Putin the vohzd

During his campaign for president, Vladimir Putin often used the slogan “dictatorship of law” in decribing what he would bring to Russia. Though it lost something in translation, it was taken as meaning “rule of law,” a promise of tough but fair justice for everyone from murderous mobsters to everyday tax cheats.

That campaign was built upon the former KGB official’s image as a vozhd, a Russian word with a meaning that ranges from “strong, capable leader” to “tyrannical strongman.” The Soviet-style jailing of that country’s leading media tycoon last week leaves in doubt what kind of vohzd the Russian people got, if they got one at all.

Last Tuesday, prosecutors summoned Vladimir Gusinsky, ostensibly to answer some questions about an ongoing financial investigation. When Mr. Gusinsky appeared, without lawyers, the government threw him into Moscow’s infamous Butyrka Prison, without charges. His release Friday calmed the immediate protest, but the stench of repression lingers.

A few days in a dungeon is a tough way to deal with anyone suspected of “misappropriation of property” in the privatization of the state-owned company that translates American television programs into Russian. It is a stunningly crude way to deal with the owner of newspapers and radio and television stations that have vigorously reported on government corruption and have been harshly critical of the war in Chechnya. This affair also follows Mr. Gusinsky’s allegation that the Kremlin tried to bribe him into taking their side, the police detentions of other maverick journalists, the appointment of former KGB spies and generals to “oversee” elected provincial governors and Mr. Putin’s bid for the authority to remove those elected governors at his whim.

This suggests that the Russian people got precisely the kind of vohzd they did not want, the kind they suffered under for most of the 20th century. An alternate theory, based upon Mr. Putin’s claim that he was as shocked as anyone at the Gusinsky arrest and that it was timed by political rivals to occur while he was out of the country to cause him embarassment, suggests the unlikely possibility that Russia didn’t get a vohzd, but a weakling.

Of the strong, capable leader kind of vohzd, the kind Russia needs, the kind Western leaders were counting on, the kind Western businesses wanted to do business with, there remains no sign. There are, however, signs of Mr. Putin’s KGB roots and every indication that his campaign slogan was meant to be taken literally.