Ranks are beginning to close on the question of Vladimir Putin????????s Russia in the West????????s pro-democracy circles. The question is no longer whether action is required but rather what action, how and when. Last week, Publius Pundit documented the importance of two watershed events in Russia, the murder of journalist Anna Politkovskaya and the onset of a Russian pogrom against Georgian children in Russia, in signaling a sea change in the country????????s political course. On the same day we published, the respected pro-liberty think tank CATO Institute announced that it was creating a new Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity and hiring neo-Soviet dissident and former Kremlin insider Andrei Illarionov to run it. Illarionov was quoted as saying bluntly: ???????One can see those who attempt to dissent or protest end up either sewing mittens in Krasnokamensk or being struck dead by a bullet in her own lift.??????? The one sewing the mittens is oil oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, arrested and sent to Siberia the moment he began making noises about seeking the presidency; Illarionov, a former economic adviser to Putin????????s Kremlin, and Putin????????s former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov, now an opposition candidate for president in 2008, are the two leading voices of opposition in neo-Soviet Russia, so the CATO move was a dramatic statement in favor of the defense of liberty and democracy in Russia. In fact, it was a direct challenge to the Kremlin.

In the days that followed, two highly respected conservative publications — on in America and one in Britain — have joined us in expressing utmost concern in the most serious language (including the ???????f-word??????? and the ???????m-word???????) that Russia is now a runaway state headed for anti-democratic disaster. We welcome discussion in the comments section as to possible responses the democratic world can make to this crisis situation, which can ultimately have dire consequences for world peace if left unattended.

1. The F-word

On October 12th, reviewing the worsening showdown between Russia and Georgia, the Economist blasted Russia with the ???????f-word??????? ???????? that is, fascism.

The Kremlin loathes Georgia, once a cherished vassal, with the special wrath reserved for wayward loved ones. To the Russians, Mikhail Saakashvili, Georgia’s president, is an American puppet, hell-bent on taking his country into NATO, and the arch-carrier of the germ of post-Soviet revolution. For his part, Mr Saakashvili is irate over Russia’s meddlesome backing for South Ossetia and Abkhazia, two regions of Georgia that broke away in the early 1990s. Georgia’s arrest last month of a handful of Russian intelligence officers (terrorists, insists Mr Saakashvili) may have been a counter-provocation, aimed at garnering international sympathy. If that was the plan, it probably worked: the Russians went berserk. Even though the men were swiftly deported, Russia recalled its ambassador, evacuated other Russians, severed transport and postal links with Georgia????????and then imposed a raft of punitive measures against the legions of ethnic Georgians (many of them Russian citizens) living and working in Russia itself. In Moscow, hundreds have been arrested and deported (pictured above); celebrities with Georgian names harassed; Georgian-owned businesses raided and closed. The manager of one Georgian restaurant says the staff are in hiding; another says the water has been turned off. The police, meanwhile, asked Moscow schools for lists of children with Georgian surnames, though Dmitri Peskov, a Kremlin spokesman, terms the request a ???????disgusting??????? excess of zeal. Now we understand how Chechens living here feel, says a doctor, who like many Moscow Georgians is a refugee from Abkhazia. New immigration laws, explicitly targeted against Georgians, are promised; so are restrictions on the remittances that help prop up Georgia’s economy; Russians allege they contribute to its militarisation. Another hike in the price of Russian gas seems likely (there was one last winter, along with mysterious simultaneous explosions in both export pipelines). Mr Saakashvili may have underestimated the further damage the Kremlin can do to Georgia. He may also have over-estimated the outside help he can expect. ???????Russia sees Georgia as a bastion of the West,??????? he complains, ???????but the West doesn’t.??????? For all that, Georgia will survive the confrontation. But can Russia?

The Economist sees neo-Soviet (that is, self-destructive) behavior in Putin????????s actions: ???????The Kremlin’s escalation of it is an extreme example of another Soviet habit Mr Putin has inherited: using foreign enemies as scapegoats and tools in domestic politics. Past targets have included America, Ukraine, and foreign do-gooders allegedly engaged in espionage. This row comes as anxiety mounts over the question of the succession to Mr Putin when his second (and supposedly final) presidential term ends in 2008. A foreign threat, even a bogus one, will help keep the electorate pliant, whatever the Kremlin decides to do.???????

