And this was not chess, with its cold-blooded calculations. This fight was about honor and morality. I could not ask people to protest in the streets if I was not there with them. At the rally on Saturday I had said our slogan must be “We must overcome our fear” and I was obliged to stand by these words.
It is also essential to point out that these arrests were only the tip of the iceberg, the small fraction that can be seen. Such things were taking place all over Russia on a daily basis. Opposition activists, or just those who happened to be in the way of the administration, were being harassed and arrested regularly on false charges of drug possession, extremism, or the latest trend: for owning illegal software.
During my five days in jail I had the chance to speak with many of the “ordinary consumers” of Kremlin propaganda. They were generally sympathetic and showed no signs of believing the many lies the Kremlin and the youth groups it sponsors have spread about the opposition. For them I was still the Soviet champion and the idea that I was an “American agent” sounded as ludicrous as it was.
So why was Mr. Putin so scared if things were going so well? He is, or at least he still was back then, a rational and pragmatic person, not prone to melodrama. He knew the numbers, so why the brutality and heavy-handed campaigning if he knew he and United Russia were going to win easily?
The answer is that he was becoming aware of how brittle his power structure was. Instead of sounding like the tsar, high above the crowd, he was starting to sound like just another paranoid autocrat, surrounded by enemies. As George Bernard Shaw wrote, “The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.”
And so demagoguery it was and demagoguery it continued to be. A violent pro-Putin youth group, Nashi, had already released a poster celebrating Putin’s “crushing victory” in the December 2 parliamentary elections. It also warned against the “enemies of the people of Russia,” me included, attempting to disqualify the results. These terms jibed nicely with Putin’s own rhetoric of threats and fear. The ground was being prepared for greater oppression.
Along with our public protests, The Other Russia also worked to establish a communications structure beyond the long reach of the Kremlin. We wanted to expose the daily crimes that were occurring and get this information into the hands of the right people in the press and the governments of the free world. As time went on, and the crackdown on civil society and public protest got stronger and stronger, I came to believe that this international outreach was the most promising avenue of attack. Putin benefited so much from economic and political engagement with the West that he was practically unassailable at home. Cutting him off from that foreign embrace was a priority. Unfortunately, the leaders of the world’s so-called leading democracies showed little interest in living up to their professed ideals.
Nothing symbolized the lack of will to stand up to Putin than the G8 Summit in St. Petersburg held July 15-17, 2006. The G7 was an informal club more than an organization, a strangely casual group that brought together the leaders of the seven largest industrialized democracies. (Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United States, as first met in 1976. Brazil and India have recently surpassed Canada and Italy on the GDP list, or will soon.) Boris Yeltsin was invited as a sort of honorary participant in 1998, a tradition that was carried over to Vladimir Putin. Russia hosting the meeting in 2008 represented its official entry into the club, which many had already called the G8 for years, instead of the awkward “G7+1.”
This was the cast: Stephen Harper, Canada; Jacques Chirac, France; Angela Merkel, Germany; Romano Prodi, Italy; Junichiro Koizumi, Japan; Tony Blair, United Kingdom; George W. Bush, United States. The president of the European Commission was also usually invited and Jose Manuel Barroso attended the summit at the Constantine Palace in St. Petersburg.
It was a grand moment for Putin and an equally dismal one for Russian democracy. Putin loved to see and be seen with these paragons of democracy as much as he despised what they supposedly stood for. It had been a nice gesture to invite Yeltsin to attend in the hope that all additional engagement with Russia would be good for everyone. Instead, the G8 became a perfect example of the damage engagement could do. Putin exploited every photo-op and handshake to flaunt these democratic credentials at home. It was difficult enough to communicate the opposition message of democracy to the Russian people without their seeing Putin on every channel being embraced as an equal by the leaders of the free world. I maintained the hope that the West would find its collective backbone and that Russia’s participation would be made contingent on our actually being a democracy. Instead, it took Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014 to finally get Russia’s G8 membership suspended.
While President Bush was in St. Petersburg he met with a group of Russian NGO directors and opposition figures—at least that’s what he was told. Whether he was aware of it at the time or not, every participant at the meeting had to be preapproved by the Kremlin. No one there would have qualified as an opposition figure in my view, except perhaps for Alekseeva, the former Soviet dissident. As ridiculous as this charade was, Tony Blair wouldn’t even make that token effort and was upstaged by his wife, Cherie Blair, who met with a group of NGO heads during the summit.
When observing the West’s conciliatory dealings with Russia during this period, a favorite quotation from Winston Churchill comes to mind: “However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.” For five years, President Bush had been talking about maintaining an open dialogue with Putin and about how hard he had worked to convince the Russian leader that “it’s in his best interest to adopt Western-style values and universal values.” This sounded quite reasonable, but we didn’t have to go on theory. We had a track record to scrutinize and it was already clear that the strategy of discourse and appeasement toward Russia had failed.
By the time the G8 meeting came around it was long past time for Western leaders to take a harder stance if they wanted their rhetoric about the promotion of democracy in Russia to have any credibility at all. The St. Petersburg summit offered the visiting heads of state a chance to see for themselves how bad things had become. If they had opened their eyes, the leaders who talked so often about receiving “mixed signals” from Russia would have seen that the only mixture that mattered was that of oil, money, and power.
Bush and Europe’s leaders apparently believed it was best to disregard such things for the sake of getting Russia’s cooperation on security and energy. But as Solzhenitsyn foretold, this cynical and morally repugnant stance has also proved to be an entirely ineffective one. Just like old times, Moscow has become an ally of troublemakers and anti-democratic rulers around the world. Nuclear aid to Iran, missile technology to North Korea, military equipment to Sudan, Myanmar, and Venezuela, making friends with Hamas; this was how Putin repaid the West for keeping its mouth shut about human rights in Russia for eight years.
And yet the G7 leaders refused to acknowledge that it was absurd to come to Russia for help with Iran, North Korea, or Hamas when the high energy prices the Putin administration required to keep its hold on power were driven by the tension that comes with every North Korean missile launch and each Iranian nuclear threat. Russia continued to block UN sanctions against these rogue states; the only mystery is why the West continued to treat Putin’s Russia like an ally.
The Europeans in particular also pretended Putin was some species of democrat in order to promote their nations’ business interests. Of course you can expect leaders to support their national interests to a certain extent. In France, Sarkozy promoted Renault and the oil company Total. In Germany, Merkel promoted Mercedes-Benz and Deutsche Telekom. And of course Berlusconi promoted the companies of… Berlusconi.