Human Rights in Russia

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.

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.

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

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.

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-sided offerings, either on that thick blotting paper churned out by a factory somewhere that aimed to meet its target in tons, or on near tissue paper. By 1990 there was a great variety. The anarchists (appropriately enough) were still producing very rough copy, and there were still all the odd fly sheets produced by individuals, as well monthly democratic and patriot papers. In April 1990 there was a makeshift stall outside a metro station that sold a variety of democratic publications, by September the groups had set up their stalls on Nevsky prospect. But more than half the tables were covered with sex manuals and astrology, and they were the most popular. The right was there in force one day, with their data on the Jews dominating Russia since 1917. But none of the political groups were selling out.

I found myself making comparisons with the publications of 1917 and early 1918 – also a time when there was a remarkably free press. In 1990 the offerings were meagre in comparison, even when one included the regular dailies and the new weeklies. In April, with delight, I had bought a copy of The Black Banner, an anarchist title that disappeared after the revolution, and in September, travelling out in the train to the forest, bought another copy off the long-haired, ragged, anarchist who was selling his papers. But the content was pathetic, and it is hardly surprising if the middle-aged travellers who bought it used it to wrap up their potato peelings, and turned back to Izvestiya. In 1917 there were parties with well-argued ideas and platforms, and a whole stratum of bourgeois society that, by its very presence, underpinned a world of owners and unions, conservatives, liberals and socialists. In 1990 there was none of that. There was a large and hungry literate public, but a wasteland without any well-thought-out political programmes contested and polished in the public arena, or political organizations with a committed following.

I was in Moscow when the 1990 election campaigns were underway, attended a meeting in the famous House on the Embankment (of which more in a moment), and joined in one of the big demonstrations by the democratic forces. Here for the first time I saw the Russian, the monarchist, and the blue and yellow Ukrainian flags. Years of orderly parades showed their traces: organized contingents moved off smoothly in answer to requests from well-disposed militia men. But now there were knots of impassioned individuals arguing for and against private property, scruffy sellers of flysheets, and the lamp posts were decorated with details of intermarriage between the politburo families. Good-natured, cautious optimism was in the air.

What kind of electoral politics did the activists engage in, in 1990, and how did the soviets or councils, inherited from the Soviet system, operate under the new conditions? In the spring of 1990 I was met at Moscow airport by a young man in his jeans and faded blue jacket who explained, as we drove in to the city, that although a physicist by training he now worked as a guide for different organizations, and he was fortunate because he could use his mother's car. Upon learning that I wrote on Soviet politics, he invited me to a meeting that evening in his apartment block where the candidates for the forthcoming district and city council elections would meet with the electors. As we drove past the Kremlin he turned into the House on the Embankment, the great grey apartment block built for the party elite in the twenties, with its food store, and its cinema. ‘But who is your father?’ I asked, taken aback, and was left speechless when he replied ‘It's not because of my father, but my grandfather, Yakob Sverdlov.’ My instinctive response was to reach out and touch his arm. Sverdlov, one of the most famous and respected old Bolsheviks who kept the party files in his head until he died of pneumonia in 1919. Sverdlov, whose son married one of the daughters of Podvoisky, the Red Army hero (the Kremlin children all played and grew up together), became an NKVD interrogator, and was himself arrested and imprisoned more than once. Now here was their son, a gentle young man, not interested in politics, ‘a terrible dissident’ according to his mother who later that evening, as we sat in the big solid apartment with its unparalleled view of the floodlit Kremlin, told me (as she had surely told generations of young pioneers) how she remembered pushing Lenin about in his wheelchair after his stroke.

