Russian Notes: Saving Lt. Col. Putin

I warned in my recent column for Insight, " From Russia with death ," that very little time remains before the next murder takes place. I did not then know that a (happily unsuccessful) attempt had already been made to assassinate former Russian Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar.

The current little "joke" in Moscow is, "Not everybody is going to see in the New Year." Since that is very soon, I return to some of the points in my article, which has stirred up a raging controversy both in Russia and in America.

First, as regards my own attitude to Russian President Vladimir Putin: It has not changed. It remains just as negative as it was when, at the beginning of the effort to find a replacement for Boris Yeltsin, Mr. Putin first monopolized our television screens, winning the hearts of the nation with his plebeian slang.

However, there has never been anything personal in my attitude toward the man. It has been based solely on the extent to which Mr. Putin could bring good or evil to Russia.

Thus, I publicly supported him in 2001 when, against the prevailing opinion of his entourage, he spoke out as an ally of the United States in the Afghanistan operation and, without the loss of a single Russian soldier's life, resolved an important issue of the country's security: how to liquidate a bridgehead for Islamist radicals, who were preparing to move on Central Asia. For the first time in Russia's military history, somebody else did our dirty work for us. Usually, the reverse has been true.

Right now Mr. Putin finds himself in a situation in which, as the end of his second term approaches, he can again play a positive role in Russian history.

Within Russia and beyond its frontiers, assassinations and attempted assassinations are taking place of "enemies of the people," lists of whom are to be found on all our country's quasi-fascist Web sites. It is only going to be possible to continue blaming these murders on the CIA, or the oligarchs Boris Berezovsky (in Great Britain) or Leonid Nevzlin (in Israel), for a few more days, until the British, as seems likely, publicly and officially produce compelling evidence showing that the tracks of Alexander Litvinenko's murderers lead straight back to Moscow. The president of the Russian Federation will then have to take possibly the most momentous decision of his life.

Much the same dilemma faced the one-time President of Poland, Wojciech Jaruszelski, when his intelligence services brutally murdered their own "enemy of the Polish people," Father Jerzy Popieluszko. Mr. Jaruszelski could have tried to cover up the crime, thereby irrevocably becoming an accomplice (and if he had, he would undoubtedly be in prison today). Instead, he chose to hand the murderers over to justice and as a result has remained, even today in post-Communist Poland, a respected political figure.

More important, however, than the fate of the Russian president is the fate of his country. The effective legitimization of these serial political murders will make not only Mr. Putin but all of us hostages of the institutions which are committing them. That is quite apart from the fact that Russia's international reputation for years to come depends on whether a radiological attack on a G-8 partner was sanctioned by the head of the Russian state rather than by some rabid FSB oil baron.

We have to help the president of the Russian Federation to come to the right decision. He is, of course, unlikely to listen to the voices of his opponents. That is why what is needed is a broad coalition of supporters of Mr. Putin, of that section of United Russia, the party of the government, which, if only from the instinct of self-preservation, will be prepared openly to speak out a