Beating Down Democracy; With his latest bloody crackdown, Vladimir Putin takes a step futher toward outright dictatorship.

Byline: Owen Matthews and Anna Nemtsova

Last week Vladimir Putin and his guest Jean-Claude Van Damme spent an afternoon watching a kickboxing tournament in St. Petersburg. Between bouts, the Russian president excused himself to receive updates from his Interior minister, Rashid Nurgaliyev, on a no less violent event across town. There, 8,000 of Putin's security forces, in newly issued black visors and riot gear, were busy breaking the heads of some 2,000 protesters marching near the city center. By the end of the day, 400 opposition protesters were in jail; more than 40 were hospitalized. It was the fourth such march in a month that police goons had ruthlessly crushed on the Kremlin's orders.

Is Russia moving toward dictatorship? It certainly looked that way last week after the latest violence against peaceful demonstrators in Moscow and St. Petersburg. After years of slowly tightening state control over the media ...