Oleg Kozlovsky’s English Weblog

From Huffington Post.
December 23, 2009.

Yabloko, which had claimed to be the last registered democratic party in Russia, has officially broke up with the opposition. Its convention adopted [on December 19] a resolution last week that bans Yabloko’s members from participating in any opposition organizations, movements or coalitions.

Kremlin’s most hated “troublemakers” like The Other Russia and Solidarnost are explicitly mentioned in the resolution. Those who don’t leave these organizations within three months will be automatically expelled from the party, regardless if they hold high posts.

Yabloko had long struggled to balance the real democratic opposition and the so-called “system opposition” (i.e. controlled by the Kremlin). Members participated in Dissenters’ Marches and openly criticized Vladimir Putin’s regime while their official leaders were more busy attacking other democratic organizations and figures. Grigory Yavlinsky (Yabloko’s co-founder and former leader) and Sergei Mitrokhin (Yavlinsky’s successor) called themselves the opposition, but meanwhile supported the authorities when sensitive topics were concerned. They denounced any opposition’s attempts of consolidation, defended infamous Moscow mayor Yury Luzhkov from accusations of corruption, and even went so far as to support United Russia’s candidate for mayor of Sochi against Boris Nemtsov of liberal Solidarnost.

But this display of loyalty wasn’t enough for the authorities. Yabloko hasn’t been allowed to win any major elections since 2003. The party also had huge debts after its lost campaigns. The latest Moscow Duma elections were a disaster for Yabloko when Mitrokhin lost his deputy seat. It became clear that Yabloko had no chances to win any elections without submitting to the Kremlin completely. The only other option was to join the opposition ranks and inevitably lose the official registration (i.e. the right to participate in elections, under current legislation) and face harsh repression. No wonder the party’s leadership didn’t want such a fate.

To guarantee the full loyalty of Yabloko, Mitrokhin needed to get rid of “troublemakers” within his own party. Such were the most independent and popular activists (like the head of St Petersburg branch Maksim Reznik or a well-known journalist Andrei Piontkovsky), who were already participating in different opposition projects. The latest resolution was therefore both a way to clean the party of its democratic wing and a signal that Yabloko was ready to surrender — A kind of a white flag visible from the Kremlin’s towers.

The latest decision makes Yabloko a part of the system of managed, or “sovereign” democracy built by Vladislav Surkov. This concept implies that all democratic institutions exist in paper, but are in fact imitated and controlled by the government. Elections are held regularly but their outcome is known in advance. Freedom of speech is praised but only exists on the Internet and in some papers with limited circulation. There are parties that call themselves opposition but they will never challenge the existing government or try to take its place. This system is used to fool and calm down people both inside and (maybe even more) outside Russia. “Our democracy is not perfect, but so isn’t yours,” they say to Western leaders. And there are always ones who prefer to believe (or pretend to believe) that this imitation is democracy.

The most ironic part of this story is that even after such a shameful surrender Yabloko has only a dim prospect of restoring even a part of its influence. As shows the experience of another wannabe pocket opposition party, Right Cause, Surkov doesn’t value his defeated opponents. Almost all candidates of Right Cause weren’t even allowed to run for elections this autumn. So there is a very slight chance that Yabloko will be able to win any elections after giving in to the Kremlin. Especially after they expel all their most promising activists.

“Vertical of power” is hardening its grip over the Constitutional Court. Kommersant reports today that two members of the Court were punished by their fellow judges for public criticism of the Russian judiciary system and the lack of democracy in general.

Vladimir Yaroslavtsev had to resign yesterday from the Council of Judges of the Russian Federation and its praesidium, a self-regulatory body of the Russian judiciary. The reason for that was his August interview with El Pais, in which he harshly criticised the political system built by Vladimir Putin. “The judiciary power in Russia during Vladimir Putin’s and Dmitry Medvedev’s presidencial terms has become a tool used by the executive power,” he claimed. “I feel like I’m standing at the ruins of justice,” the judge concluded.

Another member of the Constitutional Court, Anatoly Kononov, even has to resign from the court because of his public critical position. For a long time, he was opposing many undemocratic decisions of the court by declaring his individual opinion (the right a Constitutional Court judge legally has). He has also criticised these decisions (including the Court’s refusal to examine the cases of Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Natalia Morari) in the press. He also tried to defend judge Yaroslavtsev and to oppose the new order of selecting the Chairman of the Constitutional Court (he is now appointed by the President and the Senate instead of being elected by the judges themselves, as it used to be). As a result, he was forced by his colleagues to resign from his post for “undermining the authority of the judiciary system.”