But that much hysteria is apparently not enough to satisfy Putin, who is increasing fanning the flames of racism documented by Publius Pundit months ago. The Economist reminds us:

Until recently, the Kremlin has tried to ???????ride the tiger??????? of extreme nationalism, as Dmitri Trenin, of the Carnegie think-tank in Moscow, puts it, through a risky double strategy: portraying itself as a bulwark against extremism, but also trying to harness nationalist instincts for its own ends. It is widely thought to have created the nationalist Motherland party to siphon votes away from the Communists. (Motherland is now being merged with two other parties into what will become the main ???????opposition???????????????almost certainly a completely loyal one). Mr Putin seems now to be giving the tiger freer rein.For example, he last week enjoined his ministers to protect the interests of ???????Russia’s native population??????? against the ethnic gangs who, he said, control the street markets. Such gangs are ???????a reality???????, says the Kremlin’s Mr Peskov, in justification. But after a racist bombing in a Moscow market killed a dozen people in August, Mr Putin’s remarks were at best inadvisable; and in what is????????however much some ethnic Russians might wish otherwise????????a multi-ethnic country, potentially disastrous.

As the Economist sees it, this clearly ???????demonstrates Mr Putin’s failure to create the ???????dictatorship of the law??????? that he once promised. Untrammelled by normal constraints such as an independent judiciary or a genuine opposition, the Kremlin makes and breaks laws as it pleases. The growth of racist violence is both evidence and result of a broader lawlessness. Lack of faith in government institutions, and especially in the police, says Eduard Ponarin of St Petersburg’s European University, leads some to seek other forms of redress.???????

The conclusion? A terrifying one: ???????Yegor Gaidar, a former prime minister, draws an analogy with inter-war Germany, which like post-Soviet Russia experienced economic chaos, then a period of stabilisation in which post-imperial nostalgia took hold. Vladimir Ryzhkov, one of the few remaining independent parliamentarians, worries that Mr Putin seems to be switching from an imperial idea of Russia towards one more resembling a ???????Reich.???????? History also offers a term to describe the direction in which Russia sometimes seems to be heading: a word that captures the paranoia and self-confidence, lawlessness and authoritarianism, populism and intolerance, and economic and political nationalism that now characterise Mr Putin’s administration. It is an over-used word, and a controversial one, especially in Russia. It is not there yet, but Russia sometimes seems to be heading towards fascism.???????

2. The M-word

Shortly after the Economist fired its warning shot came another, this time from the other side of the Atlantic and the Weekly Standard. Enlisting the services of Russia expert Anders ?????slund, the Standard dropped the ???????m-word??????? — murder. Headlined ???????Putin gets away with murder,??????? it noted an eeiry set of ???????coincidences:???????

In Russia, gangsters have the macabre custom of making a birthday present of a murder. On Vladimir Putin’s 54th birthday, one of his fiercest domestic critics, the journalist Anna Politkovskaya, was shot to death in her apartment building in central Moscow. She worked for the weekly Novaya Gazeta, Russia’s last independent newspaper. Its deputy editor was murdered a couple of years ago, and the killer was never found. Although Politkovskaya had been tailed by the FSB for years and her murderer was captured on film, he got away. The Kremlin has made no comment. The prosecutor general claims to have personally taken charge of the investigation, but such investigations seldom result in an arrest.

Then it observed: ???????In the last year, President Putin has exported ground-to-air missiles to Iran that can shoot down American F-16s. He has exported arms to Syria that were successfully used by Hezbollah against Israel. A year ago, the Kremlin cheered when Uzbekistan evicted a large U.S. air base, and now it is encouraging Kyrgyzstan to do the same. Meanwhile, state-controlled Russian media spew out nationalist and anti-Western propaganda. Every evening after the first state channel’s main newscast, one of the Kremlin’s foremost propagandists, Mikhail Leontiev, delivers his daily diatribe against the West.??????? The conclusion couldn????????t be more clear: putin is a murderer and war monger. Strangely enough, the Standard was actually being rather moderate; it could have mentioned the hundreds of thousands of AK-47 assault weapons Putin agreed to ship to Venezuela, the large packages of financial assistance he recently inked with Cuba and the Hamas terrorist regime in Palestine and his repeated attempts to undermine the soveriegnty of pro-West governments in Ukraine and Lithuania using the tactic of energy blackmail. The Econmist agreed: ???????Whoever killed Politkkovskaya, Mr Putin shares the blame for having made independent journalism both rare and perilous.???????

The Standard????????s conclusion was exceedingly blunt: ???????To consider Putin a strategic partner or even ally would be to close one’s eyes to reality. If Putin persistently behaves like an enemy of both the United States and the E.U., we had better pick up the gauntlet. Only a fool or a coward would do otherwise. The fundamental problem of Western policy toward Russia is that it is still based on the idea that the Cold War is over. Alas, this truth has become obsolete, as Putin has gone about reviving one feature after another of a police state, including authoritarian rule and an anti-Western foreign policy.???????

