Human Rights in Russia

In the early 2000s, Putin's epoch, I really appreciated the previous decade, because it had given us ten golden years […] they say that we were a democracy – we weren't. It was simply that the state had become very weak, and society was left to itself. And for us those were golden years because during that period, by some miracle, civil society managed to coalesce, or at least it was born. And I consider that the human rights community in our country is the nucleus of civil society. (Liudmila Alekseeva)

However, as Alekseeva herself had said, many of those who chose to call themselves human rights activists did not know what human rights were, lacked experience, and had few resources. In a moment we shall see what she decided to do about it. But, first, we note that the term pravozashchitnik (or ‘rights defender’) was gradually passing into usage. Originally associated with those among the dissidents who, in the late seventies, had demanded the authorities observe the constitution and international conventions, Svetlana Gannushkina remembers the surprise (and pleasure) she felt when finding herself described, in a newspaper in Azerbaijan, as a pravozashchitnik. Surely, she reckoned, this was because she was with Larisa Bogoraz. The term's link with some of the dissidents did not always work in favour of those who began to describe themselves as such. While for some it was a badge of honour, there were many in the general public and among their political opponents for whom it came to mean ‘Western sympathizer’, a ‘trouble-maker’, someone unable to compromise. The first Chechen war of 1994–6, and Kovalev's principled stand against the federal government's policy, contributed to this.

In September 1993 Yeltsin had established, by decree, a presidential commission on human rights, and appointed Kovalev (without consulting him) as its chair. This was to take on the role of an ombudsman until such time as the relevant law could be passed. In effect this commission, with a staff of 35, returned to the work of the original human rights committee of the Supreme Soviet. Once the new parliament (now the Duma) met at the start of 1994, Kovalev was confirmed as ombudsman, although there was still no law to this effect. His office continued to receive and try to deal with complaints, to prepare legislation, and to monitor and make recommendations regarding the failings of government or justice officials. But increasingly he and his colleagues became involved in the war with Chechnya.

Following the break up of the USSR, the Chechen-Ingush republic (part of the Russian Federation) had declared its independence. In 1992 it had split into Ingushetia, whose leadership resolved to remain within the federation, and the now named independent republic of Ichkeria (Chechnya), with a popularly elected president, Dzhokhar Dudayev, but home to armed conflict between his followers and opponents. Refugees, many of whom were Russian, were fleeing to neighbouring republics or to Russia itself. In November 1994, Yeltsin took a decision to use all available means to bring Chechnya back into the federation, and did not seek Duma approval. Thus began a disastrous and badly planned invasion by federal troops, which escalated into full-scale bombing of the capital, Grozny, by mid-December. The casualties, among the Russian troops, the Chechen fighters, and the civilian population were appalling. While not a popular war, public and political opinion was divided; media coverage was extensive and open, even disagreements within the military were voiced. The Soldiers' Mothers travelled down to Chechnya in search of their conscript sons. Kovalev, with a small party of Duma deputies, and with Oleg Orlov from Memorial, flew to Chechnya; they spent the New Year in a bunker in Grozny, reporting back on the bombing and casualties.

Kovalev's repeated calls for a ceasefire, negotiations, and planned evacuation of civilians, and his criticism of the Russian government both in Strasbourg and New York angered many. On 5 January he had flown back to Moscow from Grozny, to be granted an unproductive interview by Yeltsin who insisted that the bombing had ceased. At a Duma hearing later that month, a storm of vituperative criticism (as well as some support) greeted Kovalev's proposal for the condemning of the military operation and demands for an immediate ceasefire. Blocked from returning to Grozny, he flew to Strasbourg to attend a meeting of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, and spoke against Russia's admission until the military action in Chechnya had ceased, and Russia was ‘closer to being a democracy’. PACE voted to delay admission. Kovalev continued to report on casualties and atrocities (on both sides), sometimes acting as a go between, until a military ceasefire was agreed in August 1995. Agreement on the withdrawal of federal troops and on the shelving, for the present, of the question of sovereignty was finally reached in August 1996.

By this time Kovalev was no longer chair of the president's commission on human rights, Russia had been admitted to the Council of Europe, and Yeltsin had won a second term as president. In March 1995 the Duma had voted to remove Kovalev from office as ombudsman but, given that he was still chair of the president's commission, he and his staff continued to work as before. At the beginning of 1996, as he resigned from the office, the commission brought out its Report on the Observance of the Rights of Man and the Citizen in the Russian Federation for 1994–1995.¹ As can be imagined, it was hard hitting, particularly in its coverage of Chechnya, which occupied pride of place in the report.

