Russian democracy smothered by NGO law, corruption and a muzzled media
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Russian NGO law
Bellona's Alexander Nikitin speaks on the ramifications of Russia's new NGO law and the deterioration of Russian Democracy last Friday in Oslo.
Nils Boehmer/Bellona
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The official paranoia that ushered in the tough new NGO laws was spearheaded by Ukraine’s “orange revolution” when thousands took to the steets of Kiev to protest an obviously rigged election in which Moscow backed incumbent Viktor Yanukovych defeated western thinking, pro-democracy Vitkor Yushchenko. The protests brought about a new election that Yushchenko, to Moscow’s chagrin, won.
Part of what it making the Russian government’s smothering of civil society possible, said Nikitin, who also runs Bellona’s St. Petersburg office, is President Vladimir Putin’s push to subjugate all forms of public interaction to his government, as well as rampant corruption within the agencies created to govern non-profit organisations.
“Corruption will be the death of Russia,” said Nikitin, who heads Bellona’s St. Petersburg office.
“It runs through all levels of society from janitors to government officials.”
This, plus the zeal of the Putin Administration’s goal to bring every form of government and public expression under its heel – introduced by Putin as “power vertical” – will smother what little remains of the drive toward Russian democracy.
“Everything has a price and you can even purchase a governorship, though I am not sure what the cost for that is these days,” Nikitin said.
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| Pål Skedsmo of Oslo's Fridtjof Nansen Institute joins Nikitin in a discussion of Russia's NGO law and Russian democracy. |
| Nils Boehmer/Bellona |
Pål Skedsmo, a researcher with Oslo’s Fridtjof Nansen Institute joined Nikitin in last week’s discussion, though he expressed more optimism that civil society can still be a catalyst for creating democracy in Russia.
“The new law is a desire for more control from the side of the authorities,” said Skedsmo, who also said that there was some small hope for cautious optimism. “There is a sign of more openness and more cooperation between organisations. Confidence is being built, but patience is necessary.”
Nikitin’s Loss of optimism
Nikitin, who was accused by the Russian successor to the KGB, the Federal Security Service (FSB) of treason in February 1996 for his contribution to a Bellona report on radioactive contamination sources in Russia Northern Nuclear Fleet, said he was an optimist by nature, even during the five-year trial that finally cleared his name.
“Even when I was sitting in a jail cell with no access to a lawyer and facing charges that could lead me to the firing squad, I knew everything would be alright,” he said. But those were different times, he said, when the judiciary could basically be counted on to render independent decisions. “If the same thing happened today, I would not have any optimism.”
This loss of optimism, said, Nikitin, was due to Putin’s rise to power, during which the Russian judiciary, media, businesses, and parliament were all brought under Kremlin control. The United Russia party – which holds the majority in the Duma – “is just a department of the administration,” said Nikitin.
As for the media, Russians get most of their news from state controlled television, said Nikitin. Newspaper subscriptions have dropped off, leaving the average citizen with Soviet standard broadcasts.
“The news begins with a report on what Putin did that day,” said Nikitin. Next will come a report on the doings of the Russian Orthodox Church - the revival of which is a priority of Putin’s. Then comes news of about Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov and Presidential Chief of Staff Dmitry Medvedev, who is widely tipped to be Putin’ successor in the 2008 presidential elections.
“It’s the Soviet propaganda structure at work,” Nikitin said.
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| Reporter Anna Polikovksaya, 48, a searing critic of the Chechen war and Putin's infringments on civil society, was murdered this weekend in a contract-style killing. |
| Time |
This weekend’s contract killing of journalist Anna Politkovskaya - one of Russia’s most searing and outspoken critics of the Chechen war and the Putin Administration, which she accused of stifling civil society in Russia – is a case in point about what happens when Russian reporters don’t toe the party line.
Niktin’s fears about the judiciary were justified by a conversation he had with the chief justice of the Moscow city court system who asserted that “all judges follow my decisions.” These decisions, said Nikitin, are handed down by no less than the administration itself, allowing the Kremlin to control the outcome of any trial.
