The issue: Free expression has a heavy price

Dictators take themselves very seriously and thus are acutely conscious that one of the most potent weapons against them is ridicule.

HOW ELSE TO explain the judicial overkill in Moscow against three young — all in their 20s — members of a female punk band who entered the cathedral that is the headquarters of the Russian church and sang about 30 seconds of a song whose salient lyric is “Our Lady, chase Putin out” before they themselves were chased away?

This is the kind of juvenile prank that the principal of any American high school could have dealt with in about half an hour. But this is Vladimir Putin’s Russia. The three have been in jail since February and only went on trial last week.

The women are charged with “hooliganism,” an all-purpose charge used by Russian police when they want to arrest someone but can’t find an actual crime to charge them with. For this vague offense, they face seven years in jail.

BY ALL ACCOUNTS, Putin was badly rattled by the demonstrations that followed his rigged re-election to the presidency and now seems determined to stamp out the opposition. There was further evidence of that last week when police arrested a leader of those rallies and a well-known anticorruption crusader and brought dubious charges of theft against him. Alexei Navalny, a 36-year-old lawyer, faces as much as 10 years in prison.

In another sign of shaky confidence in the government’s legitimacy, the Putin-controlled parliament upped the fines for taking part in unauthorized demonstrations to a maximum $9,300.

IN THE KREMLIN’S efforts to portray the young women’s prank as a grave crime, it hasn’t helped that the three are lively and attractive, that two of them have young children and that they have considerable support from the Russian arts community.

Putin is concerned about his own image and how Russia is perceived in the world, but both are taking quite a beating at the hands of the punk band.

Comments

comments