The chess champion/activist has obtained permits for rallies repeatedly, only to take the rallies out of the designated areas and into crowded thoroughfares that were off-limits. It appears obvious that the purpose in doing this was to provoke a police reaction that would get him on foreign TV. Otherwise, I suppose, the rallies would be too boring to notice. I understand the tactic. But I don't understand why Western journalists go along with it and don't at least describe the motives. When it happens in the West (e.g., the WTO demonstrations in Seattle in 2000 and in Washington, D.C., and Miami the following year), the demonstrators get little sympathy, even when the police crack down.

Maybe the police in Russia are tougher, even tougher than the cops in Chicago where demonstrators can't get away with anything. I don't doubt it. But what about the rally planners who intentionally broke the permit rules?

I checked out one of the Kasparov demonstration sites used last summer--the well-located Turgenev Square. It was evident, first, that there was plenty of room for a rally there. Second, it was clear that there was no justification for breaking a permit agreement and moving the demonstration into the horrendously traffic-jammed roads nearby. We wouldn't let Mr. Kasparov or anyone do that in New York. Why should it be acceptable in Moscow?

This doesn't mean that Russia doesn't have many civic and political inequities. It's just that the Western media don't seem to have an adequate understanding of them or of Russia's rapidly developing civic society as a whole.

Some of the same kinds of people who wanted us to be more understanding of the communist Soviet Union are now unwilling to cut the Russian Republic much slack at all.