Russian National Exhibition, a grand event organized by Russian government to attract US investment, opens in Chicago tomorrow. Russian bureaucrats and businesspeople will try to convince their American counterparts that it is safe and profitable to put money in Russia’s economy. This difficult task appears even less achievable after today’s tragic death in Moscow custody of Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer for Hermitage Capital Investment. He was arrested a year ago on tax evasion charges and, according to the defence, the investigators tried to coerce him into giving false testimony against his boss William Browder. Heritage claims that corrupt police officials have used its stamps and documents to steal huge amounts from the national budget as tax compensation. But it was Magnitsky who those same officials later charged with tax evasion. He complained multiple times about his health and was refused health care, his attorneys say. His death is another sad warning to those who risk to invest in Putin’s Russia.

The organizers of the Exhibition will not ignore the humanitarian aspect too. They even have a whole 2.5-hour long session on “Formation of Civil Society.” Five regional ombudsmen (from Samara, Yekaterinburg, Dagestan and Kabardino-Balkaria), an editor of an online paper and an unkown (to me) expert will be explaining how Russia develops its civil society. The apparent lack of any NGOs’ representatives speaks for itself: the government has no activists to show to their Western partners without loss of image.

The Walls Are Not Forever

Two leading human rights organizations, Moscow Helsinki Group and For Human Rights Movement, are going be evicted from their offices by Moscow authorities, Prima News agency reports. Moscow government has decided not to prolong rent of their premises, which they occupy since 1996 and 1997 respectively. The government has already applied to the court for eviction of the NGOs.

Moscow Helsinki Group is the oldest existing human rights organization in Russia, which was founded in late 1970s. Its head Lyudmila Alexeeva, one of the most prominent human rights activists, was just recently awarded the Andrei Sakharov Prize. For Human Rights Movement (Za Prava Cheloveka) is another old and respected human rights NGO headed by Lev Ponomaryov. He says that the reason behind the eviction is either political or economical. Both organizations are outspoken critics of the Kremlin and participate in democratic protests.

PS: As another democratic movement’s activist Vsevolod Chernozub reports on his Twitter, another NGO that defends soldiers’ rights, Mother’s Right is also going to be evicted. I don’t know any more details yet.

According to Russian media (in Russian), Ministry of Home Affairs (whose main agency is police) held tactical maneuvers in Moscow suburbs today. During these maneuvers, SWAT troops were trained to disperse, according to the script, “a group of senior citizens that protested social injustice and blocked a federal highway.” In order to do this, the whole arsenal was used by the police: water cannons, shock grenades, and tear gas. Troops blocked and arrested some of the “senior citizens.”

Minister Rashid Nurgaliev was watching the maneuvers and was apparently satisfied. A lot of civilian journalists couldn’t share his optimism. Even the reports of government TV called the event “very strange.” Here is a report of Vesti news TV channel (one of the most official TV channels owned by the government, in Russian):

Of course, when the scandal broke out, MHA hurried to deny any references to senior people in their maneuvers’ script, the use of water cannons and the very fact of maneuvers; state TV channels removed their news reports from their Web sites. Fortunately, somebody saved the clips and uploaded them to YouTube.

Read the rest of this entry »

A briefing was held last Thursday in the US Helsinki Commission (officially named the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe) dedicated to the use of microblogs and new media to promote freedom in authoritarian countries. A lot was said about Russia, and I’ll just cite Daniel Calingaert of Freedom House, who referred to a few recent examples of how we utilized Web 2.0 to spread information about electoral fraud:

Citizens in the former Soviet Union have used new media to assert their rights and to challenge abuses of power. In Russia, for example, the Internet was the primary means for drawing attention to fraud in this month’s local elections. When observers in the Moscow district of Zyablikovo found a group of individuals hired to vote for United Russia multiple times, they used Twitter and Livejournal blogs to spread the news immediately and to publish photos of the violators.

A member of that district’s electoral commission, [Andrey Klyukin] gave an online interview to describe in detail the plan behind this fraud. The interview was widely viewed on Russian YouTube and covered by several traditional media outlets. Another group of observers published video footage of a polling-station chairman in the city of Azov as he tried to mix fraudulent ballots which had already been filled in for United Russia with legitimate ballots. This video became a hit in the Russian blogosphere and prompted a criminal investigation of the polling-station chairman. Digital media spread the news of voter fraud in Russia’s local elections and contributed to a real-world response. The news triggered a public demonstration on October 12th
in Moscow’s Pushkin Square and prompted all three opposition parties to walk out of Parliament in protest.

