Human Rights in Russia

Citizens and the State from Perestroika to Putin

Mary McAuley

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780857739315
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Civil Rights in Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Today Russia and human rights are both high on the international agenda. Since Putin returned to the presidency in 2012, domestic developments (from Pussy Riot to the release of Khodorkovsky) and Russia's global role (especially in relation to Ukraine) have captured world-wide attention. It is therefore an appropriate moment to see how human rights activism functions inside Russia. Since 1991, when the Russian Federation became an independent state, hundreds of organisations have sprung up across the country, championing different causes, with varying strategies, and successes. The response of the authorities has varied from being supportive, or indifferent, to openly hostile. Public support has been lukewarm. Mary McAuley here analyses the development of human rights activism in Russia - from the emergence of the new organisations in 1991 to the recent political attacks on the community, and its response. While the book focuses on the new 'human rights community' in post-Soviet Russia, it also illuminates larger issues of politics and society in a post-communist state, and a changing global environment. Both past and present play their part - the legacy of seventy years' of Soviet rule, and of a more distant Russian past, the size and multi-ethnic composition of this huge country, the impact of moving to a market economy, attempts to introduce democracy, the significance of western aid and expertise, as well as Russia's place in the international sphere. Based on archival research and practical experience working in the Russian human rights community, Mary McAuley provides a clear and comprehensive analysis of the progress made by human rights organisations in Russia – and the challenges which will confront them in the future.

PART 1

THE GOLDEN DECADE

CHAPTER 1

PERESTROIKA TO 1993:
SEEDBED FOR HUMAN RIGHTS

There was some kind of melting pot, a crucible, which I would call the democratic movement, and it was impossible to understand who was involved in defending rights, or engaged in politics, or with history, or in journalism. It was all mixed up together, unstructured, there was no specialization, everyone was involved in everything. (Oleg Orlov, International Memorial Society)

In December 1986, following a phone call from Gorbachev, Andrei Sakharov, the famous physicist who had played a key role in the Soviet Union's development of nuclear weapons, returned from exile to Moscow. While his international reputation may have saved him from imprisonment, his criticism of Soviet policy on nuclear weapons and on civil and political issues had brought dismissal from work, and cancellation of his awards. In 1980 he had been exiled, under KGB surveillance, to Nizhny Novgorod, a closed city on the Volga. His return heralded a change in policy towards political prisoners. In 1987 Sergei Kovalev, first imprisoned for his dissident views in 1974, was allowed to return to Moscow from Tver, a city outside the 100 km zone surrounding the capital, a zone forbidden as a place of residence to released prisoners. He had close contacts with Sakharov.¹

By the time Kovalev returned, long forbidden topics had begun to appear in the press, TV programmes had come to life; people set up discussion groups and then organizations; meetings were held, then small demonstrations, then larger demonstrations; conflicting voices were heard within the Communist party, even at a party conference. In 1989 a group of Moscow intellectuals, which included Kovalev, decided to re-establish the Moscow Helsinki Group. But, as perestroika opened up space for action, it was other issues, not human rights, that dominated the public agenda. The members of the reconstituted Moscow Helsinki Group² were busy in very different activities. Liudmila Alekseeva, for example, on her visits from America, and even after her permanent return in 1993, was travelling the country in the hopes of encouraging the new independent trade unions to play the part of Solidarity. The situation (‘the ground burning under our feet’, as Larisa Bogoraz, a former dissident, would describe it at a seminar organized by the new Moscow Helsinki Group in early 1991) had given birth to ideas, hopes, actions – previously undreamt of – jolting hundreds, thousands, of people out of their accustomed grooves.

By 1990, when competitive elections were held for the Russian Congress of People's Deputies, a cacophony of voices, those previously private voices, had invaded the public space: the soviets, conferences, and election meetings. In June 1991, with the support of Democratic Russia, the party that advocated an end to Communist-party rule, the introduction of market reforms, and had a pro-Western orientation, Yeltsin won election to a new post, president of the Russian Federation, the largest republic in the USSR. By December, following the botched putsch in August, Gorbachev's resignation, and the breakup of the USSR, he was president of a now independent Russia, whose Congress or parliament had adopted a declaration on human and civil rights.

