CHAPTER 2
HUMAN RIGHTS
ORGANIZATIONS:
FIRST SHOOTS
In Russia, as we saw, human rights was not the platform on which the democratic and civic activists challenged Communist party rule during perestroika. During 1991–3 the new political parties dominated the scene. But human rights were stealing, gradually, on to the agenda. The Supreme Soviet had its human rights committee, headed by Kovalev. The Leningrad city council had its human rights commission. In February 1991, Larisa Bogoraz, the diminutive and elderly chair of the Moscow Helsinki Group, welcomed speakers and participants to a seminar on human rights, held in a hall in Moscow. The seminar was the first in a series, organized by Bogoraz, which ran for the next three years. The topics ranged from natural rights to freedom of movement, from freedom of speech and communication to social rights, from philosophy and activism to nationality issues and human rights. For many who attended, Muscovites and people from the provinces, elderly and young, the seminars opened up a new world of ideas.
In introducing that first seminar, Bogoraz referred to its aim as one of increasing the understanding of the importance of ‘legal culture’ – without legality, she suggested, politics, and the way we live, grinds to a halt.
We hope that you, returning to the regions, will be able to engage in legal enlightenment and education […] Of course you may ask whether now, when the earth is beginning to burn under our feet, is a time for education […] and I do not think that all of life's problems are resolved through law, but law is the mechanism which helps us to resolve the problems.
We are not here, she insisted, to engage in proselytizing (agitation); our gathering together here confirms that, in the main, we share the same views. But did they, and did the new activists who by 1993 were creating organizations in provincial towns and cities?1
Liudmila Alekseeva, one of the Group's founders, only managed to attend one seminar. Elderly, but with an inexhaustible supply of energy and optimism and with AFL-CIO support, she was too busy travelling the country seeking out new independent trade unions. The 1993 constitution, Article 30, proclaimed: ‘Everyone shall have the right to association, including the right to create trade unions for the protection of his or her interests. The freedom of activity of public associations shall be guaranteed.’ As Alekseeva travelled the country, looking for trade unions, she would be approached by people who had set up human rights organizations but:
when I managed to squeeze time off from my trade union work and to meet with these people I discovered that that they had no idea of what human rights were but had chosen to call themselves human rights activists simply because they had heard of us, of the Moscow Helsinki Group […] they did not know what human rights were, they had no experience, no money, no organizational experience – in other words, nothing. Just the desire to do something.
Once independent NGOs could register themselves and, post-1993, with a new constitution which had drawn from the Universal Declaration, and with activists abandoning political careers, the number of organizations began to multiply. Memorial had set up its Human Rights Centre in 1993.The Moscow Helsinki Group struggled. It was not clear what its role should be, now that there was a democratic order. Its original ‘Soviet’ role of reporting the authorities' infringements of civil and political rights had been assumed by a more radically minded dissident, Alexander Podrabinek, who in 1987 started a weekly publication, Express Khronika, to carry on that tradition, and remained highly critical of any cooperation with the new authorities.2
We look first at several Moscow-based single issue organizations, whose leaders had taken up causes during perestroika, and then turn to those in the provinces.
The Moscow organizations: prisons and the army
In 1992 ten Moscow NGOs created an umbrella organization – The Russian Research Centre on Human Rights – under a director, Aleksei Smirnov, a former dissident. Together they stood a better chance of getting subsidized office space. And they did – in the centre of Moscow. But the idea that they might work together, share resources, and decide common strategies, proved unrealistic. They were headed by strong-minded individuals, who had very different agendas. Among them were the Moscow Helsinki Group, Prison and Liberty led by Valery Abramkin, the Soldiers' Mothers Committees, the Mother's Right Foundation, Rights of the Child, the Independent Psychiatric Association of Russia, and an Inter-regional Human Rights Network. Together these provide a quite representative sample of the very different kinds of organizations perestroika had produced. Most of them still survive today, and still have an office on the same corridor. The Moscow Helsinki Group, in 1996, acquired its own, more spacious, office space and moved out, but that is to run ahead.
