Staunton, May 14 – Friday May 13th
has “every chance to go down in contemporary Russian history as one of the darkest
pages … on the path to the final imposition of fascism on Russia,” a day that
echoes Hitler’s Kristallnacht in November 1938 that set his regime on the path
to genocide and war, according to Olga Kurnosova.
Her suggestion may seem overblown to
some – after all, many Russia opposition figures and commentators have drawn
this parallel with other events in Putin’s Russia including in particular the
murder of Boris Nemtsov – but both her argument and the fact that others are
supporting it means that it should be taken seriously.
Kurnosova, head of St. Petersburg’s
Civic Front, says that her conclusion arises from several actions that happened
yesterday. “The most important of these”
was the Duma’s approval of tougher anti-extremism measures including giving the
authorities the power to block someone from leaving the country (rusmonitor.com/segodnyashnijj-den-dlya-rossii.html).
Under the new law, the powers that
be can block anyone who has been warned from leaving the country without
getting a court order. This will only
intensify what has already become a reality in Russia: the use of
anti-extremist legislation against the political opposition rather than “against
real extremists.”
This move suggests, Kurnosova argues,
that “the Kremlin must be interested in having as many opposition leaders leave”
because those in power “understand that the situation in the country is getting
worse with each day” that it will find it easier to control the situation if it
drives those with experience in organizing meetings out of the country.
Such a move, of course, is nothing
new for dictatorships: “the Kremlin is [simply] following in the footsteps of
the Third Reich.”
The crushing of the RBK news agency
because of its courageous reporting on topics that the Kremlin doesn’t want
aired, she says, is “another side of [this] ‘iron curtain’ because a closed
country must have exclusively propagandistic mouthpieces and no [genuine] media”
lest the lies of the authorities be exposed.
And finally Kurnosova argues, the
announcement that talks about exchanging Ukrainian political prisoner Nadezhda
Savchenko for two Russian military figures suggests that the Kremlin doesn’t
appear to want to be making any concessions and thus will move even more
harshly against its own people and neighboring countries.
“All this,” the democratic activist
says, “only confirms that terrible things are taking place and that on one
seventh of the earth’s surface with each day a fascist regime with nuclear
weapons is strengthening itself. If we
sit and do nothing, then no one will know into which country the parliament
will send ‘the regiment of the immortals’ and then conduct a referendum to join
it to the Russian world!”
In fact, Friday the 13th
may have been even worse than Kurnosova suggests. One blogger lists three other
events that make her analogy even more powerful: Moscow’s plans for taking
total control of the Russian Internet by 2020, its gaining the right to block
sites without a court order, and the burning of a house belonging to a Chechen who
complained to Putin (facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1620739768252423&set=a.1428886827437719.1073741828.100009492466479&type=3&theater).
Among the most powerful of the
commentaries about these developments is one offered by Igor Yakovenko on the
Kasparov portal. Noting that all this “began immediately after the holidays,”
he calls these measures “an anti-constitutional coup,” one that reflects the
fears of those in power about the population (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=5736BDF168D92).
And he concludes: “Only the
pathological anemia of that part of Russian society which at one time was ready
to rise in protest and the complete dystrophy of will among those people who
pretend to the role of the leaders of this protest permits [the Putin regime]
to continue to mock the population under its control by adopting legislation
that has nothing in common with law.”
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