The room for the meeting, with its Red Corner, its bust of Lenin, portraits of Marx and Engels, and Red Banners, was packed with mostly middle-aged men and women. The candidates were allowed three minutes to outline their programmes and, as is traditional, started by giving their autobiographies. Some never got onto their programmes. A youngish man, who had abandoned a Komsomol career to head a cooperative that bought up apartments and rented them out to foreign tourists, remarked that it probably did not matter since he was unlikely to get many votes anyway; a professor of physics stated that he would not bother to outline his programme since it differed little from others. A middle-aged woman announced that she would press for better housing for residents, for ending the influx of migrant workers, for more provisions, a special fund for Moscow, more money for hospitals, cleaner streets, higher pensions, and price-linked wage increases: all popular demands, and ones that she would fight for as an individual, not as a member of a party. One candidate proposed investigation of the Prosecutor's Office, greater rights for deputies and for informal associations, and handing all religious buildings over to religious bodies. An elderly intellectual in an Adidas tracksuit asked all candidates to identify their political position on Article 6 in the constitution (on the leading role of the Communist party). All, with the exception of a military man who thought it inappropriate to comment, thought Article 6 should go. It was however the cooperatives that roused passions. The cooperative chairman was attacked for having abandoned teaching the young for the sake of money, and his argument that the taxes paid by the cooperative to the city government were of more benefit than unimaginative Komsomol activities cut no ice with some present. Both he, and one other candidate – a slightly aggressive, skilled worker with a chequered career of party education, expulsion, and a spell working in the Far North, who advocated enterprise autonomy and a free rein for entrepreneurial talent – stood out as representatives of a younger generation.

If the candidates demonstrated new and old attitudes, so too did the meeting itself. When a candidate asked if he could speak ahead of his turn, because he had to leave early, all semblance of order broke down. The chair ruled against, but a noisy minority (among whom the worst offenders were elderly intellectuals who shouted through their cupped hands) accused him of being formalistic and undemocratic. Many joined in, on one side or the other. The chair tried a vote, and unwisely declared that a spotty show of hands looked like a majority; the candidate headed for the microphone, but was shouted down by those who held that following the original order of speakers was the more democratic procedure; others argued that the order had been decided undemocratically. By then the individual was putting on his coat to leave, but a young candidate (whose action was subsequently claimed to symbolize the intelligentsia's willingness to sacrifice themselves for the people) rushed to the microphone and begged him to take his three minutes instead. Somehow, the dispute subsided, and the meeting continued.⁵

The election meeting was of course far from typical but it shared features with those, in some of the large cities, where challenges to the party leadership brought open debate. In such cases, there were no rules to be followed. I have described it at length to emphasize that ‘democracy’ requires the acceptance or the observance of perhaps quite arbitrary, but agreed, conventions. The Soviet system had bequeathed only its own rituals and conventions, which were no help at all. Where there was no challenge, the usual rules continued to operate: the local elite provided its own candidates, and they were duly elected.

Leningrad as it was then, had produced its dissidents, underground organizations and, by the 1980s, a flourishing anti-establishment music and artistic community. With perestroika the intelligentsia came to life and, for a short while, so did some of the industrial workers. By 1989 there was a democratic movement no less active than its Moscow counterpart. Memorial was there too. However, many individuals, a few with a dissident past, who subsequently would create human rights organizations in the city, were at this time wholly involved in democratic politics, standing for election in the new soviets in the spring of 1990. Boris Pustintsev who, as a young man, had served five years for distributing leaflets in support of the Hungarian uprising of 1956, managed subsequently, despite obstacles, to get a higher education and spoke fluent English. Active in Memorial, he balloted unsuccessfully in the 1990 elections. But Yuly Rybakov, an artist who had been imprisoned in the mid-seventies for anti-Soviet propaganda, won a seat to the city council. One of his exploits in the 1970s had been to paint a four-metre long slogan, ‘You crucify freedom but you cannot handcuff the human soul’ in huge letters, on the wall of the Peter and Paul fortress, visible, when morning came, from the other side of the Neva river. The KGB operatives found themselves in difficulties, the river unexpectedly rose, and they could not remove it; they had to resort to requisitioning coffins from a nearby workshop and stacking them against the wall. Other exploits included painting ‘Listen to the Voice of America’ on the windows of a shop selling radios and, during the night, painting ‘for a free politics’ on the sides of trams in the tram depot, whose drivers, quite unaware, then drove them round the city next morning. When Rybakov returned from prison in 1982, disillusioned by his fellow prisoners' lack of interest in political freedom, he concentrated on supporting experimental art. But, with perestroika, he returned to political action, and was elected in 1990 to the city council.

