Strongman, The

temporarily for allegedly failing to comply with registration requirements.) 14
    Aware of the bad publicity surrounding the new law, the Kremlin resorted to Soviet-style propaganda to make the public aware of how heinous NGOs could be.
    A fortnight after the law was signed, Lyudmila Alexeyeva, a 78-year-old human rights activist and chairperson of the Moscow Helsinki Group, was at home in Moscow when a friend called and told her to switch her television on, quickly. ‘I switched on the TV,’ she told me, ‘and saw some strange silhouettes. The presenter, in a dramatic voice, was saying that some English diplomats had made some kind of transmitter, inside a rock, in some square, stuffed with top-notch technology.’ 15 State television had been given an extraordinary scoop: clandestine footage of British spies in action. The pictures showed named British diplomats, including one Marc Doe, a ‘second secretary’ (often a euphemism for an MI6 agent), retrieving data from a fake rock, in reality a transmitter, planted in a park. The report showed the rock being opened up, to reveal a James Bond-style gadget inside.
    The story was bizarre, but it was not untrue. Tony Blair’s chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, admits: ‘The spy rock was embarrassing. I mean, they had us bang to rights. The rock was there for all to see, on television. Clearly they had known about it for some time and had been saving it up for a political purpose.’ 16
    The political purpose became clearer as Lyudmila Alexeyeva continued to watch. ‘Suddenly they are talking about this diplomat at the British embassy, Doe, or something like that, who “managed” our human rights organisations. And then they show some piece of paper with the words “Moscow Helsinki Group”.’ In fact, the document, signed by Doe, appeared to be authorisation for the transfer of £23,000 to the Moscow Helsinki Group.
    The Russians did not expel any of the British spies they had caught red-handed. The story had a different purpose: to demonstrate that NGOs like the Helsinki Group were in the pay not just of the West but of the British secret service. Alexeyeva says she had never met Marc Doe, and the Helsinki Group had only received one grant from the Foreign Office’s Global Opportunities Fund, which was merely processed by the embassy. The Foreign Office says that all its payments to Russian NGOs are openly published on its website. But by using a spy to handle some of those payments, it had played straight into the Russians’ hands.
    Two days after the ‘spy rock’ exposé, President Putin justified the controversial NGO law by making an explicit link between espionage and NGO activities: ‘We have seen that attempts are made to use secret services to work with NGOs and that they are financed through the channels of the secret services. No one can say that this money doesn’t stink. I assume that many people will now understand why Russia has passed a law regulating the activities of non-governmental organisations in this country. The law is intended to block the interference by other states in the internal affairs of the Russian Federation.’
    Triumph of the strongmen
    In his annual presidential address in April 2005, Putin uttered a sentence that has often been quoted as proof of his nostalgia for communism. ‘The collapse of the Soviet Union,’ he said, ‘was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.’ In fact, he was not talking about the communist system as such. What he regretted was the passing of a mighty, unified, multi-ethnic state, whose collapse – as he went on to say in that speech – left ‘tens of millions of our fellow citizens and compatriots outside Russian territory’. This was, as he put it, ‘a genuine drama’ for the Russian nation – and it is hard to dispute that.
    It was an unfortunate choice of words, however, since so many of his actions at the beginning of his second term really did look as if he was trying to restore the Soviet Union, communism and all. In response to the Beslan siege he had removed many of the most democratic elements of the electoral system, tightening his personal grip on power. In response to the popular revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine he had squashed human rights groups and set up an ugly chauvinistic youth organisation. All the while, his stranglehold on the media was tightening.
    There was little reason now for genuine liberals to remain in Putin’s team. As early as