Putin and the Dissident The Kremlin Gets Revenge on a Lone Critic of its Crimea Land Grab.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/putin-and-the-dissident-1428448558
As a deputy in the Russian parliament, Ilya Ponomarev cast last year’s sole vote against the Kremlin’s annexation of Crimea. For this and other thought crimes, his face was plastered on a Moscow billboard labeling him a “national traitor” and his bank accounts were frozen. For most of the last year he has been living abroad.
But in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, a bucket of political revenge is never enough. So this week the parliament voted to strip Mr. Ponomarev of his parliamentary immunity. This effectively forces him into exile, since his immunity was the only thing that had been standing in the way of being hit with trumped up criminal charges of taking illicit payments. The tactic is a Kremlin favorite, which it has used against former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky and dissident blogger Alexei Navalny.
ENLARGE Mr. Ponomarev’s real crime is that he has been outspoken in denouncing Mr. Putin, both inside and outside the country. In 2012 he took a prominent role in the street protests against Mr. Putin’s tainted election to a third presidential term. He cast the sole vote against Mr. Putin’s 2013 “gay propaganda” law, and he also led a successful effort to stop a law that would effectively have criminalized street protests.
Since leaving Russia last year, he has worked to energize the Russian diaspora to form the intellectual and political basis of a democratic opposition. As he told us last month, Mr. Putin cannot be president forever, and Russia will need a viable liberal alternative to the thugocrats vying to take charge of the Kremlin.
“Many of us now are in the U.S., and Kremlin is comfortable with it,” he wrote us Tuesday in an email. “But we will get more organized and we will be back—as it happened already not once and not twice in Russian history. And we will not feel sorry for those who initiated that farce in State Duma—formerly Russian parliament.”
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