For a leader who styles himself a strong man, Russian President Vladimir Putin seems awfully scared of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). For the past several years he has been waging a war against those groups, working to marginalize them and limit their influence. The latest step in that effort occurred late last month, when he signed legislation that criminalizes any contact with "undesirable" NGOs or individuals, an amorphous and undefined qualifier that will be filled in by Russia's chief prosecutor. This is just one more attempt by Putin and his confederates to silence any opposition to their rule.

Putin and his colleagues are convinced that the West, and the United States in particular, is determined to remove them from office. They watched color revolutions sprout throughout the world — and studied most intensely those in states of the former Soviet Union such as Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine — and concluded that such movements could not be organic protests against authoritarian regimes. Rather, they are certain that such protests are financed and promoted by Western forces bent on eliminating any individual or government that dares to defy them and their vision of world order.

According to the Kremlin, the chief instruments of that effort are NGOs engaged in "democracy promotion." The $5 billion that U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland said the U.S. spent over the past two decades to "secure a prosperous and democratic Ukraine" was, in Russian eyes, a program of regime change in a crucial Russian buffer state and an attempt to limit Moscow's great power ambitions. That belief motivated the Russian Parliament three years ago to pass a law that labeled Russian groups that received any funds from abroad as "foreign agents." Several dozen groups earned that label, and a number of them eventually shut down.