Word: kondaurov
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Putin, says Alexei Kondaurov, a former KGB general who is now a maverick Duma deputy, is known for keeping score and for a long memory. So the idea that he would want an infuriating gadfly like Litvinenko to disappear is not beyond reason. But the President's defenders scoff at the idea that he might have been involved in Litvinenko's death. Putin, they say, had no need to get rid of Litvinenko; the exile was an irrelevant crank. Milton Bearden, a former CIA spy in Moscow, as well as other experienced intelligence hands, agrees it would be nuts...
...Whatever the agenda of those behind the killings, the effect may be more devastating than they intend. Says former KGB General and now a dissenting Duma member Alexei Kondaurov: "The Litvinenko murder landmarks the precedent of nuclear terrorism. Unless it is resolved, terrorists of any mettle will know they can get away with it." Putin's failure to help resolve that crime will also further institutionalize violence as a tool of political struggle, he believes. "Then, both the state, factions within the state, and opposition forces will habitually resort to murder as a political expediency. This will smash the country...
...Putin's political opponents have a long list of other grievances. They include allegations of torture by the police, pressure on journalists, and what opponents see as an erosion of Russia's democratic institutions. The ranks of the new dissidents are swelled by unlikely recruits - men such as Alexei Kondaurov, who, as a major-general of the kgb's Fifth Main Directorate, was responsible for crushing ideological subversion in Soviet days. Kondaurov is now a member of the Duma's Communist Party faction, and campaigns tirelessly on behalf of his friend and former employer, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who once headed Yukos...
...Kondaurov and others argue that the Russian authorities are terrified of the sort of "people power" that brought Viktor Yushchenko and Mikhail Saakashvili to power in Ukraine and Georgia. He sees a new dissident movement as "the only option," because power in today's Russia is now so concentrated in the hands of the Kremlin that any other opposition is futile. "It's very much the same as the case was in Soviet times," Kondaurov says...
...days of Soviet rule are rhetorical and overblown. Those who are ill at ease in today's Russia for whatever reason can choose to live and work abroad (indeed, many of Putin's critics have decamped to London); an earlier generation could only dream of such freedom. Still, Kondaurov's feeling of claustrophobia - what Victoria Webb of Amnesty International describes as "the shrinking space for individual voices in Russia" - now appears to be widely shared. This year, Stanislav Dmitrievsky was prosecuted and saw his human-rights group, the Russian-Chechen Friendship Society, closed down after its newsletter reprinted speeches...