com/articles/garry-kasparov-putins-culture-of-fear-and-death-1425249677
Fred Sanders
(23,946 posts)uhnope
(6,419 posts)given the subject is a recently assassinated dissident. Are you running interference?
stevenleser
(32,886 posts)stevenleser
(32,886 posts)As Nemtsov's murder once again shows, in Putin's Russia, the government votes YOU out.
Any high profile critic of Russia is a profile in courage these days.
stevenleser
(32,886 posts)William769
(55,144 posts)pampango
(24,692 posts)Authoritarian regimes come in different shapes and sizes. In some states, the political opposition is deprived of power, influence, and participation in political life through peaceful, non-violent means. In others, the killing of opposition politicians is just a regular occurrence. In Malaysia, a key opposition leader, Anwar Ibrahim, may be tried for sodomy; in Thailand, Thaksin Shinawatra may be kept out of the country; in China, former Chinese Premier Zhao Ziyang was placed under permanent house arrest. But in the days of authoritarianism in Argentina or Chile, for example, no one was surprised when opposition politicians were found dead or just went missing. Only years later did we learn about the secret concentration camps or how political opponents were thrown into the ocean from helicopters.
Until Friday night, none of us realized how much Russia belonged to the second type of a dictatorship in which, after another round of lashing out at the regime and its leader, a long-time professional opposition member quietly goes for dinner at a historic shopping mall and then proceeds to walk the streets of the capital. What might seem like an unthinkable luxury to an Argentine, Mexican, Pakistani, or Chinese opposition member surprised no one in Russia. Until this Friday night. That night we witnessed a new iteration of Russian authoritarianism, one which is increasingly shifting from a pragmatic dictatorship toward an ideology-driven dictatorship of self-preservation.
This doesnt usually happen in places where the people and the leadership consolidate as a result of improved living standards, which is what happened in the first decade of Putins tenure or in China during the 1990s and 2000s. It happens in societies that consolidate around opposing an enemy. In such societies, the regime mercilessly divides people into good and bad in order to preserve itself, to eliminate uncomfortable questions, or to spur approval for its policies. The good people remain full-fledged citizens and are protected by law, however imperfect it might be. The bad ones are stripped of their citizenship and legal protections. Only those in accord are entitled to utter their Civis Romanus sum, while the dissenters become another line in the invisible, or sometimes quite visible, proscription list. Just take a look at radical patriotic web sitesthey are rife with such lists of enemies and traitors who have to be punished.
In recent years, the Russian lexicon has been enriched by a series of labels for those opposed to crucial domestic and foreign policy decisionsfor example, Putins return to the presidency, the construction of national identity around sexual orientation, the annexation of Crimea, and the intervention in Ukraine. The dissenters are called traitors, the fifth column, enemy collaborators, and destroyers of the country and its values.
http://carnegie.ru/eurasiaoutlook/?fa=59212