In this chapter, I describe the extraordinary social and political environment – first that of the perestroika years (1987–91), then the turmoil in a new ‘democratic’ state (1991–3) – which provided a seed bed for the germination of human rights organizations. From 1988 onwards, in some places, independent organizations had sprung up to claim a role as spokesmen on behalf of society, or of some of its members. Some would become human rights organizations but they did not spring, fully armed, out of the crucible of perestroika. The Memorial Society, one of the earliest, became the catalyst for the new democratic movement. While democracy, national sovereignty, the market, and freedom of the media would come to dominate the agenda, in 1987 it was the unfinished story of Stalin's political prisoners and victims that captured public attention.

Stalinist repression and the democratic movement

In 1987 a handful of members of a Moscow discussion club, Democratic Perestroika, decided to organize an ‘historical-enlightenment section’ to campaign for a monument to Stalin's victims, and to call their group Memorial. This was the origin of today's International Memorial Society.³ The story of Memorial's early years draws our attention to key factors that played a part in determining the kind of human rights community that subsequently emerged, and its relation to state and society. First, the story, then the commentary.

There were no dissidents among the members of the first Memorial group, although Lev Ponomarev, older than the rest, born in 1941, a physicist, had known Yury Orlov, the founder of the original Moscow Helsinki Group, and had accompanied Orlov's wife to visit him in exile near the Arctic circle. It was the release of Sakharov that galvanized Ponomarev, an energetic and impulsive individual, into action, and into joining the Memorial group. And Vyacheslav Igrunov, from Odessa, who had suffered forced psychiatric treatment for his views, while not a formal member, contributed his ideas. The group's members were largely young professionals, working in the research institutes, who had grown increasingly critical of the restrictions and repression the regime employed. The youngest of them was Elena Zhemkova, a mathematician, a graduate student, originally also from Odessa. Depending upon who is telling the story, the account differs quite substantially but all agree that Yury Samodurov, tall, bespectacled, and emotional, played a key role in collecting signatures, whether on the street, in the theatres, or from well-known artists and writers, in support of a memorial, a museum, and research centre, to be presented to Gorbachev at the nineteenth Communist Party Conference in 1988. Oleg Orlov, then a 35-year-old biologist, had had no contact with dissident circles but he had printed off leaflets in support of Polish Solidarity, before giving up in despair. With Gorbachev in power, he believed something could be done. Colleagues in his institute put him in touch with the Memorial group. Their ideas appealed to him or rather their activity – ‘concrete actions’ – getting support from people on the street.

By this time similar groups were springing up across the country, and the ‘Memorial group’ had attracted the attention of some of the dissidents. Orlov remembers Kovalev, Alexander Daniel (the son of the well-known dissident writer Yuly Daniel and Larisa Bogoraz), Bogoraz herself, and Arseny Roginsky coming to one of the regular meetings of the group in 1988.

We, of course, revered people like this. And now four of them came to our meeting. We didn't know anything about Roginsky. A conversation started, as far as I remember, they were sounding us out […] and after some time Roginsky, and then Daniel, started coming to us. We had a formal system of admissions – Roginsky found it strange and novel – we voted him in as a member, and in this way the old and the new joined forces.

In my view the old human rights movement, at least as far as Memorial was concerned, played a hugely important role. Traditions, for example, of scrupulous attention to facts, collecting facts, publishing facts, keeping excessive politicization at a distance, which characterized part of the dissident community, exercised a very strong influence on Memorial's ideology.

Roginsky, a 40-year-old historian from St Petersburg, educated at Tartu University in Estonia, and continually in conflict with the authorities over unauthorized publications relating to the archives, had been warned in 1981 either to take advantage of his Jewish nationality and emigrate or risk arrest. He chose arrest, and received a four-year sentence on a criminal charge of using falsified documents to get access to the archives. Upon release in 1985, he moved to Moscow and, from 1989 onwards, played a key role in Memorial. An able negotiator and analyst, a born story teller, sometimes referred to as the ‘grey cardinal’, I see him as the Thomas Cromwell of the community.

During 1988 and 1989, petitions gradually gave ground to protests, to confrontation with the authorities, changing tactics, a candlelit vigil around the Lubyanka, the KGB headquarters, on Political Prisoners' Day (30 October), and arguments over the structure and type of ‘movement’ that was growing. A Social Council of well-known individuals (created on the basis of popular responses to a questionnaire, which put Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn in first place, and included artists and writers) became a negotiator with the authorities. Sakharov agreed to become co-chair; Solzhenitsyn, still abroad, felt it inappropriate to join. After setbacks, opposition from the authorities, and internal disagreements between more and less radical members, a founding congress of the All-Union Voluntary Historical-Enlightenment Society, Memorial, with delegates from the different republics and towns of the Soviet Union, was held in the spring of 1989. Sakharov became the Society's first president.

