MOSCOW -- Exiling someone is so very Russian. Although centuries passed by and regimes changed, authorities retained exile as a great tool of punishment and manipulation. Less objectionable than execution or imprisonment, it effectively uprooted and silenced the regimes' opponents -- and sometimes destroyed them altogether.
The Romanovs exiled rebellious intellectuals into the Siberian wilderness, and their own embarrassingly promiscuous or hard-drinking cousins to Paris. Stalin shipped Trotsky to Turkey. Brezhnev sent Solzhenitsyn to America.
But what Russian President Vladimir Putin is doing beats them all, as he is exiling not an individual but an institution -- and a pretty important one at that, the Constitutional Court. The highest judicial authority in the country, the equivalent of the United States Supreme Court, is to pack and move within a year. Its new address: Putin's hometown, St. Petersburg.