From Denver’s Rocky Mountain News — Originally published Sunday, Dec. 21

Welcome to the Soviet Union, circa 2008.

Americans may have thought all would be well … after the Iron Curtain came down and capitalist Boris Yeltsin danced his jig. It may have seemed that the feared KGB had been replaced by the seemingly innocuous FSB, and that one of its former directors was a man that the U.S. would work with (according to soul-searcher President George W. Bush).

But first we saw capitalists like Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who also happened to be a critic of government corruption, go down …

Then critical journalists began to fall under suspicious circumstances …

… [A] new bill in the Duma was brought to the world’s attention [recently]: The definition of treason would be expanded beyond passing state secrets to damaging Russia’s “constitutional order” and “sovereignty or territorial integrity.” Kremlin opponents quickly realized this broad definition could send them to a repopulated gulag, as the proposed law effectively banned protests. And if that wasn’t enough, the Duma recently approved discarding jury trials for those charged with treason. …