Putin's re-Sovietized Russia.(Ahead Of The Curve)

ITEM: "Vladimir Putin is on course to complete Russia's transition into an authoritarian state--and it will have happened while the West not only stood by, but nodded its benign approval," wrote Gary Kasparov in a March 12 Wall Street Journal column. The renowned Russian chess champion and veteran anti-Communist urged Western leaders to ask some "pertinent questions" about Putin's regime: "Why is Mr. Putin suffocating the media? Why are business leaders who do not obey his orders being jailed? Why are the elections rigged in favor of Mr. Putin and his henchmen?"

ITEM: In a March 22 column, Toronto Sun foreign affairs analyst Eric Margolis recalled a 1991 visit to the then-Soviet Union during which he toured the Lubyanka Square headquarters of the KGB secret police and had extensive conversations with the new generation of KGB officers. "A decade later, KGB alumni have assumed total power under former KGB colonel Vladimir Putin," noted Margolis. "Last week's barely contested elections in Russia confirmed Moscow's hard men are now completely in charge of a one-party state. President Vladimir Putin has ruthlessly scattered Russia's feeble democratic forces, brought the media totally under his control, broken the robber barons, and crushed regionalism. He is now an absolute ruler.... KGB hard men [now control] security, information, banking and finance, oil, metals, trucking and foreign trade ... [as well as] major industries and services...."

ITEM: Vladimir Putin "has packed his government with 'men with epaulettes,'" noted a March 5 AP dispatch from Moscow. Under the reign of Putin and his KGB cohorts, known collectively as siloviki, Russia has been "turning back the clock to Soviet times."

ITEM: Putin's rise to power was propelled by a series of terrorist bombings in Russia in September 1999; the attacks were blamed on Chechen terrorist groups connected to al-Qaeda. "The 1999 bombings proved to be Mr. Putin's political making," commented the March 13 London Daily Telegraph. "He positioned himself as a strongman who would crush the Chechen rebels and restore order to the ailing country." However, "a growing body of proof has surfaced that links the bombings ... to the FSB--the revamped KGB. Independent investigators, including several MPs, who have sought to look into the case have been intimidated, arrested or beaten."

ITEM: In its March 22 issue, the liberal journal The New Republic reported that "fear of government repression ... has driven 33,000 Russians to seek political asylum in industrialized countries in the past year." According to the magazine, "The Putin administration's real belief system can be summed up in three letters" : KGB.

AHEAD OF THE CURVE: Nearly a decade ago, THE NEW AMERICAN--in defiance of the conventional wisdom that the Cold War had ended with ...