For more than six years, the administration of President Vladimir Putin  as deepened and darkened a political, economic, and moral crisis in
my home nation of Russia. I would like to talk about the origins of this risis, its nature, and its consequences—and how we are fighting to
reverse it.

 corrupt patronage proved immune to democratic reform. For a limited
time this old system lived alongside the new one of elections and basic
democratic rights. But this unnatural situation could not last for long.
Yeltsin’s successor had to choose one or the other, the veiled power of
the bureaucracy or the transparency of democracy. It was obvious which
would be chosen by a man of Putin’s KGB background.
Russia’s oligarchs today are themselves top state officials. Aristotle
himself could not find a better definition of “oligarchy” than what we
have in the Kremlin. Top Putin administration members chair some of
the largest corporations in the country, such as Gazprom, Rosneft, and
Transneft. You might wonder if Russian even has a term for “conflict of
interest.” First, Putin’s bunch took justice into their own hands, and
then they put the state coffers into their own pockets.
A Kleptocratic Regime
This Kremlin’s aims—and here is the point many miss—have nothing
to do with the left or the right, or with any political ideology at all.
Such considerations have been swept away under Putin. This regime is,
and has always been, a kleptocracy. The only belief system that guides
its leaders is the firm belief that they should all be very, very rich. To
achieve these ends, the dictatorship of Alyaksandr Lukashenka in
Belarus is victimized along with Mikhail Saakashvili’s reformers in
Georgia. This is not geopolitical paranoia, it is about making money.
Today the Kremlin is a mafia-style operation. Force is the first option,
and you negotiate only with those who are stronger.
In fact, there is a joke making the rounds today in Russia. German
chancellor Angela Merkel calls Putin to ask him to negotiate with Lukashenka.
“Maybe you can find common ground,” she says. Putin’s reply:
“What’s that?!”
Nor is the Putin regime a business in the way that the Soviet system
made every company into a state company. Under Putin’s system, the
money flows only upwards through the vertikal of power. The skyrocketing
price of oil and gas has poured billions of dollars into Russia, but
little of it escapes the gravitational pull of the Kremlin’s inner circle.
The Russian GDP has multiplied many times over, but only a small
percentage of the population is benefiting. The vast majority of the
people who live outside the centers of Moscow and St. Petersburg are
actually seeing their living standards decline. The political structure is
so corrupt and corroded that there is no way to distribute money to the
provinces, even if the Kremlin wished to do so.
Many observers in the West wishfully think that this is only an internal
Russian problem. They say, first, that Putin is popular and that the
Russian people have the leadership they deserve; and second, that a
strong hand in the Kremlin is better for the rest of the world because it

means stability, even if it comes at the cost of human rights and democracy
inside Russia. These are fallacies, and very dangerous fallacies.
Regarding Putin’s popularity, you first have to stop making comparisons
between Russia and other countries based on opinion polls
and similar data. We only recently escaped the oppression of the allseeing
Soviet dictatorship, and our president was a KGB spy. When
someone calls you at home and asks you what you think of the top man,
what answer are you going to give? I am sure Saddam Hussein’s approval
rating was still polling at over 99 percent until the first U.S.
tanks rolled into Baghdad! No, you cannot learn anything by asking
about the president like that; you have to ask about his policies, about
the direction of the country, and about how people view their situation.
When you ask Russians about Chechnya—a word practically banished
from Russian television—or how they feel about the future of the country,
you get a very different picture. The pretty picture painted by the
macroeconomic numbers is deceiving. Before comparing 2007 to 1998,
remember that back then at the time of the financial default the price of
a barrel of oil was US$10. Today it is over $50, recently down from $70.
Away from the wealth of the big cities, times are hard. Even if we are
generous and say that the energy boom has helped 15 percent of Russians,
that still leaves more than a hundred million people out in the
cold. These people do not deserve the Putin administration. They do
not deserve to live without free media. They do not deserve to have
their voting rights chopped away to nothing. They do not deserve to
have their pensions looted while this Kremlin regime becomes the
wealthiest ruling elite in history. Russia is a country of great literary
and scientific accomplishments. It should not be our destiny to become
another Saudi Arabia or Venezuela, to quite literally fuel the achievements
of other nations while we lose ground. The Putin administration
is selling off the future of Russia by the barrel.
Not only Russians lose, of course. The Kremlin recently played its
shell game with Shell Oil in the Sakhalin deal. Under the cover of environmental
regulations, the Kremlin forced Shell to sell its stake to
Gazprom. But the money made there will not go to the nation. In this
shell game it is impossible to tell which shell is Rosneft, Gazprom, or
the Russian state. When the game is over, all three shells are empty, and
the Russian people (along with the foreign investors, in this case) lose
every time.
Even if a hundred million increasingly impoverished and unruly
citizens in a nuclear Russia do not worry you, consider the international
impact of Putin’s policies. The myth of Russian stability has led many
in the West to ignore what the Kremlin has been doing to maintain the
only things it really cares about—the flow of cash and the oil prices
needed to sustain that flow. The energy revenue that supports graft,
propaganda, and repression is the only thing keeping Mr. Putin and his