But what was the All-Union Society? It had held a founding congress but was not yet registered. It had no real structure. In Moscow, as in other cities, its groups of activists operated out of their apartments, now overflowing with documents, letters, files. Money for a memorial sat in savings bank accounts. There were no formal links between local organizations, who had their own and differing rules on membership. Memorial had played a key part in bringing people out on the streets or to sign petitions in support of Stalin's victims and, through this, to galvanize a ‘democratic movement’, but what now was its role?

In 1989, after the founding congress, the Muscovites set up a Scientific Historical-Enlightenment Centre, headed by Roginsky, responsible for the archive, museum and library collections, and with a brief to work with similar local groups, engaged in collecting materials, uncovering burial sites, and campaigning for memorials, rehabilitation, and compensation. The organization succeeded in bringing, without official support, a huge boulder from the Solovki islands (site of one of the earliest Soviet prison camps) to stand in the square outside the Lubyanka, the KGB headquarters. However, its members were simultaneously involved in demonstrating against the violent suppression of a peaceful demonstration in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, and campaigning for the release of the small number of political prisoners who were still being held. When, in the summer of 1990, after competitive elections, Kovalev, now a member of Memorial, became chair of the committee for human rights in the Russian Supreme Soviet,⁴ he brought some of the Memorial activists, including Orlov, into staff positions. They had campaigned for his election. Now they began to work not only on rehabilitation and compensation, but on reforms to the existing penal system, and to travel to the ‘hot spots’ of ethnic conflict in Karabakh, Erevan and Baku.

In the autumn of 1991, in the wake of the abortive putsch, a law on rehabilitation of political prisoners was passed by the Supreme Soviet but, with the legalization of democratic political activities, most of those in the original ‘group Memorial’ had moved to other things – become politicians, or political activists in different parties, or set up other organizations – and personality clashes or disagreements over strategy had led to resignations. Kovalev was fully engaged as a deputy. Ponomarev too had moved into politics. Elected in 1990, he had soon found himself busy co-chairing Democratic Russia, the party led by Yegor Gaidar, the economist. He ran its staff office, which received funding without particular problems from businessmen who supported Yeltsin. Samodurov and Igrunov were no longer involved in Memorial. Sakharov had died in December 1989.

Aleksei Korotaev, also a physicist by education, involved in Memorial activities in those early years, and subsequently in different human rights initiatives, put it like this in 2010:

Because [Memorial] was the first organization and was permitted, it absorbed almost all the civic and political activists who existed at that moment. It became huge – 200 branches across the country, 200,000 or 300,000 members – all that really existed. But then, literally in the course of two to three years, it rapidly declined. Put it another way, possibilities for realizing oneself in either civic or political action opened up and very many people who, actually, wanted to go into politics, left Memorial. Some went into politics, others into business. Society had become freer, you could engage in whatever you wanted […] I don't think this was bad for Memorial, it became more specialized, began to focus on particular issues, including defending rights.

Memorial's strength had come from its role as a leader in the democratic movement. With that seemingly achieved, and with new issues coming on the social and political agenda, it inevitably lost ground. Even the fate of Stalin's victims became but one of the popular concerns, and within the Memorial Society a division of interests had gradually emerged.

In Orlov's words:

We didn't initially think of ourselves as human rights activists. In 1990–1 we were still stewing in one cooking pot. It was only in 1991 that a component part of Memorial began to recognize itself as involved in human rights – and say – yes, probably, we are a human rights organization and we ought somehow to register as such. In 1993 we registered ourselves as an independent organization in Moscow, the Memorial Human Rights Centre. And some, but only some, local Memorial organizations began to take up human rights issues. You can't say that this idea appealed to all in Memorial. The underlying theme (idea) for Memorial remains one of historical-enlightenment.

The organization now had a 25-year lease on a building, with subsidized rent, under a contract with Moscow city council. It was in 1990 when the redistribution of property – state property – began. In cities such as Moscow or Leningrad, where ‘democrats’ had won majorities in the city councils, organizations that had established a name for themselves could sometimes lobby successfully for office space with subsidized rents.

In the spring of 1992 the Society held a new founding congress, as the International Memorial Society, with branches or members in Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic States, and Kazakhstan, as well as within the Russian Federation. Its charter, now registered, described its ‘primary missions’ as

• Assisting in the building of a mature civil society and a democratic legal state, thus preventing a return to totalitarianism;
• Participation in the development of a public consciousness based on the values of democracy and law, the overcoming of totalitarian stereotypes, and the affirmation of individual rights in political practice and public life;
• Participation in the restoration of historical truth and in the perpetuation of the memory of the victims of political repression under totalitarian regimes.

