Life in Putin's Russia

Is this the legacy of the Soviet past? Not at all. In the Soviet Union, criminals were thrown into prison along with the dissidents. Is it the legacy of former president Boris Yeltsin? There was nothing like this under Yeltsin.

This is the distinctive nature of the Putin regime.

Under Putin, the Russian businessman has been transformed into game being hunted by people in epaulets. Who was the first victim of this hunt? Oil company executive Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who was sentenced to eight years in prison for tax evasion in 2005, and his company, Yukos, which the government dismantled and sold off after his arrest. Who was the hunter? Then-president Putin.

The right to commit crime has become part of official privilege. If the victim doesn't raise a fuss, no one is punished. If the victim appeals to the public, he or she is harshly punished. The very fact of appealing to the public is perceived as a challenge to the regime. But who laid down these rules of the game? Who never punishes his friends? Putin.

In the republic of Ingushetia, death squads are executing people. They're being shot in front of witnesses, in crowded places, in market squares, at bus stops, and then weapons are being planted on them and they're being photographed as dead "terrorists." In some instances, the crowd has shielded the intended victims. In others, the local Ingush police have nearly beaten the Russian executioners to death. Who's being killed? Those on the so-called Wahhabi lists. These lists were compiled at the order of the FSB (the successor to the KGB) soon after the Moscow theater massacre of 2002, in which Chechen terrorists took an audience hostage and 130 people died when Russian special forces stormed the theater.

But who ordered these lists to be drawn up? Who would think, to stop the problem of terrorism in the northern Caucasus from spreading, of executing fundamentalist Muslims wholesale, simply for their convictions, not for any crimes that they may have committed? Such an order couldn't have been given without Putin's knowledge. In the 1970s, then-Israeli prime minister Golda Meir had those who had taken part in the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics annihilated. But since the Moscow theater incident, Putin has gone her one better -- he has even wiped out people who had nothing to do with it.

Each such execution, however, has created more terrorists than it has eliminated, and for all intents and purposes, Russia has lost control of Ingushetia -- the only republic where authorities have fully followed the execution order. Who will dare to inform the great Putin, the former KGB man, the courageous hero, who happily sits for photographs in the cockpit of a fighter plane and poses bare-chested on a fishing trip?

In the West, people read that Putin has restored Russia's power and strengthened the ruling hierarchy. This is the image that the PR agencies he has hired are trying to project. There may not be democracy in Putin's Russia, they say, but there is order.

Don't buy it. The Russian authorities aren't in control of the country -- unless we consider their ability to throw any businessman in prison and seize his company to be control. And yet these guys really think they're strong -- and that the measure of a ruler's strength is the amount of cash in his bank accounts.

latynina@novayagazeta.ru

Julia Latynina is a Russian journalist, novelist and radio host. This article was translated from the Russian by Outlook assistant editor Zofia Smardz.