Valery Abramkin had spent time in prison for his underground publications. In 1989 he set up an organization to campaign for prisoners' rights and prison reform. One of his key slogans was taken from Dostoevsky's notes on prison ‘The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons’ and Abramkin himself would have found a place in a novel by Dostoevsky. Quietly spoken, thick glasses, still suffering the aftermath of TB contracted in prison, stubborn yet always courteous, he was respected by fellow activists, by prisoners and by the prison service. The strongest impression gained during the first of his six-year prison sentence, he wrote, was that while almost all his fellow prisoners had been ‘correctly’ convicted, very few could be considered ‘criminals’. ‘If, with the wave of a magic wand, it had been possible to swap the prisoners with a random collection of people from outside, no one would have noticed.’ And that convinced him that the system, which ‘quite incomprehensibly’ imprisoned so many people who represented no danger to those around them, had to be changed.3
Subsequently renamed the Moscow Centre for Prison Reform, Abramkin's group both monitored conditions and outbreaks of violence in the prison system and, during 1990, worked under the aegis of the human rights committee of the Russian Supreme Soviet to produce draft legislation on penal reform. It was largely because of its effectiveness that, with a sigh of relief, Orlov and his fellow activists in Memorial left the prison system to Abramkin's organization. In the nineties, it put out a weekly radio programme, Clouds, for prisoners, printed brochures on how to appeal for a pardon, or parole; it organized collections to provide soap and food for children in prison, who were often hungry, and essay-writing competitions. Exhibitions to portray the plight of prisoners, many sick with TB, and roundtable discussions with deputies, and high ranking officials from the prison service were held not only in Moscow and St Petersburg but in other cities too. By the end of the decade legislation on the implementation of sentences had improved, as had conditions in some of the prisons and penal colonies.4 I come back in a later chapter to the success or failure of the organizations to influence legislation, here it is the emergence and development of a variety of single issue organizations during these ‘golden years’ that interests us.
By way of contrast, Mother's Right owed everything to the opportunities perestroika placed before young people, opportunities unimaginable to those of earlier generations. It was a time when chance encounters, and the energy and talent of an individual, could have far reaching consequences. Mother's Right, allocated two square metres of space, and a table and chair, in a room shared with three other NGOs in 1992, is still in the same offices today but now with two rooms, crowded with files, desks, computers, and publications.5 Its director, Veronika Marchenko, a lively blonde blue-eyed teenager in 1986, had appeared on a TV programme, a discussion club for young people. This led to an invitation from the journal Youth to join its youth section. She began work there, while studying in the evenings at Moscow University's journalism faculty.
Our youth section quickly became very popular (the print run of the journal in those years was more than three million), and somehow or other we were invited to appear on the super-popular evening TV show View. I didn't utter a single word about the army. But, simply from seeing me on the screen, a woman from the Ukraine, from Nikopol, decided to write me a letter about the death of her son. And that started it all. While I was preparing a publication about the death of Alurdos, the cadet, fate sent me, via the editorial office, the mother of another dead soldier son, from Moscow, Pashkova. I included her story of his death in the article. Then I spent six months getting it through the military censor, a Soviet atavism, breathing its last as, with a red pencil, it deleted any geographic references in my article which would allow our enemies to know where our troops were stationed.
Her article appeared in June 1989 and, within a month, she had received a flood of letters from all across the Soviet Union. It was clear to her that ‘hazing’ in the army did not consist of occasional tragic incidents. She wrote further articles. Then, working from home together with friends, she wrote to Gorbachev, to demand changes in the law, and began to collect materials for a Book of Memory, and to set up Mother's Right, an organization dedicated to the right of a mother to know how and why her conscript son had died. By the end of the nineties, Mother's Right had produced publications, and had a small network of lawyers working across the country to take up cases on behalf of grieving parents.
The Union of Soldiers' Mothers Committees still has a room across the corridor. This was a grass roots organization of mothers, with committees across the country, which sprang up following changes to the draft in 1988. It quickly became widely known. Staffed entirely by mothers whose sons had been brutally treated or died as conscripts, its often small organizations (of three or four individuals) offered help both to parents and to the boys themselves, either in pleading exemption from the draft, or providing support to those already serving. Their aim was, and remains, to end conscription in favour of a wholly professional army. While both the Soldiers' Mothers and Mother's Right are concerned with the treatment of young men in the army, they pursue different aims, and their organizations are very different. In 1994 they worked together on a seminar project but they soon developed lines of work independent of each other. And the Union of Soldiers' Mothers Committees, Moscow-based, does not speak for all the Soldiers' Mothers committees. The St Petersburg committee, for example, has a strong independent voice. All these organizations and their activities ten years later feature in Chapters 8 and 9.