The President's Commission for Human Rights is unanimously of the opinion that events in the zone of armed conflict in the Chechen Republic constitute the most important and most tragic breach of human rights compliance in the Russian Federation in 1994 and 1995. In the magnitude and severity of the human rights violations, in the sufferings of hundreds of thousands of Russian citizens, and in the brutalities perpetrated against the civilian population, the Chechen events are unparalleled since the era of mass political repressions in the USSR.

Detailed reports of atrocities committed by both sides followed. Actions in Chechnya received the harshest criticism, but the Kovalev report was hardly complimentary about the overall situation. How did its authors conceive of human rights, and which infringements concerned them most?

The President's Commission for Human Rights finds it necessary to declare that during 1994 and 1995, the human rights situation in the Russian Federation has remained extremely unsatisfactory […] the provisions of the Russian Constitution concerning human rights and civil liberties remain largely rhetorical; they have not been backed by the force of law […] The Commission is particularly concerned that in many aspects of civil and political rights and liberties there has been a distinct retreat from democratic achievements.

The report emphasizes the failure to introduce either the law on alternative civilian service (devoting a section to the appalling treatment of conscripts in the army) or the law on the ombudsman, or to implement proposals on judicial reform. The dire state of the judicial system is described, and the report

notes in particular that there have recently been recurrences of the attitude toward the courts of the bad old days, i.e., government documents and statements by high officials, including those at the very top, have criticized the courts for: handing down unwarranted not-guilty verdicts; releasing detainees from custody; and dispensing excessively lenient sentences. Officials have also denounced courts and judges for being too independent, and have proposed closer contact between the courts and law-enforcement agencies in the war on crime.

A relatively small place in the Report is devoted to an extremely important problem: the violation of citizens' social rights, although clearly, this is the area that gives rise to the most social tension and these violations affect the absolute majority of the population of the Russian Federation. The Commission's position in this regard is explained not by a failure to appreciate the significance of this area but by the fact that social problems are studied and analysed by a whole range of other specialized government agencies.

And the report does deal at some length with the problems of non-payment of wages and unemployment, the fall in real incomes, and inequality.

Society is becoming split into quite distinct classes primarily due to a gap in incomes […] The ‘new poor’ have become a phenomenon in Russia. This category includes the one-in-four working persons who cannot earn enough from their job to make a living. Above all this concerns workers at enterprises suffering from the debt crisis who do not receive their wages for months at a time, workers in government-subsidized industries, scientists and scholars.

Violations of rights in penal institutions receive particular attention, together with a recommendation that the state create ‘an independent, civilian review board to monitor human rights in the penal system’. Other items too have a contemporary ring:

the aggravation of racial and ethnic intolerance and discrimination, sometimes involving high-ranking officials […] the law on freedom of movement and choice of residence are ignored. The resident permit system [the propiska] is being used as a mechanism to discriminate against ethnic minorities […] Political and nationalist extremism is not properly condemned and resisted by government bodies charged with preventing extremism through the force of law […] The rights of refugees and forced migrants are not actually protected and their social adaptation is in fact hindered.

The restriction of freedom of expression and access to current and archival information under the pretext of protecting state secrets […] The Commission is particularly disturbed by the dissemination of disinformation by government and other official sources […] Under the guise of fighting crime there is a tendency to expand the powers of security and law-enforcement agencies to the detriment of Constitutional rights and guarantees […] The number of persons charged with unlawful detention, the use of force against suspects and witnesses, and the falsifying of evidence and so on, has almost doubled.

There was then plenty of scope for action. By this time the term prava cheloveka (which can be translated as ‘rights of man’ but which, in the new international environment, was increasingly called ‘human rights’) was already part of official language, and associated with the Universal Declaration. This did not mean that state officials now welcomed human rights organizations. But it did mean that individuals who wanted to engage in some kind of activity to help the vulnerable or to challenge government behaviour could register themselves as organizations defending human rights. As disillusionment with the politicians grew, the defence of human rights became the ground on which people of very different persuasions set up their tents. Not surprisingly their views on what were human rights and appropriate strategies to defend them differed.

