Word: putin
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...alarm of many Russians and some in the West, the old fear is returning. It is fueled by such things as the lists of targeted Russian activists that circulate on the websites of shadowy ultranationalist groups, and also by recent measures taken by the Putin administration, including a squeeze on the independent press and new laws that could be used to silence opposition voices. "There may no longer be shortages of groceries and long lines at every street corner, but Russia today is still a place where human rights and freedom are in short supply," says Ludmilla Alexeyeva, a doyenne...
Important though the conflict in Chechnya has been in focusing activism, 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...
...that familiar refrain is not the whole story. Some of the parallels being drawn between now and the 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...
...protect and reclaim freedoms won in the final years of the Soviet Union, when Mikhail Gorbachev introduced his policy of glasnost, or greater openness. Later, in the immediate post-Soviet era, Boris Yeltsin presided over a scrappy, imperfect democratic flowering. Activists say that, since he took office in 2000, Putin has tried to bottle up the explosion of interest in human rights, free speech and democratic accountability that took place in the 1990s. Says Vladimir Ryzhkov, one of the few remaining independents in parliament: "The regime has achieved a state of total manipulation of the people." Most key media outlets...
Critically, this year has seen two pieces of highly controversial legislation. One law requires all nongovernmental organizations (ngos) to reregister with the state and submit detailed plans about their activities; a second revises an earlier law that attempts to control political extremism. (Both were used against Dmitrievsky.) Putin has said that the extremism law will improve Russian security in an era of terrorism, while Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov asserts that the ngo legislation is actually less restrictive than similar laws in France, Finland and Israel. Foreign groups such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch that have reregistered...