Henry Kissinger was my professor at Harvard, back in the early 1960s. The biggest thing I remember from many courses with him was his statement that Americans excel in our capacity for self-criticism, including exploring our weaknesses. What we arent good at is assessing the vulnerabilities of our adversaries.
This is a thought that would resonate with Natalia Arno , founder of the Free Russia Foundation, an organization that advocates for democracy in Russia. In her view, Putin has an unending collection of weaknesses, and we in the West arent giving these weaknesses enough attention.
If you were to talk with her, one of the first points shed bring up is her view that the West has the false perception that Russians dont want or deserve democracy. This is, of course, not true, she states. The Putin regime keeps people from expressing their true views, and they do it using fear, propaganda, and jail. I know of a case where a woman made an anti-Putin comment on Facebook and ended up with a 20-year jail sentence.
In her view, a strong and secure regime doesnt have to use these techniques. She points out that while under the dictator Stalin there were millions of political prisoners, under Brezhnev or Gorbachev the numbers were smaller, in the dozens. Under Putin, however, the number of political prisoners is in the thousands. In the case of the anti-war protestors, 20,000 were detained and many of them jailed. You could be jailed, she asserts, outrage in her voice, just for putting flowers on the grave of the opposition leader, Navalny.
She knows of individuals who ended up in jail simply for holding up a copy of Tolstoys War and Peace. I asked Arno, Why would a book by one of Russias greatest literary figures land a person in jail?
Her answer? The book has the word war in it, and just that three letter word can get a 15-year sentence.
Arno knows that jail time in Russia is far more of a threat than it would be in the West. Shes familiar with the experience of her friend and colleague, politician, journalist, and historian Vladimir Kara-Murza. For criticizing Putin, he was sentenced to 25 years in prison.
ALEXANDER NEMENOV/AFP via Getty Images
His time is being spent in a small, dimly lit cell with bare concrete walls. The food is close to inedible. Often, its a mound of spoiled cabbage, covered with brown and black spots, and accompanied by a rank, sour, rotten egg smell that comes from bacteria and molds.
Mr. Kara-Murza was also poisoned twice, in 2015 and in 2017, adding to his ailing health. Worse, he has severe and painful neuropathy that is a death sentence unless he receives treatment. Hes not getting the treatment.
Arno is certain that a strong and popular regime doesnt need to hold power using this kind of control-by-fear. Other reasons she cites for seeing Putins regime as weak include: Foreign investment has fled The Western technology Russia needs to maintain important industries, such as petroleum, is no longer available Millions of the best educated Russian workers have left Of Russias 190 ethnic minorities, many know that they are as much as 40 times more likely to die on the Ukraine battlefield than are the ethnic Russians. This breeds rage and incites calls for leaving the Russian Federation Russia has to invest so much money in repression that the standard of living is low
Natalia and the Free Russia Foundation are working to let Russians know theres an alternative to Putins autocratic rule. She and her colleague are using social media, messengers, anti-war coalition efforts, and partisan means like printing out information from the internet and stuffing these leaflets in mailboxes to let Russians know that with democracy, they can have freedom from fear, freedom from war, and prosperity instead of poverty.
We are not building bridges, she says. We are building tunnels.
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Mitzi Perdue, Fellow at the Institute of World Politics, is a journalist reporting from and about Ukraine. She has visited multiple times, has many local contacts, and has more than 100 published articles on Ukraine .
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