In 1993–5 the human rights commission, headed by Kovalev, received financial support from a Russian–American Project Group for Human Rights. Registered in New York, with a small board of Americans and Russians, one of whom was Kovalev, the Project Group received financial support both from its American members and from the Ford Foundation. Its activities included assistance in the drafting of the law on the ombudsman (bringing the Polish ombudsman into discussions), researching public opinion, and a small-grants competition for human rights organizations in the regions. Moscow and St Petersburg were excluded. Both Nikolai Kandyba (in Tomsk) and Igor Averkiev (in Perm) received grants for their recently established human rights centres. In the autumn of 1995, several of the grantees were invited to a seminar to discuss, together with leading Moscow activists, ‘who should be considered to be a “pravozashchitnik” in the present situation, which rights should a contemporary activist be defending and against whom or against what’. The discussion produced quite heated exchanges.² Six months later, at a roundtable organized by the Ford Foundation for younger activists from Moscow and the regions, some of the same issues, and the disputed points, arose. What were the disagreements over?

At the first seminar, Liudmila Alekseeva led off with the statement that demands for freedom of speech, press, creativity, religious belief, and the right to leave the country had, in the Soviet period, been prioritized by a small group of people, not because they were the most important but because, without them, it was impossible to defend other rights.

Now we have some kind of freedom of the press, the freedom to organize exists, and the results have been exactly those they should be […] the number of people involved in human rights activities has grown sharply and human rights activity has taken on a new appearance. People have begun to defend, as a priority, those rights whose infringement are the most important to them – and these are social rights […] you can break the window of the person who has offended you, or you can beat him up but that's not defending human rights […] defending your rights through a court, using the law – that's human rights work […] there has been a colossal leap in the legal consciousness of the people. Alas, that hasn't happened with the authorities and government officials, their legal consciousness is still that of cave dwellers, and a great amount of work remains to be done.

Kovalev agreed as regards legal consciousness, echoing Bogoraz's position at the 1991 seminar, and his own earlier publications, where he had defended his entering politics because he believed that cooperation with the authorities could advance the rule of law. He had not been optimistic though: with both rulers and ruled holding primitive, cave-dwelling conceptions of legality, the task was huge, and the human rights movement poorly equipped.³ Kovalev continued in subsequent years to maintain this position, while perhaps increasingly emphasizing the centrality of law as the mechanism to defend the individual.

Law is the only path that can lead to the eternal Russian dream of social justice […] The absence of or underdevelopment of legal norms guaranteeing freedom and individual dignity have been Russia's misfortune throughout her whole history […] either we shall scrabble out on to the main road to the development of humanity or we shall remain stuck in the byzantine-mongol bog of state absolutism.⁴

At the 1995 seminar he did not agree with Alekseeva on socio-economic rights. When two of the participants, Alexander Tarasov from Tver, and Igor Averkiev from Perm, argued the case for consumer rights and economic and social rights, and for public oversight of budget expenditure, he responded ‘that this is not, in the strict sense of the word, human rights activity although it is extremely helpful for human rights activists in that it is enhancing the public's legal consciousness’. This was echoed by Sergei Sirotkin, a close colleague: while very useful, this type of activity is not ‘the organic, natural, normal and specific activity of human rights activists’, and by Konrad Liubarsky (from the Moscow Helsinki Group): ‘to argue that at the present moment when people are going hungry economic rights are the most important, and all the rest are trivial, is hardly correct. Not everyone understands the simple truth that in the absence of democracy the cow cannot be milked.’

This, referred to as the classical conception of human rights, got support from some of the new activists from the provinces. ‘Which rights should we be defending? In the first place we should be thinking of political and civil rights, and extending them’ (Kandyba from Tomsk), but the activists found themselves struggling to cope with increasing numbers of people, with all kinds of problems, who clearly needed help. So the question arose: whom should they be helping, and by which means? Only those who were suffering at the hands of the state? Pensioners were being tricked out of their homes or savings by unscrupulous individuals, wages were not being paid by both state and private employers. Kandyba, recognizing this, moved on to arguing that they should take up the case of any one in need. Alexander Gorelik, professor of criminal law from Krasnoyarsk, while arguing that the state should be the main target for human rights activists, agreed: ‘Human rights defence should be defending the rights of those who can't defend themselves regardless of whether it is the state or private persons who are responsible. For example, invalids, children, prisoners, conscripts.’ Gorelik, elderly, scholarly, able to inspire students and retain their respect as they made their careers in the law and order agencies, and with a rare talent for composing humorous limericks to mark any occasion, would subsequently introduce innovative practices for law students in Krasnoyarsk. Here he was arguing in favour of human rights organizations' focusing their attention on the courts' illegality or maladministration of justice. Where courts themselves act illegally, he argued, the individual is left in the worst of all possible situations because ‘s/he has nowhere else to turn’.

