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Yabloko, and worked in the Duma assisting the Yabloko deputies. “We are incapable of explaining to people that we are on neither one side nor the other, but defending rights.”
    After that the conversation turned of its own accord to Iraq. The campaigners said there was no comparison: the Chechens were Russian citizens, unlike the Iraqis. Putin parried this by saying that Russia gavea better impression of itself than the USA, because we have pressed charges against military personnel who have committed crimes in Chechnya far more frequently than the United States has against its war criminals in Iraq.
    The procurator general chimed in: “More than six hundred cases.” The human rights campaigners didn't let that pass: how many of those had led to sentences being passed? The question hung in the air, unanswered.
    Lyudmila Alexeyeva, leader of the Moscow Helsinki Group and an unofficial doyenne of Russian human rights campaigners, someone whom the state authorities have raised to iconic status as personifying the human rights community as far as the Kremlin is concerned, proposed convening a round table with the same participants to discuss the problems of Chechnya with the president. “We'll need to think about that,” Putin muttered as he was saying his farewells, which meant, “There's no way that is going to happen.”
    *
    There were indeed no discussions on Chechnya between Putin and the human rights campaigners, but after their December meeting some of them, along with some of the democrats, decided to switch allegiance from the defeated Yavlinsky and Nemtsov to the newly democratic Putin, whom they evidently supposed would serve just as well.
    The same fate befell a number of well-known journalists. Reputations were compromised before our very eyes. We watched as Vladimir Soloviov, a popular television and radio presenter, one of the boldest, best informed, and most democratic of reporters, who not long ago had exposed government wickedness, for example, over the chemical attack in the Nord-Ost disaster (when 912 members of the audience of a musical were taken hostage by Chechens), suddenly and publicly proclaimed his passionate support for Putin and the Russian state.
    This happened to him because he was brought in closer to the Kremlin and sweetened up. He transmogrified. It is a recurrent Russian problem: proximity to the Kremlin makes people slow to say no, and altogether less discriminating. The Kremlin knows this full well. How many of them there have been already, stifled by the Kremlin. First theyare gently clasped to the authorities’ breast. In Russia the best way to subjugate even the most recalcitrant is not money but bringing us in from the cold, at arm's length at first. The rebellious soon begin to subside. We have seen it with Soloviov, with Dr. Roshal, and now even the admirers of Sakharov* and Yelena Bonner* are beginning to talk about Putin's charisma, saying he gives them grounds for hope.
    Of course, this is not the first time in recent history that we have seen this coming together of the regime and defenders of human rights, the regime and the democrats. It certainly is the first time, though, that it has been so devastating for former dissidents. What hope is there for the Russian people if one part of the opposition has been bombed out of existence, and another, almost all that remains, is being set aside for later use?
    December 11
    This morning there was more of the same, a reputation destroyed by the Kremlin's embrace. Andrey Makarevich was an underground rock musician in the Soviet period, a dissident, a fighter against the KGB,* who used to sing with passion, “Don't bow your head before the changeful world. Some day that world will bow its head to us!” It was the anthem of the first years of democracy under Yeltsin. Today, on live television on the state-run Channel One, he is being presented with a medal “For Services to the Fatherland.”
    Makarevich came out in support of