Abuse within society or state neglect
Appeals for help from people who felt they had no one else to turn to – whether from the relatives of Stalin's victims, prisoners, or soldiers' mothers, came flooding in in response to newspaper articles or television programmes. Not all came from those who were suffering at the hands of the state. In 1989, a young statistician, Marina Pisklakova, petite and blonde, who still leads ANNA, an organization that focuses on domestic violence, moved to a new Academy of Sciences institute headed by a well-respected and well-connected economist, Natalya Rimashevskaya. She was given the task of identifying the issue that was, at the present time, of greatest concern to women. She designed a simple questionnaire, with items such as child benefits. This was published in the journal Working Woman, and readers were asked to respond.
I received two letters which were not answers to the questionnaire, simply two letters describing awful things that were happening in their families. I didn't know how to classify them, they didn't fit into any of the categories. They simply wrote about the abuse they suffered from their husbands.
She turned to a colleague for help in answering the letters because ‘one thing I had understood. They had both written “You in the Academy of Sciences are clever people. You surely know what I can do” and I had understood that they had written to me because they had no one else to turn to.’ One of her colleagues explained that in the West this was known as domestic violence whereas in Russia it was still a taboo subject. Wherever there was an opportunity, such as waiting in the school playground, Marina began to talk about it with other women and soon she had those to whom she would offer support, by simply listening. But she recognized that this was no answer. In 1991 when the institute sent her to Goteburg for two months, Rimashevskaya advised her to try and find out more about combatting domestic violence in Sweden. She did, and received an offer from Ritva Khomstron, the director of a crisis centre, to come and train her. Why me? she asked. To which Ritva replied that since she had already started on counselling, there was no way back. On her return to Moscow, Rimashevskaya suggested that this should be part of her research work. Ritva came, at her own expense, and together they worked on setting up a telephone of trust, and on training people to counsel callers. Rimashevskaya gave her a room, a telephone number, and announced the number on a popular Moscow radio station. And the calls started coming. It was 1995 before Marina, now with a group of counsellors she had trained, left the institute and registered ANNA. By then the idea of ‘crisis centres’ had spread across the country, and in 1998 they came together to form an Association, with Marina elected as chair.
Not all these new activists were young. For older individuals too, perestroika could change their lives in mid-career, those who were natural activists but, under the Soviet system, had been unable to employ their talents in meaningful social activities. Activists-manqué, we can call them. Svetlana Gannushkina, who taught maths at the Historical-Archive Institute, was in her late forties when perestroika began. With a well-known psychiatrist as a grandfather, after whom a hospital was named, she had grown up in a family to whom people often turned for help and, as a teacher, students brought her their problems. But it was signing letters of protest against anti-Semitism that brought her, in March 1988, an invitation to the House of Scholars to participate in a discussion of anti-Semitism organized by an instructor from the Central Committee of the Communist Party. This was the time that the conflict erupted in Nagorny-Karabakh between Armenians and Azeris, and an appalling pogrom of the Armenian minority in Sumgait, a town in Azerbaijan, occurred. Svetlana spoke twice, each time for two minutes. Once in reply to a proposal from a Jewish speaker that they should talk about nationalism, anti-Russian attitudes, and the plight of blacks in America:
I responded that I wanted to talk about the things that disturbed me, that I, of course, sympathized with the blacks and Indians, but I wanted to discuss issues that caused me pain, things of which I was ashamed and for which I felt responsible. And later [when a representative of Karabakh committee] stood up and said that you have gathered here and are discussing your Jewish affairs, while our people are being slaughtered, I said that of course I understood him but, given that we had gathered to discuss a concrete issue, I couldn't, now, recognize my responsibility for what had happened in Sumgait. The government must take action, and the Azeri intelligentsia should examine its conscience.
