Now, Kremlin Seeks to Evict Kozlovsky
Filed under: Russia
The website (Russian language, logo at left) of Oleg Kozlovsky's "Oborona" ("Defense") youth opposition group reports that, having failed to keep Kozlovsky in military service (see the interview in our sidebar), it is now seeking to evict his organization from its headquarters. On March 17th, Kozlovsky was contacted by the local police precinct and instructed to vacate an apartment in Moscow which had been rented by the group for the purpose of holding their meetings. Captain Sergei Nikolayev told Kozlovsky explicitly that the basis for the order was the group's objectionable political activities and that he had received copies of the group's publications from the FSB (successor to the KGB). Instructing Kozlovsky to head for the remote suburbs, Nikolayev threatened to visit the premises every day and to find various reasons to forcibly evict the group regardless of their desires. Kozlovsky states that the impression made upon him by the "police officer's" threats was that of a mafioso, and vowed to ignore the warnings and accept the consequences.
Oborona was evicted from their headquarters in 2006, just two weeks after beginning their operations at that location, after armed officers "convinced" the landlord to break the lease. A complaint was made to the local prosecutors officers but, of course, went nowhere.
This move is breathtaking in its stupidity. The Kremlin is driving Oborona underground and martyring them. A strong, confident government would simply ignore them, allowing them to operate openly so they could be easily monitored. But Putin's Kremlin is pathetically weak and fears this group of young people desperately, as Kozlovsky states in his interview, repeatedly confirming this with barbarically crude, bullying moves against them. The Putin regime thinks it shows strength by attempting to snuff out the opposition, but in fact it shows only the most ridiculous weakness. The voice of freedom can no more be snuffed out in Kozlovsky's Russia than it could in Gandhi's India or King's America. Sooner or later, it will prevail. The only question is how much of today's Russia Vladimir Putin will despoil and destroy before it happens.
UPDATE: Kozlovsky writes about the attack on Robert Amsterdam's blog.
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