It is ironic how a nation of local-minded islanders – such as the British – so often complain the freedom of speech among its European counterparts, yet it so often goes on to readily suppress the freedom of expression. This month has been a perfect example of that phenomenon. Whilst London wags its finger at Moscow for the alleged role of the Kremlin in the death of a Chechen war reporter, Anna Politkovskaya, the BNP staged a party conference in Blackpool, heavily suppressed by leftist elements in society. While Politkovskaya lies dead in an early grave for voicing unfashionable concerns on Russian actions in Chechnya territories, I wonder – hypothetically speaking – just how many people in the UK would have looked sadly upon the unexpected murder of the BNP leader for voicing similarly unfashionable concerns in Blackpool? Not many. Perhaps foreign rebels are infinitely more attractive that the rebels on one’s own doorstep.

However, with the suppression of the BNP rally aside, the death of the Chechen war reporter dealt a deep blow to Russia’s modern political critics. A pistol and four bullets were found next to the body of Politkovskaya. Known as a dedicated human rights defender and for criticising the Kremlin’s actions in Chechnya – working for the newspaper Novaya Gazeta – it was her strongly opposing voice towards the Kremlin that has made many think this is a political contract killing. Furthermore, the Russian spy and critic of Putin, Alexander Litvinenko, whose name has not left the headlines since his own untimely death, was known to have openly accused Putin for her death.

Whichever way you look at it, this motion of events has set alarm bells ringing across a wide spectrum of international governments over Putin’s treatment of life and liberty among its more verbal citizens. Even a number of Britain’s quietest diplomats have recently criticized the Putin regime for its responsibility in the deaths of both Politkovskaya and Litvinenko.

In late November, Artemy Troitsky of the New Statesman accurately set out the brutal context of suppressed political critics under Putin’s authority:

“The attempted assassination of Alexander Litvinenko might not be all that it seems and yet it does fit a pattern. It follows only a few weeks after the murder of my good friend, the campaigning journalist, Anna Politkovskaya. There have since been other, less publicised cases. Another investigative reporter, Fatima Tlisova, was poisoned two weeks ago in north Caucasus; on 18 November the former head of security in Chechnya, who had fallen out with the region’s prime minister, was gunned down in the centre of Moscow in broad daylight by Chechen and Russian police […]”

Although Putin’s post-Soviet oligarchic expanse is somewhat different from Blair’s Labour Euro-liberal system, they share a common democratic attribute: the tendency of the political elite, in consensus with the electorate, to impose grounded social norms upon the freedom to write, protest, publish and criticize. It is not residual cold war tensions which impinge upon the freedom of political critics – it is democracy itself which is the origin of the tensions. Tocqueville wrote in the 1830’s of the rough-edged democracy that developed in America: “I know no country in which, generally speaking, there is less independence of mind and true freedom of discussion than in America.” The same is true of the development of Russia’s wailing newborn democracy.

Contrary to the voices of many commentators – who see Politkovskaya’s death under Putin as a threat to democracy – I would argue that her death should be seen largely as a consequence of Putin’s push towards democracy. Taking a step back from discussions on contemporary democratic ideology, an awful consequence of the super-democracy is that the unfettered will of the legal majority takes no prisoners for those who stand or speak outside that interest. Although it is common for many to diagnose such problems on residual cold war tactics of the former Soviet Union power, it is more likely that we should see them as fresh problems for Russian political critics, operating under a historically unique democratically authoritarian Putin-regime.

The shame and difficulties faced by writers and critics such as Artemy Troitsky remind me of the problems faced by Theodor Adorno – the twentieth-century anti-fascist German philosopher (and often inadvertently claimed as leftist) – when he attempted to explain the position of the critic in post-war Europe and America. The way Troitsky discusses the criticism of the Russian state resembles the way that the anti-Nazi social theorist, Theodor Adorno, once talked of the critics under Germany’s National Socialist regime.

When one reads through Adorno’s Minima Moralia (1951), his writings are interesting for anyone who defends unfashionable positions – anti-Islamic or religious perspectives – from a more fashionable political order and in the process, has been accused of ‘lacking in tact and diplomacy’. For Adorno, ‘tact’ is the social control of the act of criticism, regardless of whether that individual thinks of herself as a critic at all. It shapes the entire idea and sphere of the critic. It is the accusation on the lack of tact that seemed to be one of the reasons why Troitsky himself gave up depositing difficult political material on his website.

In a totalitarian society, Adorno talks of the false critic in which the very notion of the “freedom of thought” becomes simply speculative – the journalists speculate but never criticize. One’s freedom of thought is guaranteed by ‘speculation’ – the most work-dominated, scientific, lazy, asubjective, conditioned mental process, which at all costs must be settled under the “proof that nothing changes”. Accordingly, Russia, culturally and politically, seems to have never grown used to its own criticism.

Perhaps the most interesting of Adorno’s characterizations of the totalitarian public sphere is his understanding of social criticism as a “wrestling club”. Political critics make up a serious proportion of the semi-intellectual “wrestling club”. Intellectuals are caught within a self-conscious bubble, wrestling with difficulties, always struggling and always remaining indecisive. They eventually become the greatest promise of the state. Convinced of their critically intellectual qualities – and indeed, they usually are the accepted face of intellectualism – they fulfil the promises pre-designed within the archaeology of society.

As Adorno himself writes of the critics: “No wrestling match is without a referee: the whole brawl has been staged by society internalized in the individual, which both supervises the struggle and takes part in it”. Whether it turns out to be Putin that has refereed the wrestling match of the critics in Russia, combined with suppression by the political elite and established society, it takes all members to participate in a totally repressive society, not just one political leader. If Putin is guilty of the suppression of political critics in the most barbaric way possible – through the murder of Politkovskaya – then this should spell a very bleak future for Russia’s critics who dare to leave the wrestling club.