However, subsequently, upon reflection, she decided they too should take responsibility, and asked for the transcript to note this. The incident illustrates Gannushkina's qualities as a participant in discussion. Unlike many she is always focused, succinct and, what does not come out here, able to confound an opponent. In response to hostile questioning, recently, from prosecutors on why she should assume Western funders were interested in a stable Russia, she asked the official to consider the following situation: he lived with his family in a small house, with a well-kept garden, on a quiet street but, unfortunately, his next door neighbours, in a large house, with an overgrown and untidy garden, had a large and noisy family; windows got broken, car engines revved up during the night, and sometimes fights broke out. Would he like living next to such neighbours, she asked? Might he not favour investing some effort and means to assist these neighbours and their children in finding a new way of living? While she sometimes relies on humour, she can also demolish an opponent's argument with a series of logical and informed statements, and she has no hesitation in taking on a minister, prosecutor, or the president himself.
Following the discussion in 1988 she was invited to become a co-founder of a new section on national-political relations under the Sociological Association which took up the Armenian–Azeri conflict. In January 1989, during the winter break, she decided to visit Erevan but, at the last moment, changed her mind and went to Baku in Azerbaijan. She returned with 30 interviews with members of the intelligentsia, interviews that revealed a much more complex set of attitudes than those ascribed to them by those who supported the Armenian position. But it was her meeting with the Azeri refugees, driven out of Armenia that, in her words, decided her future fate.
They were simple peasants, it was a heart breaking scene, because they had been driven out, over a pass in December […] they were in a campsite, it's true they had been allowed to take some of their things with them, but there was a woman whose two-month-old baby had frozen and she was in a completely deranged state. These were people who lived in Armenia, spoke Azeri, knew no Russian, they were peasants, and they had no idea where Karabakh was […] When we asked what had happened, the party organizer of the collective farm and the director of the school stepped forward together and explained ‘Armenian comrades with machine guns came and ordered us to get out.’ They still called them comrades. What a terrible injustice! Why drive out these peasants? The local Azeri boss in his sable hat and leather coat turned up and started to calm them down. He said to them ‘You'll understand our position, you are not our people, we should not be looking after you, a territorial division exists. What should we do with you?’ No one understood what to do with them. And that led me to take up the issue of refugees.
In this case, it was the absence of any state institution with a brief to deal with a political and humanitarian problem that produced the NGO. The unforeseen ethnic conflicts, followed by the breakup of the USSR, brought the refugees, first those fleeing the violence, then the Russians leaving the Central Asian republics. With the appearance of refugees in Moscow in 1990, their plight became a topic in the press. Lidia Grafova, a well-known journalist from Literaturnaya gazeta, together with Gannushkina and others decided they should set up an organization to provide, at the very least, humanitarian aid. This was Citizens' Assistance, again still operating today, and still led by Gannushkina. But she had quickly realized that, with the ending of the Soviet Union, legislation regarding migrants was crucial. She started to look at the legislation, at first, understanding little but ‘drawing on knowledge of how mathematical theories work, began to learn the laws’ and, since then, has concentrated on mastering the legal issues. The unwillingness of many in Moscow intelligentsia circles to recognize that there were two sides to the Armenian–Azeri conflict dismayed her, and it was this that led her to Memorial. Dmitry Leonov, one of the Society's founding members and a key figure at the time, introduced Gannushkina in 1993 to the human rights group.
They were people, with whom one could talk of both sides. That was important for me, that I was among like-minded people, who were able to think widely, analyse, do research, engage in monitoring, although the word did not exist then […] and so I joined Memorial […] Memorial came into existence – from Memory – but then it became clear that human rights were not only infringed in the past, but also today – and the human rights centre appeared.
But while continuing to teach maths, Citizens Assistance was where she spent most of her time. Until 1996 the organization's ‘office’ was the space under a staircase in the building occupied by the newspaper Literaturnaya gazeta. A group of volunteers held weekly receptions to give refugees advice, food, and support. In 1998 the city government provided Citizens Assistance with an office at a subsidized rent. But by now Gannushkina had set up another structure, Migration Rights, as part of Memorial's Human Rights Centre, to offer legal support to migrants and refugees. This has gone from strength to strength, for reasons we explore in Chapter 9.
