Pushkin Square Crackdown

Why is Vladimir Putin so afraid of a few thousand dissenters?

IN THE DAYS of Mikhail Gorbachev and glasnost, Pushkin Square in central Moscow was the site of historic rallies protesting repressive Soviet rule. On Saturday, international chess champion turned opposition leader Garry Kasparov sat in a Russian lockup after trying, unsuccessfully, to march on the historic square. Joining him in jail were 200 other dissenters. The next day, authorities picked up an organizer of a rally in St. Petersburg before she could even join her compatriots, 120 of whom were also arrested. Their crimes? Attending an unauthorized protest, violating traffic laws or -- the most farcical -- making "anti-constitutional" statements.

Other Russia, an umbrella organization of the country's disparate anti-Kremlin opposition groups, has been organizing such demonstrations in cities across Russia over the past few weeks, despite government efforts to stop them. Last weekend's protests were to be the most prominent yet, occurring in the country's two largest cities. In the end, about 2,000 people showed up in Moscow on Saturday -- to be greeted by 9,000 police and Interior Ministry officers. Another 3,000 attended Sunday's demonstration in St. Petersburg. In both cities, Russian authorities beat groups of protesters with clubs.

Ostensibly, President Vladimir Putin remains popular in Russia. He has presided over impressive economic growth. So why is he so frightened, so unwilling to allow a few thousand opponents to peaceably assemble in central Moscow? The answer ironically may lie in his success at choking off freedoms in his country. The media have been muzzled, and many local elections have been eliminated; the normal mechanisms for people to express their desires and complaints in a healthy society are gone. As a result, to gauge public sentiment Mr. Putin is left with little but the reports of his old colleagues in the former KGB, and that may encourage a tendency toward paranoia.

U.S. and European leaders have responded with varying degrees of indignation to the disturbing images of truncheon-wielding police thrashing unarmed students. White House spokeswoman Dana Perino called the Russian authorities' reaction "heavy-handed" and "unacceptable," while a State Department spokesman said, "It raises a question about whether or not those opposition parties, those opposition figures are able to freely and peacefully express their opinions in the context of contested elections." Unfortunately, it does not raise that question; it provides a sad and obvious answer.