The two strains within the Society – the concern with past crimes, and the concern with defending rights today – stand out clearly. Recent political developments were viewed very differently by members. Kovalev defended Yeltsin's decisions to close, with force, the Congress of People's Deputies in the autumn of 1993. Some leading Memorial activists were strongly opposed.

Now the commentary. The perestroika years (1987–91), fast-moving, sometimes chaotic, threw up a generation of civic activists who responded to Gorbachev's calls for reform. While some had a dissident past, most were individuals who had never engaged in politics or public activity, and many were young. Individuals were engaged in different civic and political activities simultaneously; the boundaries between professional, civic and political life were fluid. Young professionals played a key role, joined by members of an older generation, some of whom had been dissidents, or had known of the dissidents. Many retained their professional jobs while engaging in these new activities. They were making things up as they went along, with no previous experience of leading or even participating in an independent organization. Not surprisingly, conflicts arose.

As the political situation changed, some moved into politics, a wholly new profession, some for a short while, others for many years. Conflict between Yeltsin and the Congress of People's Deputies during 1992 and 1993, repeated at regional level between governors and soviets, produced new alignments. Finally, with a new constitution at the end of 1993, the state took on commitments to defend human rights, civil, political, and socio-economic, and to observe the international conventions. Independent non-governmental organizations could register, and pursue the defence of such rights. But their role, even with the new 1993 constitution, was far from clear either to themselves or to the authorities.

When, in the following chapter, we introduce a variety of organizations that would become part of the human rights community, a rich picture emerges. Perhaps all that the new activists shared was a desire to change the way the system worked, to remedy its injustices and, this was important, to engage in activities that they found meaningful. But, before enriching the picture, I want to put this new civic activity in a social and political context. It is hard now to convey what living and acting in those years was like, and mine is the view of an outsider, but it may help the reader to understand something of what it was like.

No food but newspapers

Moscow in 1990 was still a dark city; there was nothing in the shops, no cafes; people were hungry. The state-run economy was grinding to a halt and perestroika had brought no meaningful economic reforms. I did not meet any of the Moscow activists at that time. St Petersburg, then still Leningrad, was the city where I had spent time as a graduate student in the early sixties, and been coming back to ever since. Leningrad was still recognizably Leningrad, with its familiar streets and shops, crowded trolleybuses, waves of tired pedestrians searching for food after work, but now home to activities never before allowed. There was a strange discordance between the old familiar surroundings and the new world of public speech and action.

In 1990 and 1991 there was not much food. We survived on porridge, bread, and black coffee, and sometimes there was apricot juice and cognac in the cafe on the corner near the Institute of Sociology, to which I was attached. The hungriest year was 1991. Food was scarce, monotonous, the salami largely fat, and cheese only a memory. Everyone was hungry, losing weight. In 1990 the old system of distribution had broken down, the means of transport had failed. A television programme specialized in discovering warehouses, filled with rotting produce, of dealers slipping goods out of the state network to private traders. People talked incessantly, anxiously, of the approaching ‘market’. Nobody knew what this dark frightening thing, looming on the horizon, was but all repeated the phrases that ‘markets are necessary, a market is what societies ought to have’. An old man, waiting at the tram stop began to complain bitterly: ‘did you see the prices? When were tomatoes ever four rubles a kilo? And all the traders are dark-skinned. What is happening to Russia?’ He grew ever more agitated, stamping up and down in his felt boots, as two old ladies started to tell him that he hadn't seen anything yet, ‘once we move to the market…’ ‘What market?’ he asked angrily, ‘Was this what I fought through the war for? I'm 86 and I can't even buy a tomato.’

Everyday life revolved round a search for food, and following the media. Suddenly private conversations and social concerns had become public. Editors, journalists, TV and radio staff still had their offices, received salaries, and were freer to do what they liked than their counterparts anywhere else in the world. They were accountable to no one, not to an owner, a political master, nor to the market. The only problem was getting hold of paper. In 1989 the unofficial press was badly typed and xeroxed two-s...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part 1 The Golden Decade
• Part 2 Taking Stock
• Part 3 Activists in Action
• Part 4 Twenty Years On
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Dramatis Personae
• Further Reading
• Plate section