If most of the early human rights organizations were those concerned to defend individuals against the powerful and unaccountable state apparatus of coercion – the prison system, the army, the security services – both Pisklakova and Gannushkina were focusing on the issue of abuse within society, abuse of individuals where the state stood aside. Those who took up children's rights were often trying to deal with both simultaneously – the abuse children suffered at the hands of their parents and the inadequacy of state provision for those children. By 1991 the underground cellars of large cities, and their railway stations, were home to countless children, curling up to sleep with their dogs after a day's begging, stealing, and sniffing glue. Boris Altshuler, also a physicist by background, set up an organization Children's Rights, also with a room in the Research Centre, to campaign on their behalf. In ten years' time, he would be orchestrating an Alternative Report on the state of affairs in Russia to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, but in these early years it was immediate help that the children needed. By way of example, I turn to an initiative that involved active citizens using what still remained of the old state system.
In 1993 there were thousands of homeless children in St Petersburg. Some had run away from alcoholic parents, some been abandoned, others had absconded from brutal children's homes; some came from far afield. Ranging in age from four or five to 18, they formed little gangs and lived by stealing, begging, collecting empty bottles and claiming the deposit, and by prostitution. They all smoked, some sniffed petrol and glue; some of the adolescents had a mental age of five or six; many could not read. They had head and body lice and, eating whatever they could get hold of, suffered from chronic gastro-enteritis.
Two enterprising women, in 1991, took a gang of children to the mayor's office, to plead for help. The deputy mayor, appalled, lifted the telephone and gave authorization for them to take over a deserted hostel. Some of the children had been found in cellars, some just turned up; several were quite disturbed. The young girls could be taken for boys: their voices were hoarse and rough from smoking, their mannerisms tough, a defence against the world they lived in. By 1993, when I visited the hostel, 45 children, mostly girls, were living in the three apartments that had been renovated. There was a kitchen in each apartment, a play room, a school room, and a sick room. Most of the equipment came from the Swedish charity named after the children's writer, Astrid Longren, and the home was called Astrid House. The municipality paid a daily allowance for food, to be bought at wholesale prices from a base which supplied children's homes and hospitals, but medicine was a problem.
They still all smoked, and that was allowed – on the stairwell. They needed endless care and lots of attention; they needed one-to-one tuition. The little children had a good number of toys – tiny five-year-old Petya, found in rags in a cellar, unable to talk when he came, was sitting watching television hugging a doll to himself. The older children were worse off. They only had one jigsaw – Made in England, a thatched cottage with roses climbing up the walls – and a set of draughts. The home was an open one, the only constraint that the children must be in by nine o'clock. One evening they set their dogs on a mentally-retarded man who happened to walk by. The staff locked them out for the night, saying that people who behaved like that were not welcome. The children were bewildered; they built a little fire to try and keep warm, and stood against the building all night. They were concerned that they had upset the staff, but they were not really clear what the fuss was about. Gradually they got rid of the dogs. The staff's aim was to help them to understand how to live an ordinary life, and to find them foster parents. In order to comply with the law, to safeguard the children, and to encourage a family to take a child, the foster parents were registered as ‘employees’ of the home, and entitled to receive the food allocation for the child, for provisions bought at the wholesale store. But the future for the older girls looked bleak.
Those who ran the Astrid House would not have thought of themselves as human rights activists, nor would those who were setting up human rights organizations have considered them to be such. Yet the boundary between what they were doing, and Gannushkina's assistance to refugees, or Abramkin's campaigns to help feed hungry children in prisons, was blurred. The individuals mentioned so far, apart from those at the Astrid House, applied their talents and energy to creating non-governmental organizations, and have remained with them ever since. I have had to leave many others, no less deserving of mention, out of the picture. How might we characterize our perestroika activists? Talented, energetic, willing to take risks – yes – and with little or no experience of setting up and running organizations, negotiating with the authorities, or engaging with the outside world. Many paid their first, short visit to a foreign country during the nineties. Many survived by keeping their old jobs or using contacts among those whom they knew; none thought of setting up membership organizations except Memorial, where it occurred spontaneously.
St Petersburg and the provinces
It was not only in Moscow that by 1993 non-governmental organizations, with a mandate to defend rights, had set themselves up and registered. In many cities the pattern of democratic action, in which civic activists and critics of Communist party rule entered the electoral arena, and won seats, repeated itself. Politics and civic action was entwined. Gradually, and for different reasons, some of the activists distanced themselves from politics to focus on setting up human rights organizations.
