Putin's power grab

A HARSH law on nongovernmental organizations that Russia's President Vladimir Putin and his Kremlin coterie are pushing through a docile Duma shows Putin's true colors. This is the move of an antidemocratic ruler acting on the paranoid belief of his security services that foreign human rights, educational, and medical organizations are disguised tools of Western intelligence agencies plotting to orchestrate a popular uprising in Russia like those that toppled corrupt regimes in Georgia and Ukraine.

Russian liberals are opposing Putin's crackdown on the NGOs. Former US senators Jack Kemp and John Edwards, co-chairmen of a Council on Foreign Relations task force on Russia, signed a cogent letter to President Bush last month warning that Putin's proposed legislation ''would roll back pluralism in Russia and curtail contact between our societies," enabling the Kremlin ''to close down public organizations simply because it finds their views and activities inconvenient."

If the Kremlin is to be deflected from its effort to take control over the last remaining spheres of freedom for Russian civil society, Bush and other leaders of democratic nations will have to tell Putin that he cannot assume the chairmanship of the Group of Eight developed democracies in January while at the same time asphyxiating independent NGOs.

The first reading of the proposed legislation, which was approved by a parliamentary vote of 370 to 18 last week, would extend to the 400,000 NGOs in Russia the sort of centralized control that Putin's inner circle has already imposed on the media, the judiciary, the major energy companies, and the regional governors, who are appointed by Putin. In its current form, the bill would force all NGOs to register with the Ministry of Justice. It would also ban foreign funding and the hiring of foreigners in those organizations. This means international outfits such as Greenpeace or Amnesty International would be required to shut their doors, and, if they wanted to continue working in Russia, they would be obliged to register anew as Russian entities.

The intent of this legislative grab for total control over Russian civil society is of a piece with Putin's use of a corrupt judiciary to confiscate the most valuable part of the giant energy conglomerate Yukos, sending its former chief Mikhail Khodorkovsky to a prison camp in Russia's far east. A partner and friend of the incarcerated magnate, Leonid Nevzlin, spoke recently at Harvard's Davis Center, where he summed up the direction of Putin's Russia with the sardonic formula: one company, one country.

Putin has to be told that he cannot get away with confiscating the rest of Russian civil society in the same way he has already confiscated TV networks and oil companies.