Reviews | Vladimir Kara-Murza from prison: the West has failed Putin

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PREVENTIVE DETENTION CENTER NO. 5, MOSCOW Dictatorial regimes can come to power in different ways. Sometimes it’s through years of civil war, as with the Bolsheviks in Russia after 1917. Sometimes it’s through democratic procedures, as in 1930s Germany. Or, as in Chile in 1973, this can happen as a result of a military coup.

Vladimir Putin came to power in 1999 thanks to a backroom deal in the highest ranks of President Boris Yeltsin’s administration. But the new Kremlin leader needed time to transform Russia’s flawed democracy into the seamless authoritarian system it is today. Nobody can determine the precise moment when Russia ceased to be democratic. But the year can be named with certainty.

It was 2003 and this week marks exactly 20 years since the first turning point of this transformation. On June 22 of that year, Putin’s press ministry cut off the broadcast signal of TVS, Russia’s last independent television network. In a characteristic display of Soviet-style hypocrisy, the official reason given was viewer interest. It was the latest stage in Putin’s campaign against independent television, which he launched days after his inauguration with a security raid on the offices of Russia’s largest private media group. Within three years, all major independent broadcasters NTV, TV-6 and finally TVS fell silent, giving the Kremlin a complete monopoly over the airwaves. Control of public sources of information is a prerequisite for any dictatorship.

Two more milestones came later that year. In October 2003, Putin’s security services arrested Russia’s richest man, oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky. The official charge was tax evasion. But the real reason was Khodorkovsky’s funding of civil society groups and opposition parties and his public confrontation with Putin over government corruption. This was a clear signal from the Kremlin to the entire Russian business community: stick with it or stay away. Finally, in December, Russian parliamentary elections took place which, for the first time since the end of the Soviet regime, were described as unfair by international observers. This resulted in the ejection of pro-democracy parties from the Duma. As the Russian parliament became, in the unforgettable words of its president, a place of discussion, Putin’s authoritarian transformation was complete.

Follow the opinion of this authorVladimir Kara-Murza

For those of us who had been involved in the democratic opposition to Putin from the start of his rule, it was painful to see how calmly most of Russian society seemed to accept the dismantling of the nascent freedoms of the 1990s. There have been street protests against the state takeover of NTV, but far from the scale the situation deserves. There were principled voices in the Russian parliament against Putin’s authoritarian movements such as Boris Nemtsov, but they were not accompanied by a mass popular movement. As a candidate for the Duma in the critical elections of 2003, I vividly remember the indifference of most voters, even in my Moscow constituency, to the country’s authoritarian turn. After the economic hardship that accompanied the collapse of the Soviet system in the 1990s, many people were willing to accept Putin’s unspoken social contract: a higher standard of living (financed by rising oil prices) in exchange the abandonment of political freedoms.

So when Western politicians and opinion makers today talk about the responsibility of Russian society for allowing Putin to rise to power unchecked (and ultimately leading us into the current war), they have right, but only partly. For what? Because a very large part of this responsibility lies with the West itself.

When Putin came to power, Russia was fully integrated into the rules-based international system. It belonged to the Group of Eight industrialized democracies; she was a member of the Council of Europe, which serves to safeguard human rights on the continent; it was (and still is) a participating state in the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, whose statutes explicitly affirm that issues relating to democracy, human rights and the state of law are of legitimate concern to all Member States. So when Putin launched ever more active efforts to dismantle Russia’s democratic institutions, we in the Russian opposition naively thought that the free world would voice criticism.

Instead, US presidents from both parties applauded Putin’s rise. George W. Bush called him a new style of leader, a reformer who will make a huge difference in making the world more peaceful. Barack Obama praised his extraordinary work on behalf of the Russian people. A German Chancellor even went to work for one of Russia’s largest state-controlled companies.

But perhaps the most grotesque gesture came from the British government, which welcomed Putin for a lavish state visit with a carriage ride with the Queen and billions of dollars in lucrative contracts literally two days after he unplugged TVS in June. 2003. I covered this visit as a journalist, and I will never forget the surreal spectacle of Britain’s political and financial elite hosting the rising dictator at an ornate banquet in the London Guildhall.

The immorality and cynicism of this realpolitik aside, the architects of Putin’s Western embracing policy ignored two fundamental warnings of history: that internal repression in Russia always results in external aggression and that appeasing an aggressor always leads to war. Once again, the free world has learned this the hard way. After getting away with so many other things over the years, both at home and abroad, it’s no surprise that Putin thought he could also get away with occupying Ukraine. .

Incredibly, there are still voices in the West that suggest he should. Day after day, Russian state television (which I am forced to watch from my prison cell) relays statements from pro-Kremlin politicians and talking heads in Western Europe and the United States calling for some kind of deal with Putin over Ukraine. I see no better recipe for disaster and for a new, even greater war in a few years than to give the aggressor another collapse.

There is only one way out of this conflict that would be in the interests of the free world, Ukraine and, ultimately, the Russian people: a resounding defeat for Putin, followed by political change. in Russia and a Marshall Plan-type international policy assistance program both to rebuild Ukraine and to help post-Putin Russia build a functioning democracy so that it never again becomes a threat to its own people or their neighbours. This is the only way to ensure that Europe can finally become whole, free and at peace and remain so.

Russian society and the West are responsible for letting Putin go as far as he has. We also both share the responsibility of getting it right this time around.

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