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is a prerequisite to the administration focusing on the victims of injustice.
    “You have the impression that on certain issues the president's information is very low-grade and sketchy. He doesn't do anything about it,” was Svetlana Gannushkina's reaction.
    For the most part, Putin listened to what was being said and, when he did speak, presented himself as being on their side. He mimicked being a human rights campaigner. Evidently, now that the democrats have been silenced, he will represent Yabloko and the Union of Right Forces for us. The prediction of the political analysts on the night of the parliamentary elections has come to pass.
    This was probably Putin's main purpose in meeting the human rights campaigners: to show them that their concerns were his. He is an excellent imitator. When need be, he is one of you; when that is not necessary, he is your enemy. He is adept at wearing other people's clothes, and many are taken in by this performance. The assembly of human rights campaigners also melted in the face of Putin's impersonating of them and, despite a fundamentally different take on reality, they poured out their hearts to him.
    At one moment someone actually did blurt out that they had the feeling Putin understood them much better than the security officials. Putin was unabashed and fired right back, “That is because at heart I am a democrat.”
    Needless to say, after this everyone's joy just grew and grew. Dr. Roshal asked to speak “just for a moment.” “Vladimir Vladimirovich,” he said, “I like you so much.” He has said this before. Vladimir Vladimirovich looked down at the table.
    The doctor went on, “… and I do not like Khodorkovsky” Vladimir Vladimirovich suddenly stiffened. Heaven only knew where this pediatrician was heading. And sure enough, his boat was heading straight for the reef. “Although I like you and do not like Khodorkovsky, I am not prepared to see Khodorkovsky under arrest. After all, he is not a murderer. Where do we think he might run away to?”
    The president's facial muscles worked, and those present bit theirtongues. After that nobody mentioned Khodorkovsky again, as if Putin were a dying father and Khodorkovsky his prodigal son. The human rights campaigners did not press home the attack, as might have been expected, but tucked their tails between their legs. The sky darkened, and only one person was to be found who, after the slipup over Yukos, dared to broach another topic that the president's entourage always asks one not to mention, for fear of him losing control of himself. Svetlana Gan-nushkina raised the question of Chechnya.
    Concluding her short speech on the problems of migration, which had been cleared by the administration, Gannushkina went on to say that she could not expect the president to talk about Chechnya, and accordingly wished simply to present him with a book that had just been published by the Memorial Human Rights Center, People Live Here: Chechnya, A Chronicle of Violence.
    This was unexpected. The minders had no time to intervene. Putin took the book and, also unexpectedly, showed interest in it. He leafed through it for the remainder of the meeting, until 10:30 p.m. In the end he himself started talking about Chechnya.
    “In the first place,” Gannushkina recalls, “he is certain that it is all right to trample human rights underfoot in the course of the campaign against terrorism. There are grounds that justify not observing the law, circumstances in which the law can be flouted. In the second place, browsing through the book, Putin commented, ‘This is badly written. If you wrote so that people could understand, they would follow you and you could exert real influence on the government. But the way this is presented is hopeless.’ ”
    Of course, what he had in mind was not Chechnya but the defeat of Yabloko and the Union of Right Forces in the election. “Putin is right,” Gannushkina believes. She has long been a member of