Putin Has Vast Vulnerabilities: The Free Russia Foundation Wants To Reveal Them To The West.

Henry Kissinger was my professor at Harvard, back in the early 1960s. The biggest thing I remember from many courses with him was his statement that Americans excel in our capacity for self-criticism, including exploring our weaknesses. What we aren’t good at is assessing the vulnerabilities of our adversaries.

This is a thought that would resonate with Natalia Arno, founder of the Free Russia Foundation, an organization that advocates for democracy in Russia. In her view, Putin has an unending collection of weaknesses, and we in the West aren’t giving these weaknesses enough attention.

If you were to talk with her, one of the first points she’d bring up is her view that the West has the false perception that Russians don’t want or deserve democracy. “This is, of course, not true,” she states. “The Putin regime keeps people from expressing their true views, and they do it using fear, propaganda, and jail. I know of a case where a woman made an anti-Putin comment on Facebook and ended up with a 20-year jail sentence.”

In her view, a strong and secure regime doesn’t have to use these techniques. She points out that while under the dictator Stalin there were millions of political prisoners, under Brezhnev or Gorbachev the numbers were smaller, in the dozens. Under Putin, however, the number of political prisoners is in the thousands. In the case of the anti-war protestors, 20,000 were detained and many of them jailed. “You could be jailed,” she asserts, outrage in her voice, “just for putting flowers on the grave of the opposition leader, Navalny.”

She knows of individuals who ended up in jail simply for holding up a copy of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. I asked Arno, “Why would a book by one of Russia’s greatest literary figures land a person in jail?”

Her answer? “The book has the word ‘war’ in it, and just that three letter word can get a 15-year sentence.”

Arno knows that jail time in Russia is far more of a threat than it would be in the West. She’s familiar with the experience of her friend and colleague, politician, journalist, and historian Vladimir Kara-Murza. For criticizing Putin, he was sentenced to 25 years in prison.