The Standard warns us not to treat Putin as if he were Boris Yeltsin, who it refers to as ???????a democrat, as Leon Aron shows in his excellent biography.??????? Yeltsin is blamed for delivering Russian assets into the hands of Russia????????s allegedly corrupt oligarchs; few recall Yeltsin????????s reason. He, and his right-hand man Gaidar, warned us that his countrymen were fully capable of choosing to return to the dark days of authoritarianism, and to prevent this he sought to disperse the assets of the Soviet regime as quickly as possible, so that reassembling them would be difficult. Yeltsin was proved right when Putin came to power, and but for Yeltsin????????s actions both the West and the people of Russia could well be dealing with a much more formidable dictator. Some may ask: But didn????????t Yeltsin name Putin as his successor? Indeed he did. But at the time, Yeltsin was being threatened from all sides with prosecution and imprisonment, a fate similar to what oil oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky actually met. Yeltsin was old, infirm and often inebriated when he stepped from power, and may have been forced or fooled into supporting Putin. When the nomination was made, most of the West simply burst into laughter, sure than at unknown KGB spy could not become the second freely elected President in Russia????????s history. The West was wrong then, and in reacting too slowly to Putin is just as wrong now. Putin????????s election should have signaled an emergency situation, and not only because Putin was a proud KGB spy. At the time, the Russian people professed to loathe Yeltsin, blaming him for the downturn in the Russian economy in the wake of the Soviet collapse, yet they followed his word like lemmings and annointed his chosen sucessor. The West should have known then that dictatorship was coming, and moved to interrupt it. Russia????????s feeble economic state would have made it particularly amenable to concerted Western influence.

Even now, loud warnings are being sounded and largely ignored. The Standard reminds us: ???????Putin talks about democracy while systematically destroying it, as Berkeley political scientist Steven Fish has detailed in Democracy Derailed in Russia.??????? It notes how Putin backed down when the West strongly supported the Orange Revolution in Ukraine and when it sought to use energy blackmail there; this contrasts markedly with the West????????s lukewarm support for Georgia as it faces an even more brazen challenge to its soveriegnty from Russia. The Standard states: ???????Right now, Russia is apparently preparing for a war against the independent former Soviet republic of Georgia. With no justification whatsoever, Putin personally has accused Georgia of state terrorism. He likened the arrest of four senior Russian military spies in Georgia to the acts of Stalin’s henchman Lavrenty Beria. Russia has evacuated its diplomats and citizens from Georgia and imposed a nearly complete embargo. Major Russian military maneuvers are under way.???????

3. A rogue by any other name

Asking questions like whether Russia is or isn????????t facsist, is or isn????????t neo-Soviet, and whether President Vladimir Putin is a murderer may seem like provocation to the Kremlin????????s KGB crowd, but in fact they????????re not. That crowd is only too pleased to have its potential rivals sitting about the parlor debating what names should be applied to Russia????????s conduct while they literally snuff out the last remaining vestiges of democracy in Russia, achieve a strangehold on the main economic arteries and sock away the nation????????s treasure trove in secret coffers and the armed forces while keeping the nation on life support, thus weak and easy to control. They????????re happy to have us call them any names we like, so long as concerted action remains only contemplation. So many times we have seen regimes of this kind rise before our eyes while we stood slack-jawed, moving to action only at the crisis stage. Will this be yet another?

John Hall, senior Washington correspondent of Media General News Service, wrote the following about Anna Politkovskaya:

After she was found brutally murdered in her Moscow apartment building, most of her obituaries identified her as a war reporter who seemed to court danger. She was far more than that. Those who might have taken the trouble to read her book, “Putin’s Russia,” would have seen she was a chronicler of Russia’s steady decline into authoritarian rule under President Vladimir Putin and perhaps his most bitter critic in all of Russia. Her book should have been more widely heralded in the United States, but the diplomatic and journalistic book review establishment here sniffed at it. Foreign Affairs magazine called it “stridently indignant.” Other reviewers said she was too provocative in claiming Russia was on its way back to Stalinism. One even suggested she was a “Cassandra.” Perhaps we all needed to be a little more indignant and provocative about Putin’s Russia after his election to a second term. The pity is that Politkovskaya didn’t get as much attention when she was alive as she’s getting now that her voice has been silenced.

It cannot be more diplomatically said, so let????????s repeat it like a mantra: “Perhaps we all needed to be a little more indignant and provocative about Putin’s Russia after his election to a second term.” In other words, perhaps a bit more “russophobia” and Anna would still be alive today, or at least we????????d be in a better position to identify and protect her successor. What seemed to some as strident before the killing may now seem like appeasement.

Kim Zigfeld publishes the Russia blog La Russophobe.