There are events that at the time seem to portend one thing but years later take on a very different hue. So it is with the dramatic political crisis that erupted in Russia 30 years ago this week, a crisis that ended with tanks of the Russian army blasting the country’s parliament, the Supreme Soviet, into submission.
Amid relentless attacks on Ukraine, which received pledges of U.S. and German battle tanks, the Russian state ramped up its campaign against civil society at home yet again, with a court ordering the closure of a revered rights group and authorities tightening the vise on the Sakharov Center.
The Sakharov Center in Moscow, the human rights entity named after Nobel Prize-winning Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov, says it is being evicted from its three premises in the Russian capital.