Authoratian governments are aware of the threat that new media pose to them and they use a wide arsenal to silent online criticism, Mr Calingaert continues:

Authoritarian regimes in the former Soviet republics and elsewhere continue to repress their citizens, and this repression extends to digital media. In Russia, for example, Internet freedom has declined significantly in recent years, as bloggers have become subject to hacker attacks, legal prosecution and physical violence. Although there is no technical filtering in Russia, officials often make phone calls to pressure web hosts or Internet service providers to remove unwanted content. The director of a leading hosting company, Master Host, admitted that his company gets about 100 requests a day to remove content from inconvenient – so-called “inconvenient” Web sites.

Full unofficial transcript

Kommersant reports (in Russian) on Michael McFaul’s (Obama’s chief advisor on Russia) talks with Vladislav Surkov (the architect of Russia’s “managed democracy”):

As Michael McFaul told Kommersant after the talks, he brought home to Vladislav Surkov Washington’s new approach to the issue of human rights in Russia: “We came to a conclusion that we need a reset in this respect too and we should give up the old approach that had been troubling Russian-American partnership.” Mr McFaul made it clear that the USA are not going to teach Russia democracy any more and cause irritation in Moscow; they are going to focus on practical work with NGOs instead.

Michael McFaul is known for his sober and clear understanding of the situation in Russia. He barely has any illusions on what the Russian political system is like. But he does really sound like many Realpolitik-infected diplomats, who call the West to turn a blind eye on Russia slipping down to dictatorship.

Is Obama’s administration really going to give the issue of human rights the last priority or how should we understand this “new approach”?

PS: Meanwhile, United Russia has faked about 1,000,000 votes (40% of official turnout) at Moscow municipal elections, according to statistical research (in Russia). Those who went to protest peacefully this fraud were arrested violently Monday night by riot police (including myself). Now we shouldn’t expect that this issue will be raised by US diplomats; otherwise it would definitely trouble the Washington-Moscow partnership.

I haven’t recently had time to blog here a lot, sorry about that. Here are some interesting things that happened in the last month or two:

1. Oborona started its English blog (not so many entries yet) and held its second summer training camp Partizan-2009 near Volga river. The camp lasted four days and was packed with training, workshops, discussions etc. Journalists and guests from other democratic organizations participated along with Oborona activists.

Here are some camp photos and a video clip (in Russian):

2. You may now follow me on Twitter (kozlovsky_en). I update it more often that this blog. Oborona is also there but only in Russian so far.

3. For the first time, an individual is sent to prison officially for criticizing the government. Alexey Nikiforov, an opposition leader in Yekaterinburg, was sentenced to 1 year imprisonment for “extremism”: his “crime” was organizing of several peaceful and legal public protest actions. The court considered slogans “Down with the police state!” and “I don’t want to live in a fascist state” extremism. Previously, courts used to sentence “extremists” to conditional terms, not the real ones.

4. Another court in Krasnodarsky Kray found the slogan “Freedom is not given, it is taken” extremism and ordered to ban Novorossiysk Committee for Human Rights, which used that slogan at one public action. The court decision says,

…the call to “take” freedom means that individual rights have priority over the state’s [rights]. Thus, the slogan “Freedom is not given, it is taken” is of extremist nature.

5. While Dmitry Medvedev calls (once again) to “strengthen democracy” and even criticizes political repression (abstract, not the ones that take place in today’s Russia), one of the Moscow’s busiest metro stations Kurskaya now proudly features a quotation from the Soviet anthem of 1943:

Stalin brought us up — on loyalty to the people,
He inspired us to labor and to heroism.

6. All seven Solidarity’s candidates to the Moscow City Duma were denied registration by the Electoral Commissions. In some cases, the reasons were unbelievably absurd and almost unexplainable (like lack of certain unnecessary hints in subscription forms). Even members of the “official opposition” Pravoe Delo (Right Cause) party were also denied registration. Therefore, there will be almost no competition in these elections.

Yesterday Russian police arrested a man in connection with the murder of human rights activist Natalya Estemirova. He wasn’t a killer, her killers will not be punished. The man was arrested for organizing a demonstration in her memory in the center of Moscow. The action was legal but the police said that “too many people” came to mourn Estemirova, grabbed the 70-years-old organizer by his arms and dragged him to a police van. Several people who protested or tried to prevent the arrest were beaten by the riot police. This is how it happened:

The arrested old man is Viktor Sokirko. He was a political prisoner under Brezhnev. Now he became a prisoner of Putin’s regime.