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| A russian court sentences Yukos billionair to prison. He entertained opposition political beliefs to the Putin Administration and voiced political ambitions. |
| Lenta.ru |
This courtroom manipulation, said Nikitin, was apparent in the sentencing of Andrei Khodorkovsky. Former CEO of oil giant Yukos Oil and formerly Russia’s wealthiest man, Khodorkosky had wide commercial and oppositional political aspirations, which earned him a nine-year prison sentence on trumped-up charges of fraud and tax evasion. He was defended by Nikitin’s former defense attorney, Yuri Schmidt.
Business ponies up to fill the financial gaps
When the government is tight for cash, said Nikitin, officials just ring up businessmen. According to Nikitin, Putin spruced up his palatial Baltic Sea residence outside St. Petersburg for the city’s 300th anniversary by simply having his minions call prominent businessmen to cough up the $300m needed for the project. And they all obliged.
“There is no doubt about the ties between politics and business in Russia,” said Nikitin. “The Khodorkovsky case just shows that Putin is making business a part of the power vertical as well.”
The only holdout against such arbitrary procedures, said Nikitin, were NGOs, which are now dying by the thousands thanks to the new legislation.
Western reform confused ‘capitalism’ with ‘democracy’
Skedsmo traced the beginnings of Russian civil society to Soviet-time dissident movements. For years, ordinary Russians had viewed the Western model as a light at the end of the tunnel – a light seeping through cracks of hope broadcast by the short-wave station Radio Free Europe, set up in Prague by the United States government.
But when that Western model was finally imposed on the remains of Communism, it turned out to be a betrayal of Russia’s profound needs.
When the Soviet Union fell in 1991, the West quickly promised these now former dissenters the world of democracy. But Western advice and donors were brutal in their approach, most notably in their advocacy of economic “shock therapy” and the now-defunct hope that a market economy would automatically sprout democracy.
Shock therapy led instead to chaotic poverty, runaway inflation and people’s savings going up in smoke overnight as bank after bank crashed. And the Western establishment failed to throw out a lifeline for the ordinary citizens, who, under Communism, at least were provided for by the state. Shock therapy destroyed their so-needed safety net.
Ideological stand-off
Beyond these measures to force Russia to pull itself up by its own bootstraps, Western governments, particularly the United States, were failing to germinate the democratic seed.
Skedsmo cited a quote that was on the lips of many ordinary Russians who had hoped democracy and capitalism would bring the freedom they had rallied for standing along the barricades during the August 1991 coup attempt.
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| Former Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs, who introduced the paralysing economic "shock therapy" principles that eventually nearly bankrupted Russia. |
| iisd.ca |
“In the beginning, we thought that democracy meant everyone could do as they pleased,” read the familiar refrain. Instead democracy as it was developing in Russia meant empty stores and empty pockets as – according to Bellona research – Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs, fresh from ruining the economy of Venezuela, was brought in to work with Russian reformers and jump-start capitalism on Russian soil.
“It was all happening too fast and with respect to civil society, many Russians think it has turned into chaos, ” said Skedsmo.
US: Russian reform takes our way or the highway
The conflicting discussion that resulted from Russia’s market economy failures, according to Bellona research, finally put Russian and the United States on an ideological collision course.
Washington grew sceptical of whether Russia could chart a course out of its economical morass based on the sketchy maps the US government had provided, while Moscow wanly asserted that it was quickly going broke from the reforms it was force-fed by a team assembled under George Bush, Sr.
According to Bellona’s observations, a palpable sense of resentment toward Washington took hold. For years, ordinary Russians had been viewing the Western model as a light at the end of the tunnel. For its part, the United States government set up the short-wave station Radio Free Europe in Prague during Soviet times to broadcast messages of hope over the Kremlin’s head to ordinary Soviet citizens.
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| Disgruntled Russians line up in front of banks that crashed thanks to Sach's economic shock therapy, tryring to collect what little of their savings was left. |
| rbc.ru |
But when the western model was hastily imposed on the remains of Communism, it turned out to be a betrayal of Russia’s profound needs.
‘Ritual lip service’
The US government, to whom ordinary Russians had looked to for a sense of salvation, had failed the Russian people. The ultimate result, said Skedsmo, was a phenomenon called “ritual lip service.”
Under this system many seminars aimed at strengthening civil society and empowering citizens were arranged. But it lead, said Skedsmo, “to a certain project-speak” in which the way of attracting financial support was effected through catch phrases like “empowerment,” “capacity building,” among others.
