Dissent, Russian Style

"It has always been too easy in Russia to put a man in prison."--Alexander Kerensky (1881-1970), Prime Minister of the pre-Bolshevik Russian Provisional Government (1917)

Hundreds of people were arrested in Moscow and St. Petersburg this weekend trying to protest the squelching of democratic freedom under President Putin. One of the leaders of the protest world-chess master, Gary Kasparov, was also detained and fined. It's not clear how many people were beaten for exercising their rights, but the picture above makes it clear this was no picnic. 900 soldiers and cops in Moscow versus 3,000 protesters. Guess who won?

Although Putin's favorable ratings are right up there in the 70 percent margin, riot police and soldiers took desperate steps to stop the disparate political marchers, working under the banner of "The Other Russia", from marching in Moscow' Pushkin Square. It makes one wonder how Putin, who is due to step down in this next March, would have handled the situation if he had bad poll ratings. Would blood have flowed in the streets of St. Petersburg, as it did in January, 1905, when Father Gipon, an Orthodox Priest, led a peaceful protest to the Czar's Winter Palace. His followers were mowed down by mounted troops swinging swords at helpless women and children. This type of "whiff of grapeshot" treatment of dissenters seems to appeal to Russian political culture and the need for a man of strength to show who's boss.

Gipon's "defeat" did result as one of the catalysts for the Revolution of 1905, the first successful one of its type in Russian history and some liberalization did take place. A national parliament, The Duma, was allowed. But the heavy hand of the Romanov dynasty still held the ultiimate say for the next dozen years.

This weekend, force from the Kremlin was a little more subtle, with water cannons and such, but the results are the same: you learn to heel to the Boss in the Kremlin or else. Very little independent media is left in Russia, for instance, and the Democratic hopes of a decade ago seem to have been checked.

In the 1990's, I was happy to see Russia becoming a freer nation, with another Duma for the first time since the years before the October Revolution and the Civil War between Reds and Whites. Of course, Boris Yelstin's party, "My Home is Russia", was corrupt and cronyish and there were economic problems as one would expect from a huge country that had had a centrally planned economy for seventy years. But with journalists and disenters being assassinated under mysterious circumstances today, one wonders if that will be looked back upon as "the good old days" for human rights activists.

There was a brief period in 1917 when neither the Czar not Lenin ruled the nation, but a provisional government headed by the moderate socialist Kerensky. But, because of the Old Russian Empire's great human losses after three years of fighting in the Great War, and the fact that Russia was economically and politically backward from Western and Central Europe, Kerensky and his followers couldn't keep Russia on the path to political freedom.

Ninety years later, I don't think the current leadership is even interested in that path.