It is time to end the fiction that Russian President Vladimir Putin's "dictatorship of law" has made post-communist Russia any less lawless. The murder of Anna Politkovskaya, one of Russia's bravest and best journalists, a woman who dared to expose the brutal murders committed by Russian troops in Chechnya, gives final proof that Putin has delivered nothing more than a run-of-the-mill dictatorship with the usual contempt for law.
This recognition is a timely one for the world to arrive at, particularly for Europe. Germany's Foreign Ministry is preparing a policy on Russian/German relations that will enshrine official indifference to Putin's lawlessness as being in the national interest of the most powerful member of the European Union.
But indifference becomes appeasement when it encourages Putin to pursue his lawless ways in the international arena, as in his current campaign to strangle Georgia's economy.
The killing of Politkovskaya has given rise to an eerie sense of deja vu: just as in the KBG's heyday, people simply disappear in Putin's Russia. Politkovskaya's murder is the country's third killing with political overtones in three weeks. Enver Ziganshin, the chief engineer of BP Russia, was shot to death in Irkutsk on Sept. 30. Andrei Kozlov, the deputy governor of Russia's central bank who was leading a campaign against financial fraud, was assassinated on Sept. 14.
The fact that Russia's Prosecutor, General Yuri Chaika, took over the investigation into Politkovskaya's killing, as he did with the murder of Kozlov, doesn't inspire hope, as such senior-level involvement would in any real democracy. In fact, the involvement of the highest level of Russia's government is almost a guarantee that the killers will never be found.
The implications of Politkovskaya's murder look particularly grim in light of the fact that she was a powerful critic of Russia's president. In her articles for one of the few remaining independent papers in Moscow, Novaya Gazeta, and in her books Putin's Russia: Life in a Failing Democracy and A Dirty War: A Russian Reporter in Chechnya, Politkovskaya wrote of the vanishing freedoms that are the signature characteristic of Putin's presidency.
As shown by the exile of the former media tycoons Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinky and the imprisonment of oil magnate Mikhail Khodorkovsky, three fates await Putin's enemies: exile, imprisonment or the grave.
I'm not accusing Putin's government of orchestrating the contract killing of Politkovskaya. After all, as a campaigning investigative journalist she made many people angry in addition to Putin, not least of which is Chechen Prime Minister Ramzan Kadyrov, whom she accused of a policy of kidnapping for ransom.
But even if Putin's associates had nothing to do with Politkovskaya being gunned down in an elevator of her apartment building in the center of Moscow, his contempt for law created the climate in which the murder was carried out. Like the murder of archbishop Thomas Beckett in the Canterbury Cathedral many centuries ago, the crime was committed in the clear belief that it would please the king.
Given what Politkovskaya represented -- the responsibility of a democratic press to question the Kremlin and its policies -- the government should have made certain that nothing bad happened to her. Putin's Russia has already lost 12 leading journalists to murder in the past six years. None of those crimes has been solved, which would not be the case if Putin's "dictatorship of law" was anything more than a PR strategy.
The six-year period since Putin arrived in the Kremlin has been a time of deeply conflicting signals. On one hand, the world sees a young, educated leader pledging to modernize Russia, particularly in terms of bringing its law enforcement and judicial practices into line with international norms.
On the other hand, the president watches in silence while his ex-colleagues in Russia's FSB security service (the former KGB) provide no security to those murdered and launch a series of notorious espionage cases against journalists, scientists and environmental activists. These "neo-spies" include journalist Gregory Pasko, arms control expert Igor Sutyagin, diplomat Valentin Moiseyev, physicist Valentin Danilov, and others.
The supposedly civilizing influence of being a Western partner -- chairing a G-8 summit in Saint Petersburg for example -- seems to have been lost on Putin's Kremlin cabal.
Once again, exposure to Western values has delivered another Potemkin Village: Russia presents a facade of laws and democratic institutions, but behind that cardboard surface the same arbitrary brutes rule.
The danger for the world is that Putin's lawlessness is being exported. Across Russia's neighbors, a form of criminalized diplomacy is taking root. Look at Putin's attempt to rig Ukraine's previous presidential election and the on-again, off-again criminal charges brought against opposition leader Yuliya Tymoshenko. Look at the rogue breakaway regions in Moldova and Georgia that exist only because of the Kremlin's backing. Look at how the Kremlin seeks to blackmail its neighbors by threatening their energy supplies.
Every policeman knows that when you ignore criminal behavior, criminals grow bolder. It is past time for the world to recognize Putin for what he is: a man who is taking Russia back into the shadows.
The world must now ponder that old Latin maxim, qui tacet consentere videtur (silence means consent), and ask itself if it is wise to quietly consent to Putin's construction of a lawless energy superpower.
Nina Khrushcheva teaches international affairs at New School University and is the author of a forthcoming book on Vladimir Nabokov.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
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