The newly elected Leningrad city council, with a majority of ‘democrats’ among its 400 deputies, opened in June 1990 with high hopes. The opening sessions were televised live, and straightaway we witnessed the new politics in action, disorganized, often chaotic (more than an hour was needed to reach agreement on who should take the chair for the day), and queues of deputies clamouring for the microphone. Yet there was no real debate, rather the council seemed to be a forum for the making of impassioned personal statements, quite unrelated to the arguments of previous speakers. Factions, and groups, emerged but decision making proved extremely difficult, and levels of frustration were high.

The myth of a powerful group of 200 democrats cloaked the reality that they were 200 individuals, with no real basis of social support, nor a shared programme of action. Under the Soviet system such meetings were rituals to demonstrate unanimous support for government policy from a united people. Now perhaps the only function they could serve was to allow individuals to voice their concerns, and complaints. This was something new, but it stood in the way of, rather than encouraging, effective collective decision making. A basic issue remained unresolved. What was the relationship between the discussion and policy making? Debate in a legislature may, at times, bear little relationship to outcomes but speakers know to whom they are addressing their voices – to their fellow party members or party leadership, to their opponents, or to their constituents. The newly elected deputies, most without a party affiliation, and with few ties with their constituents, were addressing none of these. To whom then were they speaking? And to what purpose? Within six months many were dismayed, and electors disillusioned.

I spent time in the Mariinsky Palace, seat of the city council, an imperial building with splendid rooms beautifully decorated in Wedgwood colours, red-carpeted staircases, and a rabbit warren of winding corridors. I swung between hope and despair. Just to be there, to talk to the organizer of one of the independent trade unions, or to listen to discussions about setting up new newspapers, underscored the ending of party rule. Now there was a chance to do things differently. I listened as the deputies rehearsed exactly the same arguments that (unbeknown to them) the Bolsheviks used in 1918 when trying to decide whether authority should lie with the city council or with the districts. Would they find better solutions? They faced appalling problems.

They set up a human rights commission, which included Yuly Rybakov. The new commission decided to concentrate on the rights of children, on religious freedom, and prisons, but it was quickly overwhelmed with letters and appeals from those who had never heard of the Universal Declaration. In the two and a half years of its existence 35,000 appeals were lodged with it. Most related to the lack of housing – and they were the most difficult to deal with. People could spend 18 years in the queue for a flat, living six to a room in a communal apartment, while party workers and justice officials moved to the top of the queue.

Could one say that your commission was primarily concerned with defending social and economic rights? I asked Ryabakov.

Yes. Really our commission became a kind of emergency service. There was no medicine in the shops, and people were dying, while the medicine was in the warehouses, and you needed to pay bribes to get it […] it needed someone to go and to argue […] it was the same with food. Once I had to prevent a riot by smokers. Suddenly cigarettes disappeared from all the shops, and smokers are excitable people. I was going to a human rights meeting on Fontanka when my assistant came running to say that barricades were going up on Nevsky and there was going to be a fight in a tobacconist's shop. I ran there. The crowd was angry […] I call other deputies, some go off to some warehouse or other to get cigarettes, I stay there […] after a couple of hours they brought a lorry load and start to sell the cigarettes but during those two hours I had to calm the smokers down, and also the police who wanted to beat them up.

Sometimes the television carried reports on issues that preoccupied the commission. A deputy read out a letter from a father threatening to pour petrol over himself and son, and burn the two of them to death, because of lack of help with housing; another gave an account of prison conditions in the city. There was a devastating series of interviews with mothers whose sons, while doing their national service, had died from brutal beatings by their fellow conscripts or officers. A meeting of some of the women with Yeltsin (wiping his eyes with a handkerchief at one point) was included.

