Pity Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. The Washington Post is giving him a nasty case of acid reflux. With any luck, it’ll soon become a bleeding ucler.

First, just over a month ago on on May 19th, it published a featured op-ed column by dissident opposition political leader Oleg Kozlovsky even as Kozlovsky languished in prison on trumped-up political charges. Not only did the paper tout the column as the lead on its op-ed page, it also published a photograph of the diminutive Kozlovsky in the loving embrace of a pair fo the Kremlin’s stormtroopers.

And then this past Sunday the front page of the paper’s website featured a lengthy op-ed contribution, translated directly from the Russian press, by the heroic journalist Yulia Latynina (pictured above), the heir apparent the mighty Anna Politkovskya, murdered for daring to challenge the Kremlin’s policy in Chechnya and its brutal crackdown on civil society in Russia proper. She’s one of the last voices of open criticism of the Putin regime left in Russia, hosting a popular program on Echo of Moscow radio, one of the last bastions of real journalism in the country.

She begins:

The most striking thing about everyday life in the Russia of Vladimir Putin (and make no mistake, it is Putin’s Russia, despite the election of a new president, hand-picked by the great man) is the incredible corruption of the courts, the police, the special forces — all the institutions that are supposed to uphold law and order in a democracy and that in Russia today have been transformed into a cancer that’s devouring the state.

And she concludes:

In the West, people read that Putin has restored Russia’s power and strengthened the ruling hierarchy. This is the image that the PR agencies he has hired are trying to project. There may not be democracy in Putin’s Russia, they say, but there is order.

Don’t buy it. The Russian authorities aren’t in control of the country — unless we consider their ability to throw any businessman in prison and seize his company to be control. And yet these guys really think they’re strong — and that the measure of a ruler’s strength is the amount of cash in his bank accounts.

Click through and read the whole piece, and Kozlovsky’s too. They’re required reading for anyone who wants to understand what is really going on in Russia today. And check out the over 150 comments, including frothing, hysterical attacks on Julia as being “unpatriotic” by the crazed Russian nationalists who live to justify the Putin dictatorship, showing clearly how effectively Julia and the Post have affected them.

It’s so encouraging to see that some major Western newspapers are not fooled — as the American president has so woefully been fooled — by the KGB regime of Vladimir Putin. Now, we need to demand that this wave of coverage turn into a tsunami, and that our political leaders follow it up with the proper level of support for opposition leaders like Kozlovsky.

Otherwise, it won’t be long before we read that Latynina has been gunned down outside her apartment just like Politkovskaya was. The Post reported last week that the Kremlin is closing the investigation into the killing without charging anyone for ordering the hit.

Russia is an amazing place where the people elevate those who are most dangerous to the nation’s welfare to positions of great power (Lenin, Stalin, Putin – they even sound alike) and jail or kill those who struggle most patriotically for the nation’s glory (Solzhenitsyn, Politkovskaya, Kozlovsky – their names always sound more complicated, and more Russian). It’s not hard to understand the fact that Russia’s population is expected to halve over the next fifty years, or that its male population doesn’t live to see it’s sixtieth year on average, when you know that this is the way the people of of Russia choose to conduct their affairs.