Time to get tough on the Kremlin crooks and bullies

European Voice

The jailing of Boris Nemtsov is a dark departure from Russia’s already bleak status quo.

When you next meet Boris Nemtsov, will you be able to look him in the eye and say that you did everything you could while he was in jail? Did you urge your ambassadors to visit him in prison? Did your local Russian ambassador find himself bombarded with public and private protests? Did your politicians write letters to the newspapers, give speeches or go to demonstrations? Did your legislators hold hearings about freedom of assembly in Russia? Did you raise Russia’s continued membership of the Council of Europe?

Unlike the war in Georgia, or the jailing of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, this one is unambiguous. Nemtsov is an honourable man (and – full disclosure – a friend of mine). He could have taken the thirty silver roubles that have tempted so many erstwhile reformers of the Yeltsin era. He could have a nice lucrative job mis-running some big state-owned industry or maladministering a government agency (often pretty much the same thing in Russia). Many people from his corner of politics have ended up in the adhesive embrace of the Kremlin, perhaps because of blackmail, perhaps because of bribes. Nobody asks too closely.

Instead, Nemtsov ploughs a lonely furrow, as the leader of the threadbare ranks of the pro-Western, pro-justice, pro-freedom camp. I’d add ‘pro-Russian’ to that list. With his admirable colleague, Vladimir Milov, Nemtsov has exposed in a series of searing pamphlets the looting and thuggery that are characteristic of the ruling regime. Libel laws make it hard to repeat the allegations in detail. But I urge readers of this column to google the pamphlets and read them.

But even if Nemtsov were a crank or a scumbag, his trial and sentencing would still be a disgrace. The conduct of the trial was a farce, the allegations ludicrous and the sentence of 15 days in prison grossly disproportionate.

This is not yet a Soviet-style crackdown (sentences then were measured in years, not days). But it still marks a dark departure from an already bleak status quo. Nemtsov and others have been detained briefly before, but this arrest came at a legally sanctioned demonstration, and the sentence is unprecedented. As the case of Sergei Magnitsky shows (he was a lawyer tortured to death in prison for his temerity in exposing a big state-backed fraud), Russian prisons are dangerous places.

The incident shatters hopes of a new era of liberalisation and modernisation under President Dmitry Medvedev, who only days earlier was praising Nemtsov as an example of a serious politician that the regime should talk to. If he wants an example of the “legal nihilism” he decries, here is one right under his window. The only way he can regain credibility now is to resign.

But it also highlights the feebleness of the outside world: the ‘wet West’ one might call it.

Europe’s response looks blush-makingly bad. A few limp words. No action. Even America, supposedly bewitched by the ‘re-set’ in its relations with Russia, has been more forthright.

The ‘wet West’s’ message to the Russian leadership is clear: we don’t really mind what you do, and even if we did mind, we wouldn’t and couldn’t do anything. That clears the way for more of the same: what will Europe do when the next demonstration (for freedom of assembly, on 31 January) is met with more truncheons, more arrests and longer sentences? Or if the flickers of remaining media freedom are snuffed out? Or if Russia starts bullying neighbouring countries?

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