Word: sovietize
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...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...
...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...
Dmitrievsky and others are seeking to 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...
...anyone noticed? Some dissidents complain that, now that the cold war is over, Russia can get away with anything. "At least in the Soviet Union times there was a steady drumbeat of people in the West talking about the problem. Today, lots of Russian activists feel isolated," says Gill. That's not to say there's no support; the European Union and the Council of Europe hold regular discussions about human-rights issues with Russian authorities, and Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, recently raised the matter of Khodorkovsky's imprisonment directly with Putin, saying the conditions of the oil boss...
...bleak. Western leaders may be less inclined to support dissidents than they once were, but it is easier than ever for those opposed to Putin to get their message out. In Soviet times, dissidents had to smuggle their news and thoughts to a wider audience through surreptitious meetings with foreign reporters or crudely printed tracts. Today, any blogger with a grievance can become a dissident, and the Internet is the new samizdat. And in the past two years alone, Russians have lodged almost 20,000 individual grievance cases at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France; some...