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Committees of Soldiers’ Mothers spoke for three minutes about the exploitation of soldiers as slave labor and other army horrors; Valerii Abramkin of the Center for Reform of the Criminal Justice System spoke for five minutes about the things that go on in places of detention (the president seemed to appreciate his speech more than the other speeches); Ella Pamfilova spoke at great length about the dismal relations between human rights campaigners and the law enforcement agencies; Svetlana Gannushkina of the Memorial Human Rights Center had three minutes to explain the implications of the new law on citizenship; Tamara Mor-shchakova, adviser to the Constitutional Court, had seven minutes to present proposals for making the state authorities publicly accountable; Alexey Simonov spoke for three minutes on freedom of speech and the predicament of journalists; and Sergey Borisov and Alexander Auzan of the Consumers’ Association talked of the need to protect small businesses.
    Ranged against them were the head and deputy head of the presidential administration; the procurator general of Russia, Vladimir Ustinov; the minister of the interior, Boris Gryzlov; the minister of justice; the minister for the press; the chairmen of the constitutional, supreme, and business arbitration courts. Nikolai Patrushev, director of the FSB, was also present at the beginning, but left shortly afterward.
    All the campaigners in turn set about Procurator General Ustinov. In between their attacks, Putin would also give him a dressing-down and accusehim of unjustifiable rulings. Tamara Morshchakova kept up a legal commentary on what was being said, urging for example that a social worker should be present during the questioning and court appearances of minors. This is standard practice in many countries, but to the Kremlin it sounded radically new. Ustinov parried by claiming this would be contrary to Russian law, and Morshchakova brought him up short by pointing out that the laws he was referring to simply did not exist. This meant either that the procurator general did not know the law, which is clearly unthinkable, or that he was deliberately misleading his hearers. With Putin present this was hardly thinkable either, which led back to the first possibility, which is incompatible with holding the office of procurator general.
    “It is only when they have direct personal experience of something that you can get anywhere,” Svetlana Gannushkina told me. “While the president was talking on the telephone to Bush, I went over to Viktor Ivanov, the deputy head of the presidential administration and chairman of a working group on migration legislation. I unexpectedly found that we had equally negative feelings about residential registration. Ivanov's wife had recently spent five hours standing in line to get temporary registration of friends who had come to stay with them in Moscow. It had made her furious.”
    This prompted Ivanov to recognize the folly of reviving residential registration, and he vowed to fight it. An FSB general, he offered to set up a joint working group with Gannushkina to reform it. “Give me a call,” he said. “Draw up a list of members for the group. We'll work on it together.”
    Another example of the triumph of personal involvement over bureaucratic inertia came when Valerii Abramkin, a champion of prisoners’ rights, told the president a dreadful story about two juvenile girls who had been wrongfully convicted. Their juvenile status was overlooked both by the court and the prison authorities and was picked up only after the girls had been transported under guard into exile, at which point they were released. Unexpectedly, Putin reacted very strongly to this. Something human flashed in his eyes. It turned out that his family had come across a similar incident involving two young girls who had sufferedfrom disregard for the law, and to whom his wife was now giving support. It really seems that some personal experience