Dissidents Decry Putin - 11.11.2004

Former Soviet Dissidents Decry Putin's Regime


Coverage:


Seattle Post-Intelligencer/AP


Washington Times

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 Seattle Post-Intelligencer - 11.13.2004

Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Ex-Soviet dissidents lament Russia's state

By GERALD NADLER, ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER

NEW YORK -- More than 50 former Soviet dissidents who spent years in prisons and Siberian exile say Russia is in danger of slipping back into a police state under President Vladimir Putin and the former KGB colleagues he has brought to power.

Graying and aging, the former political prisoners reminisced one night this week about how they challenged the totalitarian superpower to abide by laws that on paper guaranteed free speech, a free press and fair trials.

Today Russians are turning to Putin, a former KGB colonel, to restore order in their chaotic, market-driven democracy, said Eduard Kuznetsov, 65, who spent 17 years in prison for planning to hijack a plane in Leningrad in 1970 to get out of the Soviet Union.

"More than 50 percent of the key state positions are occupied by former KGB officials," Kuznetsov said. "The KGB officials have a specific mentality. They can't change. There is a danger that it will really be a police state. Not so straightforward as it was under Brezhnev, because there is inertia.

"Because they have to balance between the (opinion of) the free world and a controlled society." Leonid Brezhnev ruled from 1964-82, now labeled the era of stagnation.

Vladimir Bukovsky, who was labeled insane and spent a total of 12 years in Soviet jails and psychiatric hospitals for repeatedly demonstrating, said Russia is "slowly returning to the pre-1991 situation" before the end of the Soviet Union.

"But it will never go back all the way to Brezhnev's time. History doesn't repeat itself so precisely. But they will make a couple of generations miserable again. That's what they will do," said Bukovsky, 61.

"You cannot return the Soviet system. It collapsed because it had to collapse. Not because the CIA undermined it or subverted it. They cannot understand in their small minds that it was absolutely doomed. Now by trying to restore it, they are simply bankrupting the country."

Bukovsky, who won his freedom in a swap for Chilean Communist Louis Corvalan on Dec. 18, 1976, recalled that Putin has lamented the collapse of the Soviet Union as "a tragedy." He said Putin's colleagues also share this view.

"They do so because they used to be young officers of the KGB ... and they still have the feeling that they served the great power and now they want the great power to be back, and they think by repeating the Soviet example they once again will bring greatness to Russia," Bukovsky said.

Putin, who proposed ending the direct election of governors after the Beslan school hostage crisis in September in which more than 330 people, mainly children, were killed, has denied that his planned overhaul of the electoral system signaled a retreat from democracy. Putin earlier drew criticism for shutting down two independent television stations with national reach - purportedly for financial reasons.

Yuri Orlov, a physicist, now 80, who spent seven years in Soviet prisons and five in Siberian exile for forming a group to monitor Soviet compliance with the 1975 Helsinki agreement on human rights, said he fears Russia will regress but not to what it was. "Russia today is different."

The reunion was held at the headquarters of the nonprofit American Jewish Committee. Vladimir Kozlovsky, who grew up in the Soviet Union and emigrated to the West in 1974, said the assembled dissidents were his idols.

"They were a major factor in turning Russia into a semi-free country from a heavily authoritarian one. My childhood heroes. People I don't cease to admire. They probably spent a couple of hundred years combined in Soviet jails. And those were nasty jails. It was no picnic."

Ludmilla Thorne, a veteran of the human rights movement who worked with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov, said: "The initial stage of the Soviet Union's demise is here in this building.

"The people you see in this room are the people who laid the foundation. The first epoch was dissent. These were a small group - 2,000 no more."

She said the dissidents were using words like "glasnost" and "perestroika" nearly 20 years before former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev made them the slogan of his push for democratic and free-market reforms.

"After coming to power in March 1985, Gorbachev borrowed the term 'glasnost' and made it his own."

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 Washington Times - 11.14.2004

Washington Times

Soviet-era dissidents despise Putin

By Betsy Pisik

NEW YORK -- Physicist Yuri Orlov, one of the most celebrated of the Soviet dissidents of the 1970s, has railed against totalitarianism and government oppression for most of his 80 years. 

He knows what it's like to challenge a repressive regime, and his latest target is Russia under President Vladimir Putin. 

"Russia is flying backwards in time," said Mr. Orlov, a compact man with wild hair and a demeanor that is as Norman Mailer as it is Albert Einstein. 

"Putin is like Stalin, and he speaks in the language of the thug, the mafia," he said. 

When Mr. Orlov and scores of other Soviet "refuseniks" gathered on Thursday evening for a reunion sponsored by the American Jewish Committee , Mr. Putin drew almost as much criticism as his communist predecessors. 

The Russian president's crackdown on Chechens, closure of independent news media and other restrictions has kindled outrage among this aging group of lions, many of whom spent more than a decade in Soviet work camps, mental hospitals and prisons because they openly criticized the Soviet government and demanded basic human rights. 

They see alarming similarities between Mr. Putin's police and the infamous KGB he used to command. 

An increasingly powerful Russian Orthodox Church and lurching economic policies provide even more traction to curtail human rights so recently won. 

The gray-haired "heroes of conscience" hugged and wept and, over small tumblers of Russian vodka and blended whiskey, denounced the renewed erosion of civil rights in their homeland and the passive support they say Mr. Putin receives from the United States and other Western governments. 

"I am worried that the Bush administration is being duped," said Victor Balashov, 62, who emigrated to the United States in 1974 after a decade in a Soviet prison. 

"The government should be more thoughtful. It is like Mr. Reagan said, 'trust but verify.' You must make a judgment about Putin, ... and you can have no doubt that he is running a dictatorship." 

The emotional evening, organized by the Gratitude Fund, which was established by dissident Yuri Fedorov to assist former political prisoners still living in the former Soviet Union. 

Tatiana Yankelevich, the grown daughter of the legendary Elena Bonner who administers the Sakharov Foundation at Harvard University, said the global war on terrorism has been used "to justify the most brutal suppression and killing" in Chechnya. 

"This is a grand deceit, and many wish to be deceived," she said, referring to many of those nations and organizations that worked to free her parents' generation. 

The National Park Service is creating a traveling exhibit about the infamous Soviet prison camp Perm 36. 

Part of the international "museums of conscience" movement, the show will feature testimonies, a recreation of prison cells and recovered objects. 

It will open on Ellis Island, N.Y., in May 2006, and will travel to Boston, Atlanta, Topeka, Kan., Washington and Manzanar, Calif., where Japanese-Americans were interned during World War II.

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