Caligula in Moscow
Editorial written by Garry Kasparov for the Wall Street Journal, February
4, 2005
In this article Garry Kasparov compares Russian President Vladimir Putin
to the Roman emperor Caligula (AD 12–41), who is said to have made his
his horse a Consul in the Roman Senate. Kasparov accused Putin of creating
a puppet judiciary to persecute the opposition and blasted the West for focusing
on upholding an economic relation with Russia and ignoring mounting human rights
violations. The full article is available only to subscribers of the Wall
Street Journal Online, but it was reprínted in full on the easily
accessible Conservative web site The
Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. It will probably not stay up
for very long at that location.
Excerpts from the WSJ article
-
Democratic reform in the former Soviet Union has been much in the news
lately thanks to the victory of Viktor Yushchenko in Ukraine. Citizens
took to the streets in the millions to protest and force a new election
when his Kremlin-backed opponent tried to steal it the first time around.
President George W. Bush came in dead last in the race to congratulate
the new Ukrainian president. He waited for his "good friend"
Vladimir Putin's own tardy acknowledgment that he had been unsuccessful
in undermining Ukrainian democracy as effectively as he is dismantling
Russia's.
-
An expanding network of judges and district attorneys is being used to
persecute the opposition and enrich Putin loyalists. A puppet judiciary
has been created to accompany the puppet parliament. To add insult to injury,
a man from Putin's St. Petersburg with no judicial experience was just
named to the highest arbitration court in the land, a move akin to Caligula's
naming a horse to the Senate.
-
Illegal expropriation is becoming institutional policy. The Duma rubberstamps
Putin decrees. In the criminal courts they have brought back an old Soviet
law allowing the state to confiscate the property of the convicted.
-
19 members of Putin's parliament signed a letter to the attorney general
that condemned "evil acts by Jews against Russian patriots" and
said that all the anti-Semitic activities in Russia, such as blowing up
synagogues and desecrating cemeteries, were organized by Jews to provoke
local officials.
-
Criticism of Mr. Putin and his regime simply will not be tolerated. Censorship
and repression are threatening to surpass oil and gas as Russia's biggest
exports.
- This is not a plea for help, but a warning about what we're going to have
to deal with soon. The patience of the Russian people is wearing thin. With
whom will the West side in this coming battle, the Russian people or the
KGB?
Kasparov
aims for Putin checkmate (BBC article from Jan. 11, 2005)