Meanwhile Alexander Nevzorov, the talented young producer of 600 seconds, a TV programme that set scandal after scandal before the viewer, lambasted the city government and advocated monarchy as the best form of democracy. In one episode the famous statue of Peter the Great, now standing on a mound of live rats, was brought down as the rats began to move, a shot that was repeated at intervals with references to the ‘troubled times’ that lay ahead of the city. We moved inside the Mariinsky Palace, a place that had become a distorted world of moving furniture, acrobats, flying papers, a skull whose grinning black teeth spelt ‘Power’, a place where the cleaning ladies sadly dusted the furniture and talked disparagingly of today's council compared with the past, and where Anatoly Sobchak, the elected mayor, a dark silhouette against a window, criticized the deputies. It was brilliant television but hard to take. Nevzorov's strategy of undermining the council helped the conservatives, the party apparatus, and possibly the patriots. There was a subtle campaign aimed at raising social tension, spreading despondency and fear with sensational crime reporting – the camera moving in on a murdered woman lying in a park with a knife in her back, while the young policeman took clippings from her nails, the shots of a grotesque burnt body on the roof of the building accompanied by the journalist asking ‘suicide – or, one has to ask, something more sinister?’ It heightened the fear, particularly felt by women, that the city had become a wholly dangerous place.

There was still a political battle underway. The Communist party continued to control key institutions and resources and the political future was quite unclear. The political institutions inherited from the Soviet system, now peopled by supporters of the old order and those seeking something new, were struggling. With the end of party rule, and with Russian independence, the situation worsened. If the Leningrad city council was divided, and its relations with the mayor, Sobchak, were strained, at federal level relations were even more fraught. But it was not just that a new constitution was needed, and the deputies could not agree. By the end of 1992 the economic reforms and privatization, launched by Yegor Gaidar, the acting prime minister, had brought no dividends for the great majority of the population, rather they had halved their standard of living.

We saw how the commission on human rights struggled in Leningrad. Kovalev's human rights committee, set up by the Russian Supreme Soviet, which had a staff of seven, and 12 deputies, found itself overwhelmed by an avalanche of appeals or complaints during 1990–3, more than a third of which related to prison conditions. Simultaneously its members were working on legislation (on penal reform) and on drafting a law on a human rights commissioner or ombudsman. But the political environment became increasingly hostile. The committee's focus on civil and political rights met with criticism as the policies of privatization and shock therapy eroded living standards. In the summer of 1993, 74 deputies supported a motion, put before the Supreme Soviet, that the work of the human rights committee in defence of social and economic rights had been unsatisfactory; 38 voted against and 17 abstained.

How then was the much heralded ‘market’ affecting people's lives? Deputies got salaries but most of the activists retained their jobs in the institutes in which they worked. They simply continued to draw their salaries while spending less and less time on their work. Under the old system most in the Academy of Sciences institutes worked from home, only coming in once or twice a week for their department or section's meetings. So too did many journalists, editorial staff in publishing houses, translators, or university teachers. The salaries were low but so were rents, telephone, heating, the metro or buses, as was food, now rationed and difficult to find. Parents supported their children, part-time or one-off jobs brought in bits and pieces. Looking back, now, it's hard to recreate the early post-Soviet environment where the relationship between work and money was so tenuous. The majority of the population was, in one sense, living off state welfare, and before 1992 it was inconceivable that the state institutions (and they all were state institutions) would begin to dismiss employees or, even less imaginable, close down. Only gradually did the planned economy begin to break down: by 1992 people began to find themselves without work, or without their monthly wages, as enterprises ground to a halt, and inflation sent prices rocketing upwards.

Simultaneously unbelievable opportunities appeared for those prepared to take advantage of them. This continued as the nineties progressed. Some of the young clearly had a future in this new world, albeit unstable, fast moving, and unpredictable. It was a time for the energetic, the wheelers and dealers, the ones with practical ideas, self-confidence and ambition. You really could go to Siberia with rucksacks full of money, buy metals, get them over the border to the Baltic States, and make a million. With language skills, and perseverance, you could get taken on by a joint venture and earn more in a month, in dollars, than your father or mother, professors at the university, got paid in a year. Or you kept on your day time job in the institute (it was not that demanding after all), and worked nights in one of the big hotels, earning dollars. The hotel staff were the most highly educated in the world: doctors of biological science carried the bags, physicists doubled as door men, while classical specialists manned the travel bureaus. And if you had the entrepreneurial talent of Boris Berezovsky, a mathematician in a research institute who built up a business empire with incredible speed and moved into politics, or of the younger Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who put his Komsomol connections to work to create a financial empire, you began to play for big stakes.