In 1988 in Ryazan, a garrison town south of Moscow, Andrei Blinushov, a young historian, resigned from his post in the police department. This was in protest against the violence employed by a police riot squad brought from Moscow to break up a peaceful demonstration in support of elections. Active in the new democratic movement, and specializing in relations with the press, news of Memorial inspired him and others to set up a Memorial organization, which they registered in October 1989. But it was politics and the forthcoming elections that occupied most of their attention. Several of their members were elected to the city council in 1990, and set up a commission on rehabilitation and human rights.
After some minor confrontations the city fathers tried to buy us off with a set of documents, already drawn up, which would give each of us a plot of land in the centre of the town, a large plot with the plan for a detached house, we turned it down […] but this brought a split in the democratic movement because some of its members and the new NGOs simply could not refuse such a profitable offer […] Sadly, I must admit, we found ourselves in a minority and formed a small opposition on the city council.
In Tomsk, a university town in West Siberia, a place of exile for those sentenced under Stalin or their relatives, the ‘democrats’ also appeared, and won seats to the council. Not surprisingly some of them combined their political activities with taking up the cause of those repressed under Stalin. Nikolai Kandyba, a young scientist, but already taking up a variety of cases before the courts, was both active in Memorial and as a deputy.
While Blinushov and Kandyba combined politics with Memorial activities, others participated in the new political parties. Igor Kalyapin, born and brought up in Nizhny Novgorod, city on the Volga famous for its trade fairs, and place of exile for Sakharov, was 20 in 1988, studying radio engineering in the evenings, while working in the Chemistry Institute during the day. A presentation at its academic council by a young physicist, Boris Nemtsov, who, wearing inappropriate clothes (shabby jeans), argued clearly and persuasively that Russia needed a multi-party system, surprised and set him thinking. He joined an informal discussion club. He began to think that the way a society is organized politically has consequences for its development. Orwell's 1984 appalled him, and he joined the democratic movement. Here his talents, and his knowledge of chemistry, reaped results. In no time, using a window frame, he had set up a rudimentary silkscreen printer, which could produce colour prints for leaflets, posters. But it was a decision to introduce the Tsarist Russian flag in the May Day celebrations in 1989 that was a turning point in his life. After scouring albums of old photographs the night before to find out what the flag looked like, and then replicating it, he and friends made up a column, and waved their flags. They were dismissed from their jobs, and from their institutes; fortunately they found employment, for very little pay, with a farmer, rearing pigs in the centre of the city, who collected slops from restaurants and hotels in his Zhiguli sedan car from which he had removed the seats. Meanwhile they had set up a branch of DemSoiuz, the most radical political organization of the time, which held demonstrations, demanding a multi-party system, but they also printed election leaflets (on their silkscreen) for democratic candidates in the 1990 elections.
By 1991 the authorities were tired of their activities and brought criminal charges against them for organizing unsanctioned demonstrations. Their response was to set up tents on the pedestrian walkway in the centre of the city, raise the Tsarist flag, and camp there. Despite attempts to dislodge them with jets of water from the street-cleaning lorries, they stuck it for two weeks, and then, ‘one wonderful day’, Yeltsin won the election to the Russian presidency.
A black Volga drove up to the camp, and its occupants, young men, firmly but politely invited us to come to the prosecutor's office […] they took us there, and the city prosecutor said ‘The criminal charges against you have been dropped because circumstances have changed’. Such an article existed in the Code of Criminal Procedure. And I asked – ‘how have circumstances changed, is it that Yeltsin has been elected?’ And he said ‘No, it is simply that last night I opened the Gospels, and there it is written “Judge not, and ye shall not be judged” to which I replied ‘You should simply write “the Gospel according to Mathew, chapter and verse” in your file rather than referring to the Code of Criminal Procedure’. That was the end of the charges.
Kalyapin never thought of going into politics himself once a multi-party system had been introduced. It was business that attracted him. In a different environment he might have rebuilt a branch of industry. By 1991–2, using scarce computer technology, he and his friends were seriously in demand, putting together almost all the local newspapers, including government ones. ‘The editorial offices were terribly pleased, and we earned some money.’ However, he was dismayed by ‘the thievery, the new cooperatives’ siphoning off of resources from the state sector with the assistance of corrupt law-enforcement officials and bureaucrats', who were strangling new entrepreneurial initiatives. Profits were going not back into business but to government officials, and in the first place to those responsible for law and order.
