Mr. Medvedev’s Silence

Dmitri Medvedev has been president of Russia for almost a year, and it’s hard to think of anything on which he has demonstrated independence from his mentor and predecessor, Vladimir Putin. Many Russia-watchers wistfully recall his early condemnations of Russia’s “legal nihilism” and rampant corruption and hope that Mr. Medvedev will one day rise up and, to borrow a metaphor, push the perezagruska button on human rights issues.

Now would be as good a time as any.

On March 31, three people beat Lev Ponomaryov, a 67-year-old human rights activist, outside his home. A month earlier, Mr. Ponomaryov’s passport had been revoked and he was charged with slander for statements he made in the United States about human-rights abuses in Russia. Sergei Kovalev, a 79-year-old Soviet-era dissident who spent 10 years in labor camps and internal exile for what the K.G.B. used to call “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda,” fired off an open letter to Mr. Medvedev. He assailed the government’s tolerance for “home-bred fascists” and its “cynical laissez-faire leniency” to those who carry out politically motivated violence. So far, no reaction from Mr. Medvedev.

Nor has he reacted to the farcical new charges against Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev, the former top officers of the dismembered Yukos oil company who were arrested in 2003.

The charges then were tax evasion; now they have been expanded to the theft of Yukos’s entire oil production. If the first trials at least could have been explained as a political reckoning for a powerful and ambitious oligarch, the new ones are show, intended only to keep Mr. Khodorkovsky and his colleague in prison forever. “Power: carry out your laws,” Mr. Khodorkovsky demanded at the start of the trial.

If Mr. Medvedev really abhors “legal nihilism,” he must see that this is a fateful moment. The oil boom that greased Mr. Putin’s popularity and power — and blunted domestic criticism to his trampling of the law — is over. Things are likely to get far worse, and Russians who are testy now will get angry. That will create even more fertile conditions for the strong men around Mr. Putin to further tighten the screws.

It is tough and dangerous for the young president to buck his mentor and take on this bunch. But he is the democratically elected president. A stand for the rule of law would not only give Mr. Medvedev credibility in the West, but it could reinvigorate the demoralized ranks of Russians who still yearn for democracy.