Guilt by Association

The month of March ended very badly for Russia, and the worst is yet to come.

On March 20, the opposition tried to organize its “Day of Wrath” under the slogan “Putin must go!” but it failed to convince or inspire. Attendance at rallies was sparse nationwide. The intelligentsia have yet to reinvent themselves in post-Soviet Russia, failing to define their own new role and what the new Russia can and should be.

The two suicide bombings in Moscow on March 29 were unfortunate for a number of reasons. The self-styled emir of the Caucasus Emirate, Doku Umarov, shares a fixation on Prime Minister Vladimir Putin with the opposition. He calls Putin a “terrorist” and the Federal Security Service a “criminal organization.” The bombing of the Lubyanka metro station was meant to avenge and taunt.

From the opposition’s point of view, the timing could not have been worse. Many Russians were bound to make a simple association: The opposition hates Putin, and the Islamist suicide bombers hate Putin. Our enemy’s friend is our enemy.

In fact, it was shortly after the bombings that State Duma Speaker Boris Gryzlov made some of those associations explicit and public. He linked Vedomosti and Moskovsky Komsomolets to the terrorists, claiming that they were “stewing in the same juices.” Robert Shlegel, a United Russia deputy, has proposed a bill to ban the media from reporting any statements by terrorists. “News about militants should consist only of reports about their destruction,” said Shlegel, who caused Umarov’s video to be removed from YouTube.

That others had made the association between the opposition and terrorism became clear on March 31. On the 31st of every month, the opposition gathers in support of Article 31 of the Constitution, which guarantees the right of free assembly. This time, however, many decided to pay their respects to the victims at the memorial shrines at the metro stations. Among them was the grande dame of the dissidents, Lyudmila Alexeyeva, 82, who was verbally and physically abused by a man who cried, “Are you still alive, bitch?” and cuffed her violently on the head.

That was caught on video and immediately posted on YouTube. It will, of course, never appear on Russian television, which in the hours immediately after the bombings gave only brief initial reports and continued with its regularly scheduled programming. This frustrated, even infuriated, a certain percentage of the population desperate for further information.

Other associations were also being made: The security services offer no security, and the communications media do not communicate.

March 31 also marked the one-year anniversary of the second trial against former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky. In a recent essay, he describes the justice system as “legalized violence,” a conveyor belt in which anything but a guilty verdict is considered a “defective product.” He says that every year these injustices create thousands more who “loathe the system.” Khodorkovsky predicts that the current regime will be either intelligently reformed from above or bloodily destroyed from below. What surprises him most is that not even the ruling elite’s “instinct for self-preservation seems to be working properly.”

Khodorkovsky could be wrong about any future collapse. After all, the Soviet Union went out with a whimper, not a bang. Meanwhile, wrong associations are being made, wrong conclusions are drawn and wrong actions are taken. The Russian self-destruction machine ratchets up another gear.

Richard Lourie is author of “The Autobiography of Joseph Stalin” and “Sakharov: A Biography.”