On September 3rd a disturbing number of negative developments in the area of human rights and democracy have were reported in Russia.

First, Human Rights Watch issued a report detailing how Russian prosecutors railroaded two former detainees at Guantanamo Bay that the U.S. foolishly released to Russia’s clutches when Russia claimed they were terrorists. The sham trials that resulted were pathetic spectacles of the classic Neo-Soviet variety, based on “confessions” that were beaten out of the suspects. HRW stated: “Police in Russia frequently use torture and ill-treatment to extract confessions.” It concluded that torture is so omnipresent in Russia that it disqualifies the country from receiving extradited prisoners under the Convention Against Torture to which the U.S. is a signatory. Reading the article, one has the marked impression of a barbaric, third-world political system, not the advanced system of a G-8 country.

On the same day, Reuters reported that ???????Russian police broke up a human rights campaigners’ rally calling on President Vladimir Putin to tell the whole truth about the deaths of more than 300 hostages in the Beslan school siege two years ago. Special police dispersed a rally of mourning staged by some 80 human rights activists who gathered in Moscow near the headquarters of the FSB security service. Many human rights activists and some victims’ relatives believe that a botched rescue operation contributed to the deaths and that the authorities have deliberately covered up mistakes made by senior officials overseeing the operation.??????? Over the past few weeks, the Showtime cable network has been airing its brilliant documentary ???????Three Days in September??????? (narrated by Julia Roberts) about the Russian government????????s gross malfeasance and callous disregard of human life during the tragedy. For example, the film reminds us that there was only one meeting between the terrorists and the government during the four days of the crisis; that Putin spent virtually no time in Beslan when he visited in the aftermath and did not go to the site at all (the pictures of Putin’s cold, shark-like eyes as he visits the wounded in their hospital beds is perfectly ghastly); that one of the terrorists helped save the life of one of the children during the frenzied attack by government forces; that the government needed nearly half a day to subdue the two-dozen terrorists in the building; and that the government lied brazenly during the crisis about how many children were inside. Of course, this film has not received an airing in Russia, so that people outside Russia know more about the crisis than the Russians themselves, because the Russian people choose to close their eyes to the outrageous actions of their government. The same is true for what goes on inside Chechnya. All those interested in the Beslan crisis and in the subject of democracy in Russia are urged to watch this heart-wrenching film; in context, the Kremlin????????s actions in breaking up the human rights rally are eerily Neo-Soviet in character.

As if that was not enough, a third report on the same day from the Canadian Press (as well as many other outlets) documented a horrifying racist rampage in one of Russia????????s northern cities. CP stated:

A mob rampaged through a northern Russian town, setting fires, smashing windows and throwing stones in a second night of ethnically motivated violence sparked by a deadly fight last week, authorities, activists and news reports said. Hours of violence broke out after thousands of people gathered in the centre of Kondopoga, about 1,000 kilometres north of Moscow, demanding that police expel Chechens and other ethnic minorities or investigate them for criminal ties. Russian television networks showed daylight footage of young men throwing rocks that shattered windows at a restaurant that has been a focal point of the disorder, as a line of riot police carrying shields stood on the street outside, and of a fire raging through the restaurant’s second storey after dark.

Coming on the heels of a bomb blast in an ethnic market in a northern suburb of Moscow, these events clearly mark yet another drastic escalation in Slavic violence against non-Slavs. Time magazine recently ran two major pieces by a Russian reporter which began with the sub-headline ???????More and more Russians believe their country is for whites only, and that’s leading to deadly violence??????? thus giving national play to the shocking legacy of racial hostility that Publius Pundit detailed some time ago.

These events, occurring in a numbing barrage, clearly indicate that the human rights situation is beginning to spiral out of control in Russia. The Kremlin is cracking down on the few foreign NGOs which form the bastion of resistance within Russia itself as well as on the few remaining independent media outlets which release information about them. The world must move to halt or at least impede these developments, which signal the rapid rise of a Neo-Soviet state capable of inflicting decades of misery upon the world just as did the original USSR that many foolishly thought consigned to the dustbin of history. Those who said that Russia could ???????never go back??????? to the dark days of Soviet oppression must now seriously reconsider their Pollyannaish prognosis.

Kim Zigfeld publishes the Russia blog La Russophobe.