It became obvious to me that human dignity and civil rights had to be defended as fiercely, thoroughly and professionally as private property. Earlier I had thought that once there was private property and competition, market mechanisms would in time sort everything out. But – no.
Together with other activists, he participated in setting up the International Society for Human Rights which began to take up various, very different issues, including electoral rights, and control of penal institutions.
Kalyapin's qualities of energy and leadership are shared by Igor Averkiev, from Perm, a city in the Urals, also a city of exile, but dominated by the chemicals industry, metallurgy and oil refining. Turned down by the history faculty at Perm University in 1980 on the grounds that his stutter would prevent his following an ideological career, Averkiev did his national service. Again his stutter (which is a very slight) proved to be an obstacle. He was not accepted by either the border guards or the paratroopers and, to his chagrin, had to be content with the sappers. Following the army, the university relented and by 1984 he was secretary of the faculty's Komsomol committee.
Students began to set up anti-Soviet groups, academically oriented. At that time everything anti-Soviet was socialist oriented […] our first underground student group decided that before we attempted a revolution we should honestly try to change the regime from within, because revolution is bloody, disorderly. And to do this it was necessary to infiltrate the regime, so we decided I should become Komsomol secretary, and set up a club to discuss the problems of socialism […] but, all the same, this was not to the liking of the authorities.
In 1985 Averkiev and two others were expelled for not taking their exams in military training (was this required for someone who had served in the army?). He started organizing environmental protests. Following an action which included the collection of 20,000 signatures demanding the closure of a dangerous chemical plant, his flat was raided by the security services. The discovery of the charter of his underground organization was enough to result in a criminal charge, but it was already 1987, a new era, and the charge was dropped. Together with friends he set up a social-democratic organization (‘we had already pretty much decided that we were not liberals’) and for the next five years pursued a political career. Until 1990 he chaired the local Social-Democratic party, and co-chaired Perm's Democratic Russia; in 1991 he was elected a co-chair of the Russian Social-Democratic party, and moved to Moscow.
But Averkiev too became disillusioned with politics. By 1992, as the policies of privatization and shock therapy began to bite, the Social-Democratic party was divided – should it distance itself from Yeltsin or still support him? Averkiev, by now chair of the party, found himself on the left. Attempts to build a coalition with the miners, accustomed to holding a privileged position in the working class, but now facing budget cuts and demanding that the mines work as before, did not work out.
And I found myself faced by another serious problem […] it was very important to me to be in an organization that had an ideological orientation, had a mission, ideas. It was clear that we, I mean we in Russia, had been left behind. There was no way a proper social base for a classical social-liberal set of ideas could come into being, and, as we can see today, it hasn't happened. And parties came and went because they were of no use to anyone. It became clear that an ideological party could not send down roots, and that, if you wanted to survive, a party had to become a pressure group, had to find a niche for itself among the oligarchs. As chair I was spending two thirds of my time on raising money for the party. Yes, that is important, but it became the most important thing, and with it one's dependence grew. I know that you don't engage in politics in white gloves, but I understood that that's not my thing and doesn't interest me.
[Author's emphasis]
He resigned in 1993 and returned to Perm, not sure whether to work on the railways, or to try to organize independent trade unions. Almost by chance, learning of a programme of small grants for human rights organizations, he set up a human rights centre. In his case, we see how post-Soviet developments militated against those who would have flourished as politicians in a more hospitable environment.
In St Petersburg, in 1992, Boris Pustintsev, a lover of jazz (the young man who had received a prison sentence for supporting the Hungarian uprising in 1956), set up an organization, Citizens Watch, while remaining co-chair of the Memorial Society. Citizens Watch, whose board included lawyers, journalists, and deputies, stated in its charter that its aim was:
to assist in establishing parliamentary and civic control over police, the security services, and armed forces, and to help prevent violations of constitutional rights by these governmental agencies. Citizens Watch sees its strategic priority in bringing the Russian legislation related to human rights and the practice of its application closer to international legal standards.