But it was the issue of ‘politicization’ that produced the most heated exchanges. Averkiev argued that a human rights activist must stay out of politics. As a rights' defender he should take up the cases of elderly individuals, regardless of their political persuasions. How should he have acted when a right wing, ‘fascist’ type organization was illegally refused registration? Should he have said – quite right?

From a legal point of view it was so primitive, just as it used to be. One of the representatives of the president rang the justice department and said ‘Don't register them’. How about that? And Memorial took the line ‘For God's sake, so what, quite right too’. If I were a social-democrat, and primarily a politician, then all right I wouldn't care a damn. But as a rights' defender I cannot do that.

The problem, he argued, was that human rights activity in Russia was too politicized. And here he mentioned the association in the popular mind of the Moscow human rights defenders as ‘anti-Russian’, taking the side of the Chechens, and their involvement in Yeltsin's forthcoming election campaign for the Russian presidency. The Perm human rights organization, which he headed, had written into its charter that it did not have the right to speak on behalf of any political organizations.

Tatyana Kotlyar (from Obninsk, a determined woman who would go on to acquire a law degree and defend, among others, migrants) responded with:

Defending rights is of course not political activity […] my response to an individual who comes and asks for help cannot in any way be influenced by whether he is a communist, or a fascist, or whatever […] if rights have been infringed, it's irrelevant whether the individual is a woman or a man or the colour of his eyes. But whether the human rights activist can also take part in political activity is quite another matter. If, earlier, I was a member of Democratic Russia or Russia's Choice, I don't see why I should give that up. But I would carry out those activities within another organization, not the human rights organization. Just as I can also study maths or go to drawing classes.

However, the response from the Moscow leaders is tougher. Sirotkin argues: ‘Whether we like it or not, the ideology of human rights is a liberal party ideology. Whether we like it or not, neither the Communist party or the esteemed Agrarian party will ever defend liberal values, the ideology of human rights.’ And Oleg Orlov, from Memorial, accuses Averkiev of advancing a highly politicized social-democratic view of human rights.

What are human rights? I or Sergei Adamovich [Kovalev] defend the liberal view. And in that respect we shall always remain ‘politicized’. In our view, human rights are a particular set of inalienable rights, not social rights which have been won, not those social goods […] and when you say that we should defend those who are being hurt – that's not defending human rights. That's – if you like – social work. The human rights defender concentrates on defending inalienable rights which underlie the creation of state institutions which can support all other rights.

Orlov gave ‘the right to reside where one wishes’ versus ‘the right to adequate housing’ as a clear example of the difference between the two kinds of rights and argued, that harsh as it might seem, freedom of movement is the critical one:

Either we want a barracks where we shall be guaranteed a right to housing or we defend human rights and in that case human rights are a harsh, cruel thing. We defend rights but we are not kind uncles who put food in the open mouths of all the suffering […] The social gains that the toiling workers have made […] that lies outside our activity and we have to understand that if we have got the individual out of the barracks and given him rights – it can be very tough. We are talking about two different concepts of rights.

Interestingly enough this issue – of the right to housing – was raised by Albie Sachs, one of South Africa's leading constitutional lawyers, at a conference on access to justice, hosted by the World Bank in St Petersburg in 2000. A group of shanty town settlers had won a case on housing resettlement, based on their constitutional, and human, right to shelter, a ruling he supported. Earlier, in exile in London, he agreed, he would not have supported such a ‘social right’ as constitutional but in the new environment in South Africa he had come to look differently upon ‘rights’.⁵

However, returning to 1995, Kovalev agreed with Orlov: ‘It was quite right to ask – what is the concept of human rights? It is simply a set of basic postulates of liberal philosophy, translated into legal norms, expressed in another language.’

There is no evidence that the newcomers from the regions changed their positions. Averkiev returned to the attack at the Ford roundtable, arguing that what people were looking for was ‘justice’ – ‘fair play, decency, deliverance from official abuse and arbitrariness’. The Anglo-American conception of human rights, which the Moscow dissidents had begun to promote in the 1970s, he argued, was not helpful in Russian conditions; it was rather an obstacle to defending rights. Most people turned to him over housing, economic rights, education issues, and he saw his task as getting the wrong righted, whether through the courts or by turning to the relevant government department. If a telephone call from him could get a response from an official, that is what he should do.