By 1992 the market, skewed as it might be, had come. In September 1992 an air ticket half way across Russia cost the same as three scoops of ice cream in the new Baskin Robbins ice cream parlour on Nevsky prospect in St Petersburg. A reel of imported cotton cost the same as a bottle of vodka. Even prices for domestic goods seemed all over the place. An overnight train ticket to Perm, in the Urals, cost less than a kilo of cheese. But while a Westerner might puzzle over paying more for a ball point pen than for rent, Russians were faced with making ends meet in a world where prices were catapulting up and wages and salaries not paid on time. By 1992 real personal incomes had fallen by 50 per cent since 1990. Those on basic pensions, without family support, were the hardest hit. Food prices had risen ten times in the space of a year. Salaries of professional people by about five. Those who could not turn their hands and minds to business ventures were struggling. Individuals hawked cigarettes at street corners, kittens and puppies in the underpass on Nevsky prospect, pensioners and children tried to sell newspapers in metro passages, and the beggars and cripples sat against the walls with their battered caps in front of them.

Networks of friends and acquaintances remained an essential part of existence and, in an environment of scarcity, some relationships were based purely on expediency: coaching children for university entrance, offering medical or legal advice were ‘goods’ to be exchanged for lifts in a car, farm produce, or an appointment with a hairdresser. This way of operating – by barter and connections – took an enormous amount of organizing, and hence telephones were vital, but there were no telephone directories or yellow pages. Secretaries spent hours on the phone establishing where sugar was to be had, and aspirin, and arranging how to get a child across town to grandmother. Not surprisingly most Russians were very loathe to fix any appointment beyond the following day. Who knew what might need to be done the day after tomorrow? The notion of writing a letter and fixing something well in advance was even more alien. Secretaries often had no idea of their boss's whereabouts or future timetable; it was the rare individual, in any line of work, who had a diary. Appointments and plans that seemed to be firm simply evaporated.

By the summer of 1993 few had found salvation in a new political creed or in orthodox religion. Spiritualism and the paranormal were far more popular. After the TV news an elderly man with a flowing beard and a young woman, both in black gowns and mortar boards, took it in turns to give the horoscope for the following day. In Perm the big Political Education hall built under Communist rule, which seats a thousand, was packed out for the four-day visit of a faith-healer from Moscow. At two sessions a day, 100 rubles a ticket, and another 100 for her poster (so powerful that it should be gazed at for no more than ten minutes a day, but could be stuck under a table top to cure an alcoholic husband), she must have made a million from the visit. There we sat, row upon row, largely middle-aged and elderly women, with our jam jars of water, tubes of toothpaste and hand cream, all of which would acquire healing qualities, and with our photographs of sick relatives. Word had it that the water would begin to boil. It did not at that session, and I was greatly relieved when my companion, a retired party worker, had the sense to have a small sleep during the seances. Most who were there were poor people, who had travelled in from the country for more than one session, hoping beyond hope to find a cure for their ailments.

I managed to get a pass to attend the session of the Russian Congress of Deputies in the winter of 1992. Security was tight. In the evening, when it was dark, all had to leave by crossing the deserted Kremlin courtyards, out through the postern gate opposite St Basil's, across an empty Red Square, and then past the pickets, ranged like medieval armies with their banners and pennants – Democratic Russia on one side, chanting ‘Support Gaidar’, the Communists and the patriots on the other shouting ‘Gaidar out, Yeltsin out’.