Citizens Watch, and it is surely not accidental that Pustintsev had the language skills that quickly gave him international contacts, was much more similar to a Western civil liberties organization than any of the other new Russian organizations. The mayor's office, while shocked by the reference to civic control over the security services, still agreed to register the organization. But St Petersburg was a ‘liberal’ city, with a democratic majority in the city council. In Tomsk too, and in Perm, active individuals like Kandyba and Averkiev had no difficulty in registering human rights centres (Averkiev got a quite spacious office in the old party building); but in many other cities, organizations were struggling to receive any recognition from the local authorities.
Some of the early activists remained in politics. Rybakov, the artist who had headed the Leningrad human rights commission as a city council deputy, won a seat in 1993 as a deputy from St Petersburg to the Duma, and served until 1996. In Moscow, Ponomarev lost his seat in the 1993 elections, only to regain it, briefly, in a bye-election in 1994. Kovalev kept his seat as a member of Russia's Choice in 1996. But many who had served as deputies, or worked in political parties, now concentrated their activities on ‘non-political’ organizations. Some because they lost their seats, others because they had become disillusioned with politics. As Blinushov commented: ‘Our entry into politics was for us, natural, but that only lasted until 1993 – because, already from early 1991, we came up against the realities of politics […] the ability to compromise with one's ideals when convenient, to betray people […] we came to understand that politics was not the place for us.’
Rybakov, while he stuck at it till the mid-nineties, was at heart an artist and an activist. Kovalev? That's more difficult to say. While he would not be pleased at the comparison, I am tempted to see him as the Michael Foot of post-Soviet Russian politics. He is still a member of the liberal party, Yabloko. Ponomarev, and Averkiev, were politicians manqué. Had they been born in Poland, Hungary, or the Baltic States, they would probably be leading political parties today. But in Russia, as Averkiev commented, viable political parties were not emerging, whereas NGOs now had a sanctioned place in the new order.
A new constitution
If, in 1988–91, all types of activity – petitioning, protests, civic action, political roles – were tangled together, by the end of 1993 the political sphere had separated itself out. Its new institutions, modelled on many long-term democratic states, were those of strong presidential power, yet with a critical role for elected legislative institutions, and for an independent judiciary. The right to freedom of speech and assembly, and organization, were enshrined in the constitution. Those who had argued for human rights and the rule of law found an audience among the politicians, anxious to find partners for the new Russia both in Europe and in the USA.
Articles on political and civil rights, which we cited at the end of the previous chapter, occupy centre space but the constitution also has an impressive list of social and economic rights. Everyone has a right to ‘housing’, to ‘free medical care’, to ‘free primary and secondary education’, to ‘a pension’, to ‘acceptable conditions of work’. Many of these can be found in earlier Soviet constitutions. Then there are new rights – to ‘own property’, to ‘travel freely’, to ‘choose a place of residence’, to ‘a healthy environment’. As we can see, while some of these rights seem clear as they stand, others require elaboration in legislation in order to become ‘concrete’ or ‘justiciable’. As regards the defence of one's rights: ‘Everyone shall be free to protect his rights and freedoms by all means not prohibited by law. (Article 45)
However, legal defence receives the major emphasis.
Everyone shall be guaranteed judicial protection of his rights and freedoms. Decisions and actions (or inaction) of bodies of state authority and local self-government, public associations and officials may be appealed against in court; Everyone shall have the right to appeal, according to international treaties of the Russian Federation, to international bodies for the protection of human rights and freedoms, if all the existing internal state means of legal protection have been exhausted. (Article 46)
Article 46 would become important with the Russian Federation's admission to the Council of Europe in 1996, while the relevance of the Universal Declaration and international conventions for the new political framework was recognized by all. In 1998, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration, Yeltsin sent a greeting to a conference, emphasizing the Declaration's importance for the defence of human rights in Russia. Yet, as we shall see in Chapter 4, for activists the question of the relationship to the new authorities remained a debatable one, even for those who had most staunchly defended Yeltsin. Some had distanced themselves, moving out of politics altogether. Business interests had no such qualms. Yet all, politicians, activists, and entrepreneurs were stepping out onto uncharted territory. Organization, whether of a political party, an independent NGO, or a private business, was still something new, experience was minimal. Western assistance was just beginning. How would human rights organizations survive in the new democratic, market environment, and how would government officials and society respond to them?