More on Putin........ ( for those who haven't done their homework )
The Russian novelist Sergei Lebedev is currently based in Berlin. But it is the popular uprising in Moscow that hangs darkly over our conversation. Hours before we speak, protesters calling for the release of the
jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny take to the streets in towns and cities right across Russia. The Kremlin’s response is a familiar one: thuggish violence.
The TV images make a Mordor-like tableau. Faceless riot police clash their shields together in a rhythmic display of power; demonstrators raise their arms in a plucky counter-clap. There are arrests, many thousands of them. Young men are savagely beaten and dragged through grey slush into waiting police vans. One sets himself alight in an apparent act of rebellion.
After 20 years of repressive rule by
Vladimir Putin, and his fellow KGB alumni, discontent is boiling over in Russia. But to what end? Lebedev is optimistic about political change, of a civic thaw after a long winter. “Putin is no Gorby. We are not in
perestroika,” he admits. “But our grandparents and parents lived with the idea they would die in the USSR. Then all of a sudden, in two or three years, you are in an absolutely different reality. I think that could happen again.”
Thousands of people attend a protest against the jailing of Alexei Navalny in St Petersburg on 31 January. Photograph: Valentin Egorshin/AP