Gradually, Then Suddenly - How Freedom Slips Away
Why defeating Putin is imperative
I have Post Traumatic News Syndrome and have lived without a television since 2006. I like my peace — I like choosing what images I see, and I like not being marketed to. I have had screens of various sizes to watch films and binge streaming series, and I currently have a small screen that is always eagerly anticipating what French film I will watch next. Mine is a home filled with music, birdsong, and often a blissful silence.
So I was horrified to learn that Vladimir Kara-Murza is forced to watch Russian state TV in prison. I just can’t.
A Bette member gifted me an op-ed written by Kara Murza, published in the Washington Post today. The Russian opposition politician was sentenced to 25 years in prison for speaking out against the war in Ukraine. I documented his plight on these pages.
I am not only devastated by the fact that he is forced to watch Russian junk TV — a mind as great as his being force fed digital poison — but I am also devastated at his description in his op-ed of how Russia lost its shot at democratic freedom.
‘Gradually, then suddenly,’ as Hemingway wrote in ‘The Sun Also Rises.’
“No one can pinpoint the precise moment Russia ceased to be democratic. But the year can be named with certainty,” wrote Kara-Murza, the protege of Boris Nemtsov.
He said it was 2003 — exactly 20 years ago.
Three things happened:
In June of 2003, Putin’s press ministry turned off TVS, the last independent television network. “Controlling public sources of information is a prerequisite to any dictatorship,” he wrote.
In October of 2003, he arrested Russia’s richest man, Mikhail Khodorovsky. “Stay loyal, or stay out,” was the signal, Kara-Murza said.
In December of 2003, Russia’s parliamentary election was assessed by international election observers as unfair.
“For those of us who had been involved in the democratic opposition to Putin from the very start of his rule, it was painful to watch how calmly most of Russian society seemed to accept the dismantling of the nascent freedoms of the 1990s,” wrote Kara-Murza.
A shockwave charged through me as I thought of the calmness of the US after the 2016 attack on our country, and the calmness of the US after the attack and reversal on women’s health care rights, and the calmness of the US as we witness the massive attack on the gay and trans communities, and the book banning, and the lawfare targeting reporters from Putin proxies. Kind of like the calmness of the US as we are denied distribution of our Substack work on Twitter, and denied Twitter distribution on Substack, as a pro-Kremlin actor was put in charge of the Twitter Operation. I have not been calm these seven years, I have been writing feverishly, and marching, and connecting global experts to a US audience, as have many of you, but still…
Gradually, then suddenly.
In the op-ed, Kara-Murza wrote how the West deserves much of the blame for Putin’s rise to unchecked power.
He described Putin’s lavish greeting in the UK, replete with a “horse-drawn carriage ride with the Queen and billions of dollars in lucrative contracts” — two days after Putin shuttered TVS.
“Internal repression in Russia always translates into external aggression and that appeasing an aggressor always leads to war,” he wrote. “Again, the free world has learned this the hard way. After he got away with so much else over the years, both at home and abroad, it is not surprising that Putin thought he could get away with occupying Ukraine, too.”
I reflect back to what Finnish scholar Pekka Kallioniemi said when I interviewed him for Byline Supplement about Mike Flynn — how alarming it was to see a retired lt. general sitting to the right of Putin, after Russia invaded Ukraine and after Alexander Litvinenko’s poisoning.
“Incredibly, there are still voices in the West who are suggesting that (Putin) should” get away with invading Ukraine, wrote Kara-Murza. “Day after day, Russian state television (which I am forced to watch in my prison cell) relays statements by Kremlin-friendly politicians and talking heads in Western Europe and the United States calling for some kind of an ‘understanding’ with Putin over Ukraine. I can think of no better recipe for disaster — and for a new, even larger war a couple of years down the road — than handing the aggressor yet another cave-in.
“There is only one outcome of this conflict that would be in the interests of the free world, of Ukraine and, ultimately, of the Russian people: resounding defeat for Putin, to be followed by political change in Russia and a Marshall Plan-type international assistance program both to rebuild Ukraine and to help post-Putin Russia build a functioning democracy so that it never again becomes a threat to its own people or its neighbors. That is the only way to make sure Europe can finally become whole, free and at peace — and stay that way.”—Vladimir Kara-Murza
Those of you who joined me and Zarina Zabrisky at The Eastern Front premiere know that Kara-Murza’s vision is absolutely the correct one.
That the dictatorship in Russia was spawned by the loss of media freedom is not lost on me.
I wrote last week on Twitter how far the US media has fallen — it’s tragic, really.
In revisiting Watergate, domestic criminals broke into the DNC on behalf of Nixon and a pair of brave journalists followed the money forcing Nixon to resign.
In TrumpRussia, Russians broke into the DNC on behalf of Trump, and US media helped the Kremlin destroy Hillary Clinton.
And the media is still helping the Kremlin as it continually fails in its coverage of the pro-Kremlin actors found in Pekka’s vatniksoup.com. They pretend to be patriotic as they serve Putin’s interests, akin to serving fossil fuel and christofascist interests.
I wrote on Twitter of the dullness of these vatniks:
“I think it’s really important to continually point out how dull and predictable pro-Kremlin propagandists are. Their dreary lives must suck.”
Their job is to spew the same false narratives day in and day out — ‘Ukrainians are neo-Nazis’, ‘NATO expansion started the proxy war’, ‘Ukraine is corrupt and most aid goes to the black market’ or ‘the sanctions are hurting the West more than Russia’ — all lessons from Pekka in how to spot a vatnik — a slang term for pro-Kremlin actors and Kremlin propagandists.
We owe a debt to the dissidents who keep us informed with their clear-eyed assessments of reality.
We should not be calm about the things we are losing — we should face them head on working as hard as possible to ensure it stops happening here, and we reverse the things we’ve lost, as Biden did when he rejoined the Paris agreement.
Let’s not hope on the side of the grave, as Seamus Heaney wrote, but let’s take action against fascism in this one life.
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