Stop the Untouchables. Justice for Sergei Magnitsky.

Kremlin’s Chief Attack Dog Vacations in US

World Affairs

In just one year, Alexander Sidyakin, a member of the Duma from Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party, went from little-known functionary to the regime’s most prominent attack dog on the Russian pro-democracy movement. He has used the parliamentary rostrum to accuse Putin’s opponents of being a “fifth column” and “instigators of mass unrest,” and to stomp on a white ribbon, the symbol of the pro-democracy protests, which he called “a symbol of treason, a color of an exported revolution, which foreign political technologists are trying to impose on us.” He has accused Russian NGOs that advocate for human rights and democratic elections of “being, in one way or another, under the [US] State Department,” because “someone is trying to poke their snotty nose in our affairs.” He has defended the police crackdown on anti-Putin demonstrators in Moscow last May, because, as he put it, “if we allow [the protesters] to dictate their own terms, we will end up with an ‘Arab Spring.’”

Sidyakin’s words were backed up by action: he was the author of two of the most notorious repressive laws signed by Putin last year: the law on public rallies, which raised the maximum fines for “violations” to 300,000 rubles ($9,900—ten times Russia’s average monthly salary), and the law on nongovernmental organizations, which forced Russian NGOs that receive funding from abroad to tag themselves as “foreign agents.” According to Sidyakin, the groups targeted by his law will likely include the anticorruption watchdog Transparency International, the poll-monitoring Golos Association, and Memorial Society—one of Russia’s most respected human rights organizations, founded by Andrei Sakharov. As for the new law on rallies (which, as he boasted, he “wrote personally”), the lawmaker boldly declared that “the right to protest is not absolute.”