Paul Goble
Vienna, April 2 – The Russian FSB resembles Stalin’s secret police in that it is “absolutely outside the law” and its officers “do what they want” without even the fear of legal persecution that the late Soviet dictator sometimes visited upon his officers, according to Lyudmila Alekseyeva, the dean of Russian human rights activists.
At a roundtable on “The FSB in Contemporary Russia: Special Services or a Punitive Organ,” the head of the Moscow Helsinki Group acknowledged that of course, “there is now no Stalinist mass terror,” but she suggested that the ability of the FSB to ignore the law opens the way to new horrors (grani.ru/Politics/Russia/FSB/m.149432.html).
Indeed, she continues, the situation under Vladimir Putin is far more frightening in some respects than it was under Leonid Brezhnev. “In Brezhnev’s times,” Alekseyeva said, she was ...