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Sat 05 May 2004Inscrutable advocate of the stateCurrent Affairs: Under Stalin, the disappearance of innocent citizens was a fact of life. Two million Soviet army chiefs, priests, professors and other "enemies of the people" were murdered during the Great Terror of 1937-38.The arbitrariness of tsarist authority had found its grotesque mirror image, it seemed, in Stalin's purges. The current Russian president, Vladimir Putin, continues to exercise power arbitrarily and is indeed nostalgic for the Soviet era. For Putin, as it was for Stalin, the state is more important than individual liberty. Anything which threatens the state - the media, Chechen rebels, recalcitrant regional governors - must be neutered.