The congress itself was a heavily establishment body. Democratic Russia might have won seats, but not everywhere. Solid blue and brown-suited middle-aged men, army and naval officers, and the occasional woman deputy, often fresh from the hairdresser, in an angora jumper, and high heels, dominated the assembly. The provincial elite of ex-party secretaries, factory and farm directors were there in their dozens. A few elderly intellectuals, stooped and in glasses, with untidy hair (including presumably Kovalev), a sprinkling of bearded democrats, and Gleb Yakunin, the dissident priest in his cassock, stood out. The deputies sat in rows, stretching back in the great hall, with a gangway down the middle, facing the lectern and behind it the banked podium. At a long table on the podium sat the speaker, Ruslan Khasbulatov, flanked by his deputy chairs and telephones. Behind, highest of all, sat Boris Yeltsin, a computer right and left, with two telephones, solid, impassive, sometimes checking his watch as debate dragged on interminably.

The format and rituals of the congress were those inherited from Soviet times; they governed any congress, soviet, factory conference. We stood in silence for the miners who had died in a recent accident; we stood in memory of those deputies who had died since the last session; and we clapped those who were celebrating their birthday today. Then the congress got down to business. There was no real debate, just a string of short impassioned statements, sometimes to the point, sometimes not, and then wrangling over the procedure for taking a vote. In the breaks the corridors filled with smoke, and groups of journalists, with TV cameras, mobbed individual deputies. There must have been as many journalists as deputies – every regional paper and station wanted its own report. There was a huge buffet downstairs, and a newspaper and bookstalls. The bestseller was Igor Kon's Taste of the Forbidden Fruit, the first book on sexology written for the general public, followed by Kipling's Mowgli. The deputies from the provinces were busy buying picture books for their children, and posters of Marianna from the Mexican soap-box TV serial.

Very few of the deputies could be called parliamentarians, hardly surprisingly. Most did not hold positions they could argue out; they had individual or institutional interests to defend; some were anxious, at all costs, to make a name for themselves; many were confused and concerned by the collapse of the Union, the economic chaos, and rising prices, but had not the slightest idea of what should be done. Some owed their posts, and flats, in Moscow to Khasbulatov; some found the idea of voting against the president difficult but were anxious to remain in favour with Khasbulatov, or with the president for that matter, and hence the crucial importance of a secret ballot on key questions.

This was the congress when a group of deputies gathered on the podium to complain over what they considered a misuse of procedure and Khasbulatov, in frustration, asked: who will rid me of these democrats? A group of patriots advanced with alacrity. There was pushing and shoving, the odd fist flew. Yeltsin left in disgust. Khasbulatov called for an adjournment, and left the hall too. The thickness of the cigarette smoke in the corridors was choking. How could such a disgraceful thing have happened, people asked? The popular press had a fine time of it: ‘Great Deputy Ding Dong in the Kremlin’ ran a headline. Many among the deputies, and the population, despaired at their inability to devise and keep to effective political procedures, or to produce a workable political framework. Once democracy and freedom had been won – or granted – on what grounds were ‘rights’ to be defended? The constitutional conference could not agree.

In the autumn of 1993, following his dissolution of the congress, Yeltsin set up a working party to produce a new constitution. Kovalev, appointed as chair of the president's new human rights commission, was included. The working party drew on the UN documents on human rights. Article 2 of the new constitution states: ‘Man, his rights and freedoms are the supreme value. The recognition, observance and protection of the rights and freedoms of man and citizen shall be the obligation of the State.’ And Article 17:

In the Russian Federation recognition and guarantees shall be provided for the rights and freedoms of man and citizen according to the universally recognized principles and norms of international law and according to the present constitution; fundamental human rights and freedoms are inalienable and shall be enjoyed by everyone since the day of birth.

In December the constitution received 58 per cent of the popular vote. Elections were held to a new much smaller federal parliament, or Duma, and an upper house of regional representatives, the Federal Council. By the beginning of 1994 a new political order was under construction. Autonomous organizations now had a legal basis but many, not only the Memorial Society, had been seeded and sent out shoots even before Communist party rule finally collapsed. They, and the way they grew during the early years of the new Russia, are the subject of the next chapter.