Russia has got a spring in its step.
It is reported to have finally agreed with the US on a new nuclear treaty, its state gas company is in line to take over Ukraine’s pipelines, and its loyal businessman has bought an influential British newspaper. It is resuming ties with its former Socialist allies, And, having just chopped off some of its cumbersome time zones, Russia seems leaner and more confident than it has for some time.
So why is a country strong and secure enough to walk all over British airspace so scared of a bunch of twenty-something liberals?
As Michael Idov reports in the Daily Beast, there has been a rise in attempts to blackmail journalists and liberal activists; by luring them into compromising situations and videotaping them surrounded by drugs and prostitutes.
One such video shows Mikhail Fishman, editor of Russian Newsweek , ostensibly snorting cocaine next to a model.
Correctly noting that the snobby, fractured and unloved Russian opposition ‘doesn’t really need sabotaging’, Idov posits several theories for these operations.
1. A ‘sudden breakdown of the unspoken pact between the Kremlin and the “liberals”—you don’t develop national ambitions, and we let you preach to your fancy choir—could mean…that the system is wobblier than thought, President Medvedev’s liberalization promises are about to bear fruit, and Russia’s internal security service, the FSB, sensing uncertainty for the first time in years, is wasting no chance to tar every possible breakout star of the opposition’.
2. ‘The smear campaign is the handiwork of an off-the-script underling. (This happens quite a bit in the modern Russia: Most of the censorship on television, for example, is born not of direct orders from above but of various flunkies’ blind guesses as to what would please their bosses in the Kremlin.)’
‘Sadly for Russia’, Idov concludes, the second version ‘appears far more realistic’.
Of course, Kompromat is one of Russia’s finest exports. But the techniques that have worked so well against foreign diplomats are totally inappropriate against young liberals and opposition journalists.
“Let me get this straight,’ writes a liberal intellectual quoted by Idov. “You fight the regime, and in exchange the regime brings you free chicks and blow? Duly noted.”
What would Mark Ames say of this pitiful current crop of liberal dissidents, reduced to relying on government blackmailers for their chicks n’ blow?
