The Once and Future Vladimir Putin

• At the beginning of March a former British agent, Russian Sergei Skripal, now living in Britain after a spy exchange, and his visiting daughter Yulia were hospitalized after being poisoned by one of the Novichok nerve agents developed by the Soviets beginning in the 1970s. A British policeman who went to their aid when they were found dying on a Salisbury park bench was also poisoned; he’s been released from hospital but the Skripals remain under treatment. At this point more than two dozen Western countries have declared more than 100 Russian diplomats persona non grata and sent them packing. The Kremlin quickly responded in kind, expelling diplomats and—taking a page from the old provokatsiya manual—charging the U.K. with having poisoned the Skripals themselves to distract from problems with Brexit.
• What the New York Times calls “a pair of self-described sex instructors” imprisoned in Thailand say they are offering the United States evidence of Russian election meddling and other skullduggery in return for a guarantee of safety. There’s likely to be some sort of real information; one of them appears in a video in which a Russian oligarch widely considered corrupt meets on a yacht with a deputy prime minister.
• On March 31 there came the arrest of Dagestani billionaire businessman Ziyavudin Magomedov on the now-go-to charge of embezzling state funds. The fact that he appears to be close to people who are close to Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev adds a frisson to suspicions that the move is rather a matter of Putin’s consolidating power at the beginning of his new term. Magomedov, a construction magnate involved in building venues for this summer’s World Cup soccer competition, is estimated by Forbes to be worth about $1.4 billion. He denies the charges.
• There’s even a group of freshly hacked emails, says Business Insider, apparently from Kremlin-linked figures, with price lists showing what Russia would pay for rent-a-mobs in Ukraine around the time of its invasion. Prices varied, depending on whether one wished to arrange email hacking or demonstrations.

Every one of these events implicates the government of newly reelected Russian president Vladimir Putin, and it’s very unlikely that he isn’t personally connected in some way, if only by implicit approval.

So earlier in March, with the reelection a foregone conclusion and the inevitable prospect of Putin, who sees the dissolution of the Soviet Union as the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century,” continuing in power, chess champion Garry Kasparov, chair of the Human Rights Foundation, was inspired to convene a day-long conference to look at Putin in the round. “PutinCon,” Kasparov said, was to be “a true 360 of Putin, his KGB, his nature, his past, his accomplices, his policies.” Hoping that “this year’s program may be the last one where we have to talk about the future of Vladimir Putin,” Kasparov added to the list “his unraveling.”

The conversation, held in New York on March 16, commenced with descriptions of the diminution of democracy in Russia in the late ’90s, as Boris Yeltsin and his coterie looked for a successor. That this disappearance unrolled in tandem with multiple murderous attacks on ordinary Russians is no longer a revelation. The 2004 attack on Beslan’s school, which ended in more than 300 deaths, half of them children; the 1999 apartment bombings that killed almost the same number—these were arranged to look like terrorist attacks, implicitly by Chechens but, as speaker David Satter recalled, were almost certainly planned and carried out with the participation of the FSB, the KGB’s successor, at the time headed by Yeltsin’s anointed heir…Vladimir Putin.

Other participants spoke about the worldwide effects of Putin’s exercise of power: about the eradication of a free press, attacks on IT integrity around the world, the involvement of Russia in wars from Ukraine to Syria. Former U.S. attorney for the southern district of New York Preet Bharara spoke about the enormous kleptocracy that has made Putin the “richest man in history.” Talking with Bharara, Bill Browder, founder of the stolen and eviscerated Hermitage investment fund, continued his call for more countries to pass versions of the “Magnitsky Act”—legislation that makes possible economic sanctions and visa denials for individuals implicated in human rights violations. It is named for his late associate, the accountant Sergei Magnitsky, who traced the government fraud that gutted Hermitage and died when he was refused medical care while falsely imprisoned.

There was even a lively, if admittedly speculative, psychological consideration originally billed as “Inside Putin’s Brain: At Lunch,” which may have indicated a lack of data associated with breakfast and teatime.

And far from least: Alexei Navalny, the opposition politician who was prevented from being on the presidential ballot, spoke to PutinCon via remote link. Navalny called his listeners’ attention to ongoing frauds perpetrated within and by the Russian government, reminding them that there are laws already in place in Western countries that could help identify and penalize them.

“We are here today not to dream,” said Kasparov, introducing the final panel, on “the end of Putin’s tyranny.” But he encouraged positive takes on the subject by his interlocutors—Vladimir Kara-Murza, director of Nemtsov, a documentary on his murdered friend and political associate Boris Nemtsov and a two-time survivor of Russia-originated poisoning; Miriam Lanskoy of the National Endowment for Democracy; and David J. Kramer, a former diplomat and a scholar in the field of human rights.

Kara-Murza spoke about the unpredictability of political change in Russia, in August 1991 as well as in 1917, noting that Russians cannot afford to be as unprepared for Putin’s eventual exit as for the earlier two episodes. Noting the tens of thousands of Russian young people who have participated in protests against the government in the last year or so, he suggested “training and educating and helping to prepare” the people who will be involved in political change, including by encouraging them to run even in today’s “fake, truncated, manipulated” elections as a training ground. Along with serious work on the substance of law and policy that will need to be available if change comes quickly, such preparation is invaluable. “It’s not ridiculous to think of and plan for a post-Putin Russia,” said Kara-Murza. “In fact, it is ridiculous and shortsighted and irresponsible not to.”

With its serious and thorough assessment of the current state of affairs, PutinCon thoughtfully raised and began to address one of the most venerable of Russian questions: Chto delat? What is to be done?