Putin will stop at nothing

Anne Applebaum says that dissidents against the authoritarian regime, many of them in London, are raising the stakes. The President’s response is to get even tougher — and to target Britain in his new propaganda war

About two years ago, Mikhail Kasyanov, ex-prime minister of Russia, made a private visit to Washington. Off the record, he told a handful of journalists that he was disturbed by the authoritarianism of President Putin. Then, in maybe a dozen or so more ‘off the record’ meetings, he told more journalists, several politicians and a lot of other people in Washington that he was disturbed by the authoritarianism of President Putin. In other words, he might as well have got himself a megaphone and walked down the street, shouting his intention to oppose President Putin. There was no reaction in Russia.

Round about the same time Garry Kasparov, the former world chess champion, decided to abandon his chess career in order to oppose President Putin. ‘Russia is in a moment of crisis and every decent person must stand up and resist the rise of the Putin dictatorship,’ he wrote in the Wall Street Journal, definitely not off the record. Again, there was no reaction in Russia — though an angry fan did hit him over the head with a chessboard. (‘I’m lucky the national sport of the Soviet Union is chess, not baseball,’ he said afterwards.)

Both men are now vocal opponents of President Putin — though any way you look at it, they don’t have much in common. Kasyanov is a slick talker, a technocrat and a former insider who is, fairly or not, suspected of corruption. Kasparov is a blunt-speaking outsider, half-Armenian and half-Jewish. No one suspects him of corruption, since his chess career made him plenty rich.

But if the two have little in common with one another, they have even less in common with the rest of President Putin’s open opponents.