Russia's Bitter Chill

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Not all Russians are falling silent; indeed, a new generation of dissidents has come into being. For many of them, such as Lidia Yusupova, the war against a separatist movement in Chechnya, which has rumbled on with appalling cruelty since 1994, has been a spur to activism. Yusupova helps victims of the violence in Chechnya and has assisted in documenting atrocities there, a job that has won her two human-rights awards and a nomination for this year's Nobel Prize. She has no illusions about the risks involved. "Dying sooner or later is not the issue," she says. "But it's important where and how you die. This feeling helps bridle fear."

Important though the conflict in Chechnya has been in focusing activism, Putin's political opponents have a long list of other grievances. They include allegations of torture by the police, pressure on journalists, and what opponents see as an erosion of Russia's democratic institutions. The ranks of the new dissidents are swelled by unlikely recruits — men such as Alexei Kondaurov, who, as a major-general of the kgb's Fifth Main Directorate, was responsible for crushing ideological subversion in Soviet days. Kondaurov is now a member of the Duma's Communist Party faction, and campaigns tirelessly on behalf of his friend and former employer, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who once headed Yukos, Russia's biggest private oil company. Khodorkovsky is currently in jail after having been convicted on tax evasion and fraud charges that he says are bogus. "I'm amazed at myself," says Kondaurov. "A former kgb major-general, and yes, I do feel I'm a dissident now." He says that many former colleagues equate him with Pyotr Grygorenko, a top Soviet officer who was expelled from the party in the 1960s and confined to a mental asylum for expressing anti-Soviet views.

Kondaurov and others argue that the Russian authorities are terrified of the sort of "people power" that brought Viktor Yushchenko and Mikhail Saakashvili to power in Ukraine and Georgia. He sees a new dissident movement as "the only option," because power in today's Russia is now so concentrated in the hands of the Kremlin that any other opposition is futile. "It's very much the same as the case was in Soviet times," Kondaurov says.

Yet that familiar refrain is not the whole story. Some of the parallels being drawn between now and the days of Soviet rule are rhetorical and overblown. Those who are ill at ease in today's Russia for whatever reason can choose to live and work abroad (indeed, many of Putin's critics have decamped to London); an earlier generation could only dream of such freedom. Still, Kondaurov's feeling of claustrophobia — what Victoria Webb of Amnesty International describes as "the shrinking space for individual voices in Russia" — now appears to be widely shared. This year, Stanislav Dmitrievsky was prosecuted and saw his human-rights group, the Russian-Chechen Friendship Society, closed down after its newsletter reprinted speeches by Chechen separatist leaders. Amnesty International contends that shuttering the society "appears to be the latest move in a carefully calculated strategy to get rid of an organization that has been outspoken on behalf of victims of human-rights violations in Chechnya." Dmitrievsky himself says that Russia is veering away from democracy and back toward authoritarianism. "It's obvious after the Politkovskaya murder that no one is immune. We're all walking under a falling ax now," he told Time.