What resulted was not the internalisation of democracy, which was the goal, but rather the instrumental use of the discourse, said Skedsmo. This, in turn, brought about a system under which the US government, according to Bellona’s observations, was willing to publicly support – and take credit for - Russian reform, but was privately less than willing to help effect.
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| George Soros of the Soros Open Society Foundation provided some of the first seed money for Russian NGOs. |
| Soros Foundation |
International non-profits move in
It was not until Western non-profit giants like the Soros Open Society Foundation took interest that civil society started to take root in Russia. Foreign money was pumped in to foster the growth of Russian special interest groups, Skedsmo said.
Some 600,000 NGOs sprang up in the ensuing years and some 10 to 20 percent of them survived, or still survive, on foreign funding.
As defined by Skedsmo, NGOs or civil society organisations are “an arena situated, for the most part, outside the family, the state and the market, at which people voluntarily interact to promote their own or the public’s interests.”
A clash of definitions
According to Nikitin, however, this is where the East-West disconnect occurs.
“Government bureaucrats tell me all the time that they live and work in Russia and ask me why they are not considered part of civil society,” he said.
This resonated with Skedsmo’s observations that many Russians affiliate themselves more with Eurasian civilization that with Europe. Nonetheless, it is an assumption of the west that the Russians just “want to be like us” Skedsmo observed.
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| The notion that Russians want a western lifestyle as well as wanting a western democracy is a frequent misconception, Skedsmo implied. |
| Nils Bøhmer/Bellona |
“I think that one often conflates the Russian quest for western living standards and a wish for democracy with another,” he said.
In order to keep watch on NGOs in Russia, the government established the so-called Public Chamber, a consortium of cherry-picked NGOs that decide how to distribute foreign and domestic funding among the NGO community.
Bellona St. Petersburg, said Nikitin, is the city’s largest NGO, with 15 full-time employees and a number of freelance staff. Yet, when the government formed the Public Chamber, said Nikitin, Bellona St. Petersburg was not asked to come along. In fact, the chamber’s membership was unavailable to almost all environmental and human rights organisations. Instead, invited were entities such as the Afghan War Veterans’ Association, the Popcorn Association and other organizations that have no critical relationship with the government or are – like the Afghan War Veterans’ Association – alleged to have criminal ties.
According to Nikitin’s figures, the chamber granted 80 percent of its funding last year to similar irrelevant and servile organisations. Those organizations, said Nikitin, that apply to the Public Chamber for funding, but are not members, are almost invariably turned down.
Skedsmo agreed, saying “Russian NGOs can’t even get money from their own government” – an ironic picture given the authorities’ rosy rhetoric about supporting the NGO community.
The future of NGOs and possible revolution
In Nikitin’s assessment, weaker NGOs will simply cease to exist under the new system, with its onerous registration system, its exacting bookkeeping requirements, its aversion to foreign funds, its proclivity to patriotic causes and the constant demand that NGOs justify their activities.
On these or any other grounds, said Nikitin, the Ministry of Justice can shut down an NGO instantaneously. He predicted, as the number of NGOs shrinks, there will be a rise of nationalism, renewed militarisation, and a rash of energy import blackmail against former Soviet block countries, like Ukraine and Georgia, that have western leaning tendencies.
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| Ukraine's orange revoltuton, which erupted when pro-western candidate Yushchenko lost in a rigged vote to the Kremlin-backed incumbent. A re-election put Yushchenko in office, intimidating Moscow because of the power of organised civil society. |
| AP |
Meanwhile, business contribution to the NGO sector is taboo. The political conditions, said Nikitin, are simply impossible, as a donation may reveal a business’ political leanings. In fact, said Nikitin, one business that donated to Bellona St. Petersburg begged that its donation be listed as anonymous.
At present, Russian power is dependent on high oil prices, said Nikitin. But if those prices bottom out, it could lead to a revolution. Ukraine’s orange revolution passed without bloodshed, said Nikitin, but he was not optimistic that the same would be the case for Russia.
“They say Russia is stable, but it is not. Even France was considered stabile before its revolution” he said. “But how can Russia survive a third revolution?”
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