Tokyo -- The (original) G 7 leaders examined very carefully how liberal President Mikhail Gorbachev was when they decided to invite him to the elite club in 1991. No such rigorous test has been ever applied to President Vladimir Putin. That is a big mistake.
A Kremlin official once told me that Moscow's policemen took tens of millions of dollars from its citizens to compensate for their low wages. "The difference between the Brezhnev era and now is that today's policemen demand bribes openly, while they were not so unscrupulous under the Communist dictatorship," a veteran Russia-hand diplomat said.
This sort of corruption on a grand scale is only possible when officials know that they won't be prosecuted. The truth about the so-called 'Siloviki' (people from the military and security services) rule under President Putin is that Russian officials can exercise their power without fear. As long as they are loyal to the Kremlin, there is no built-in system to check their abuses of power.
Mikhail Khodorkovsky is no Andrei Sakharov. But the former Yukos chief's misfortune may well illustrate that the current Russian authorities have the justice system totally under their control. The problem is that President Putin does not seem to care if the concentration of power violates democratic principles.
In a normal democracy, outside interventions can be often harmful. But, if the democratic opposition in Russia can not find an audience abroad, it will be very easily sent into total oblivion.
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