The undesirables

How to handle them like a boss

WHEN A president named George W. Bush brought up Russian media freedom with a president named Vladimir V. Putin in 2005, the Russian boss gave as good as he got: Why, didn’t President Bush just finish firing Dan Rather?

Whether Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, that old KGB operative, really thought that a president of the United States could fire a network anchor was the talk of the media world at the time. Perhaps he wasn’t that ignorant of the American law and Constitution. Maybe he was just practicing his dark arts. And getting some misinformation into his own press. So there, Mr. Bush.

The Russian strongman—whoever it is at the time—has a much better grip on his nation’s media than the president of the United States ever will. For proof, read the news from both countries. Count the times the president in each faces criticism.

Now the Russian bear has the country’s Supreme Court under its thumb. Some of us in the West didn’t realize how deep this authoritarianism flowed in Russian government.

Dispatches say Russia’s Supreme Court ruled this week that one of the country’s oldest human rights outfits was illegal.

And it should be shut down. Declared outlawed.

The Prosecutor General’s Office had petitioned the Supreme Court of Russia to “revoke the legal status” of Memorial, which is an international human rights group with people all over Russia. This week the court ruled in favor of the prosecution, which said the Memorial group “creates a false image of the USSR as a terrorist state, whitewashes and rehabilitates Nazi criminals.”

The USSR? It no longer exists. But when it did, it certainly deserved criticism on its “human rights activities.” Is the Great Terror still being debated? Are the Stalinist purges still part of history? That group calling itself Memorial is supposed to be an institution of national memory. But to criticize the old and unlamented USSR is to find yourself in trouble with the legal authorities in Russia. And we talk about whitewashing history in this country.

The Associated Press says Russian authorities “in recent months have mounted pressure on rights groups, media outlets and individual journalists, naming dozens as foreign agents.” Some were even declared “undesirable.”

Now, in the United States, there are a lot of undesirable journalists. Don’t get us started. Some have coffee stains on their ties and cracker crumbs on their pants. The rumpled-shirt crowd doesn’t have to be desirable, only accurate in their reporting.

But in modern Russia, which is more Russian than modern, being declared “undesirable” is a legal designation. It’s a label that can get you outlawed in that country. And the authorities can actually shut down your operation. And put you in jail. Or worse.

In the last few days, for example, the government in Moscow shut down a website that focuses on political arrests after it condemned the Supreme Court ruling. And it doesn’t appear as though any amount of protests, of which there are many just now, is going to change the ruling, or Moscow’s oppression of certain, um, undesirables.

It’s not quite Stalinist. But it’s not quite democratic. It could be defined as, well, undesirable for those who’d like to breathe free.