THEY'VE RISEN TO THE LEVEL OF SAUDI ARABIA:

The Tsar’s Opponent: Garry Kasparov takes aim at the power of Vladimir Putin. (David Remnick, October 1, 2007, The New Yorker)

Even if Kasparov decides to run (and he probably will), the government would not likely register his candidacy, and, even if it did, he could not win. The point is to create an alternative, not to be deluded into thinking there is an open election that can be won. Besides, Kasparov is half Armenian, half Jewish—not exactly an ideal ethnic mix for a politician in a country with deep currents of anti-Caucasian and anti-Semitic feeling.

The details of Kasparov’s dispute with Kasyanov were, ultimately, of small moment. For all practical purposes, Putin will select his successor, much as his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, designated him—unless he forgoes his promise to stand down and changes the constitution to allow a third term. Although a great many Russians would not object if he were to declare himself, Mobutu style, President for Life, it seems increasingly unlikely that he will stay.

In recent years, Putin has insured that nearly all power in Russia is Presidential. The legislature, the State Duma, is only marginally more independent than the Supreme Soviet was under Leonid Brezhnev. The governors of Russia’s more than eighty regions are no longer elected, as they were under Yeltsin; since a Presidential decree in 2004, they have all been appointed by the Kremlin. Putin even appoints the mayors of Moscow and St. Petersburg. The federal television networks, by far the main instrument of news and information in Russia, are neo-Soviet in their absolute obeisance to Kremlin power. “Putin is no enemy of free speech,” Ksenia Ponomareva, who worked on his first Presidential campaign, told the St. Petersburg Times. “He simply finds absurd the idea that somebody has the right to criticize him publicly.” The business community must also obey the commands and signals of Putin’s circle. There are now nearly as many billionaires in Moscow as in New York City, but the arrest for fraud, in 2003, of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, an oil magnate who had been the country’s richest man, was a clear, ominous signal that wealth is dependent on Kremlin approval. Khodorkovsky, who dared to fund opposition parties, pronounce his own political ideas, and attempt to cut pipeline deals with China without Kremlin permission, is now serving an eight-year term in Penal Colony No. 10, in eastern Siberia.

Kasparov is well aware of the perils of brazen independence. Since Putin took office, in 2000, more than a dozen Russian journalists have been murdered, as have several opposition politicians. The cases remain “unresolved.” When Kasparov is in Russia, he retains a security contingent that costs him tens of thousands of dollars a month. His wife, Daria Tarasova, and their baby often stay in an apartment in New Jersey. Oleg Kalugin, a former K.G.B. general who was Putin’s superior in St. Petersburg twenty years ago and now lives in Maryland, told me, “You can expect anything with this regime, and Kasparov has been very vocal and very personal in his criticism of Putin. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear about something terrible happening to him. And where will the evidence be? Remember that Trotsky’s assassin, Señor Ramon Mercader, was sent to get him in Mexico by the K.G.B. and was secretly made a Hero of the Soviet Union. No one knew the truth for decades.”

When I asked Kasparov if he feared for his life, he nodded gravely and said, “I do. The only thing I can try to do is reduce my risk. I can’t avoid the risk altogether. They watch everything I do in Moscow, or when I travel to places like Murmansk or Voronezh or Vladimir. I don’t eat or drink at places I’m not familiar with. I avoid flying with Aeroflot”—the Russian national airline. “It doesn’t help in the end if they really decide to go after you. But, if they did, it would be really messy. And not just because of the bodyguards. There would be a huge risk for the Kremlin if anything happens to me, God forbid, because the blood would be on Putin’s hands. It’s not that they have an allergy to blood, but it creates a bad image, or makes it worse than it already is.”

While the Russian opposition squabbles in various corners and kitchens of downtown Moscow, Vladimir Putin glides serenely, from victory to victory, along a petrodollar slick. His popularity rating is pegged at around eighty per cent, and the image of Russia abroad and at home is no longer one of imperial dissolution.

Certainly, Putin has been lucky. Russia is second only to Saudi Arabia in petroleum production and leads the world in the production of natural gas. Without Russian gas, much of Europe freezes in its bed. Oil prices have nearly tripled since 2000. Real incomes and G.D.P. continue to grow. Unlike during the Yeltsin years, pensions and state salaries have, in general, been paid and have increased. A crushing multibillion-dollar foreign debt has been paid off. As recently as five years ago, knowing analysts would dismiss the shimmering signs of wealth in Moscow—the wildfire construction projects; the new hotels, luxury stores, and restaurants; the streets clogged with Mercedes-Benzes and Bentleys—and describe them as phenomena limited solely to a tiny, criminalized upper crust. Now nearly every big urban center, from Kaliningrad, in the west, to Vladivostok, in the far east, has seen considerable growth and the first signs of a middle class. Kasparov, though, points to the widening gap between rich and poor, persistent poverty in the provinces, and the absence of human rights as “the key reasons this regime will inevitably collapse.”

No less important than reversing the direction of the economy is that Putin has emboldened the national psychology. In the early years of the Yeltsin era, Russians devoured American pop culture, and the political class was eager to accept the counsel of the White House and Western economic advisers. In time, many Russians felt that Yeltsin was following America’s lead in everything from arms control to monetary policy. Now that the U.S. has foundered on so many fronts—in Iraq, on questions of torture and domestic surveillance—the Kremlin reacts severely to what it perceives as American lectures on democracy. A judo expert, Putin is often able to exploit the moral and executive disasters of the Bush Administration and flip America over his hip. Last February, at a Munich security conference, Putin criticized the United States for trying to establish a “unipolar” world. Putin has adopted a haughty, derisive tone toward the West. “Of course, I am an absolutely true democrat,” he remarked recently. “The tragedy is that I am alone. There are no such other democrats in the world. The Americans torture at Guantánamo, and in Europe the police use gas against protesters. Sometimes protesters are killed in the streets. We have, incidentally, a moratorium on the death penalty, which is often enforced in other G-8 countries. Let us not be hypocrites as far as democratic freedoms and human rights.” Putin’s spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, told me that the West “wants Russia to somehow return to the nineties, when Russia was weak and could not resist. It is always comfortable to have a weak Russia next to wealthy Europe. But Russia is no longer on the brink of disintegration.”

Putin sees himself as the new tsar, who, after suffering the humiliation of a lost empire, has restored strength and confidence to Russia. With the price of oil at eighty-two dollars a barrel, there is a sense of global reordering. “People feel that Putin can speak up to the United States,” Tanya Lokshina, a human-rights expert, said. “He can give us an independent politics and we can even blackmail a lot of countries with our oil and gas.”

The reality is they can't even prevent us creating an independent Kosovo in their own backyard.

Posted by Orrin Judd at October 2, 2007 2:59 PM