How the Kremlin outwitted Amnesty International

ON MARCH 1ST Russian news announced that Alexei Navalny was moving to a new prison, Penal Colony No. 2, notorious for psychological torture. Two days later his lawyers found him in a different, and less ghastly, jail. Russia’s justice system likes to keep people guessing.

The Kremlin says Mr Navalny, Russia’s main opposition leader, is a common criminal, as well as being a Western agent. Its propagandists tout his (plainly bogus) fraud conviction. Their struggle to convict him in the court of public opinion has received a boost from an unlikely source: Amnesty International, a global human-rights group.

On February 23rd Amnesty said it had decided to stop calling Mr Navalny a “prisoner of conscience”, a term first popularised by Amnesty itself. The reason given was that he had made some xenophobic comments nearly 15 years ago. Amnesty had not planned to publicise this decision, but an internal memo had leaked.

Kremlin megaphones went wild. Day after day they quoted Amnesty’s verdict that Mr Navalny’s comments constituted “advocacy of hatred”. “I very much understand Amnesty International which talks about hatred from Navalny’s side,” crowed Dmitry Kiselev, Mr Putin’s operatic propagandist-in-chief. The head of RT, a state broadcaster, called Mr Navalny a Nazi.

This propaganda coup was made easier by a...