friends in control, something of which they are all very much aware.
This should lead us to wonder if they really have the West’s best interests
at heart when it comes to global stability.
Mr. Putin has had six years to make good on his assurances that he
would help the West to bargain with the
various hostile regimes he is so close to.
He promised to help with the North Koreans,
and now they have missiles capable
of reaching the continental United States.
As a result of endless negotiations with
Russia, Iran is more belligerent than ever
and is hurriedly enriching uranium. Meanwhile,
Russia is selling advanced antiaircraft-
missile technology to Tehran. A few
days after hostilities broke out between
Israel and Lebanon, the Putin administration
released its list of recognized national
and international terrorist groups—the
first time the list has been made public.
Strikingly, both Hamas and Hezbollah are missing. Every outbreak of
violence pushes up the price of oil and puts more money into the bank
accounts of Putin and his cronies. This is the friend of the West that
recently chaired the G-8 (or G-7 by my count)?
The international instability encouraged by the Putin government is
increasingly matched inside the Kremlin’s walls. A mafia structure cannot
easily bear uncertainty, and the turmoil is beginning to spill over. A
dilemma is approaching for Putin and his associates. The president’s
term of office ends in 2008, and his efficient political machine is threatening
to explode. Should Putin stay or should he go? The chaos that
will surely occur if Putin leaves office is relatively easy to understand.
Any mafia-like structure is based on the authority of the top man. If he
leaves or appears weak, there is a bloody scramble for his position.
Whoever wins that battle must then eliminate his rivals to consolidate
his grip. Perhaps only 10 percent of the combatants will pay in blood or
incarceration, but nobody knows who will be in that 10 percent.
The shockwaves of these battles have already become visible with
the murders of Anna Politkovskaya in Moscow and Alexander
Litvinenko in London. There is little to be gained from speculating
about who exactly ordered these murders. But the system that encouraged
the crimes, and the logic that made them politically expedient for
some of those in power, reveal the true face of Putin’s Russia.
The alternative is for Putin to stay, but the problem with this plan is
that he is constitutionally prevented from staying in office beyond the
end of his term in 2008. The real obstacle, of course, is not the constitution,
which can easily be bent to the Kremlin’s will. But after he has

made so many statements about his intent to step down in 2008, Mr.
Putin would lose all his legitimacy in the West if he exercised this
option. It is true that his regime has never shown much concern for the
voices of America and Europe, but the money his associates have become
so adept at squeezing from Russian assets resides almost entirely
in Western banks. If the Russian government loses its veneer of legitimacy,
these accounts and transactions could begin to receive unpleasant
scrutiny.
The Other Russia
This sounds like a depressing, even hopeless situation. Indeed, when
I first entered the Russian political arena full time nearly two years ago,
I had the feeling that I was sitting down to a chess game already in
progress with my side facing checkmate in every variation. I realized
that our first task as an opposition force was simply to survive, to get
out the message that we existed, that we did not agree with those in
power, and that we were fighting. With every television station and
major newspaper under state control, this has been a very difficult task,
as you might imagine.
The opposition—small political and nongovernmental groups each
having its own quarrels with the government—was in disarray. Despite
the numerous causes and ideologies represented, I became convinced
that we needed to unite, to find common cause against the repression.
The one thing we all had in common was the knowledge that democracy
was our only salvation. Liberals, human rights activists, even the Communists—
all now rely on the fact that the Russian people, given a choice
in a fair election, will reject Putin’s attempt to turn our country back
into a totalitarian state.
To have a real impact, it was necessary for us to unite on the core
issue: You are either working with the Kremlin or dedicated to dismantling
the regime that Putin has created. We also needed to find a way to
reach out beyond the Garden Ring, the wealthy center of Moscow. We
needed an organization that would unify the opposition groups across
the ideological divide, as well as develop our own nationwide network
of activists. Under the banner of the United Civil Front (UCF), I traveled
Russia from Vladivostok to Kaliningrad to spread our message, to talk
about why the countryside was so poor and the elites so rich. And most
importantly, I explained that it was not too late to come together to
fight for our civil liberties and democracy, because only those things
will improve the deteriorating standard of living.
In a way, the key step was taking a page out of the Kremlin’s book:
forming a nonideological movement. Forces from across the political
spectrum came together. In the summer of 2006 we had enough momentum
to go on the offensive, hosting “The Other Russia” conference in

Moscow in advance of the G-8 meeting in St. Petersburg. We knew we
had achieved significant progress when the Putin administration made
efforts to harass us at every turn. If this is truly a measure of success, I
should be proud that my humble UCF offices were raided by security
forces a few days prior to our December 16 march in Moscow. Despite
being outnumbered four to one by police, thousands came out to express
their peaceful support under our banners declaring that “We Do
Not Agree.”
Clearly the regime is worried. As unfavorable as our own position
may still be, my evaluation of our opponents’ forces indicates that they
are not without their own weaknesses. Unlike the old Soviet regime,
this ruling elite has a great deal at stake outside of Russia. Their fortunes
are in banks, stock markets, real estate, and sports teams, mostly
abroad. This means they are vulnerable to external pressure. They literally
cannot afford the cutting of ties that would come with open hostility
between an increasingly dictatorial Russia and the West. So far,
however, it has been difficult to convince the so-called leaders of the
free world (or the free press) to bring such pressure to bear. Thus the
third element of my strategy has been to expose this hypocrisy in as
many editorial pages as I can reach.
To further this mission, The Other Russia, in addition to its continued
efforts at home, is working to establish a communications structure
beyond the long reach of the Kremlin. We need to expose the daily
crimes that are occurring and to get the story into the hands of the right
people, like the people right here in this room. Our hundreds of activists
on the ground in Russia are also in need of support. We are building a
legal-defense fund to force the regime at least to follow its own laws,
however draconian they may be.
We do not ask a great deal from the West: Only to end the fiction that
Putin’s Russia is an equal member of the club of democratic nations. To
stop providing Putin with democratic credentials, credentials that he
uses against his critics in Russia. To stop pretending that a dialogue
with Russia is taking place, when in reality there is no common language
with this Kremlin regime. You cannot treat Putin’s police state
according to the same rules as Germany or Canada. Otherwise, the Russian
people could expect to enjoy the same rights and the same voice as
Germans or Canadians, but we have neither. Together we can work to
restore those rights and that voice.