But, it was put to him, the result was simply more and more cases. How would this solve the problem of the authorities' behaviour that, Veronika Marchenko from Mother's Right suggested, was the main obstacle to the observance of rights, and with which he agreed. Did not his approach, which could be described as that of a zastupnik or intercessor, simply reinforce the patron–client relationship between the authorities and the citizen? How could this be remedied? No one, among either the Moscow leaders or the new activists, had the answer. As one of the participants, S. Buryachko, put it at the 1995 seminar:

It seems as though everything has been properly legislated, the acts guaranteeing our basic rights and freedoms exist, we are beginning to live under new conditions. At the same time we notice, in our everyday lives, that a lie is still a lie, that the state continues to lie as before, whether on the part of its leaders or through its administrative organs.

Sergei Belyaev, a slightly pugnacious labour activist from Ekaterinburg, who had set up an organization, Sutyazhnik (or Litigator), to challenge the local authorities' rulings on a variety of issues by taking them to court, backed by imaginative public campaigns, suggested that the problem was people's unwillingness to act in defence of their rights. No agreement was reached, and Averkiev would continue to defend or advance his arguments in coming years. But no one denied the importance of using the courts. Kandyba from Tomsk suggested that winning cases and getting them implemented would gradually change the poor performance of the justice system. Belyaev saw this more in terms of challenging the courts to implement the laws. And Professor Gorelik, as we saw, had argued for exerting pressure on the judges. This issue, ‘the use of law’ to change the justice system, comes up repeatedly throughout the period, and we shall return to it more than once.

In a conversation, many years later, Liudmila Alekseeva suggested that the participants in the 1995 seminar had been very downcast by the ‘dismissive’ attitude of the Moscow ‘leaders’ and that she had said to them:

Never mind, you guys, don't listen to them, human rights activists must defend a whole spectrum of social issues […] now we have more political rights than we had in the Soviet period but social rights are just a complete mess […] human rights activists must defend those rights about whose infringement citizens complain. You are real human rights activists.

But they were small and scattered, with few resources, and little expertise, often ignored by the local authorities. Branches of the Memorial Society existed but their members' concerns were not those of these new organizations, while the Soldiers' Mothers focused wholly on conscripts. This was the situation Alekseeva decided she should remedy, and she hit upon the now moribund Moscow Helsinki Group in search of a chair. Her hopes for a Solidarity movement, based on new trade unions, had evaporated: as the economic crisis deepened, the roots of active worker opposition withered. She ended her link with the AFL-CIO and offered to take on the chair of MHG. The board welcomed the suggestion and her idea of holding a conference in May 1996 to mark its twentieth anniversary.

By this time, as we noted, Kovalev had handed in his resignation from the president's commission on human rights. Most of the staff left too. In May 1996, shortly before the presidential elections, Yeltsin issued a new decree on the commission, giving it a mandate to assist the president in guaranteeing the rights of citizens. His choice for chair of the commission was Vladimir Kartashkin, a conservative professor of law, who during the seventies had slighted human rights as a Western invention. Many of the human rights activists were pessimistic. Kartashkin as a defender of human rights while Kovalev was publicly vilified? While Yeltsin won the presidential election at the second round in July, the Communists and patriots outdid the democratic candidates for places in the Duma in December. Kovalev still won a seat (on the Russia' Choice party list) but Lev Ponomarev was out.

Ponomarev, having lost his Duma seat, and witnessing the disappearance of Democratic Russia as a political party, set up a new organization, For Human Rights, based on many of the original party activists in the regions. Representatives from 60 regions attended its founding congress in 1997. They set up centres to assist citizens whose rights had been infringed; they aimed to exert civic control over the authorities' actions and, where possible, to get their nominees into the regional human rights commissions. They remain the most political of the human rights activists, yet it is not easy to identify a shared agenda, and over our period their numbers dwindle. Ponomarev is outspoken, brave. Some would say intolerant, hostile to others who do not share his views, and not sufficiently careful to check his sources before publishing materials. In the eyes of a commentator who knows the community well:

He could be a symbol of the man of 1989 […] All the creators of those clubs, those very active people found themselves [in the mid-nineties] without anything to do […] some of them only knew how to curse the authorities […] they are energetic people and political activists […] they are real activists and in that sense, important people.

Liudmila Alekseeva too was undaunted by political developments. Nothing, it seems, can daunt her and undermine her optimism. When, over 80, she broke her hip, falling down the stairs at a human rights conference, and the doctors, after a heart scan, advised against an operation, she told them sharply to pay more attention ‘to the spirit of the patient, not a scan’, and to proceed. They did, and the operation went well. In May 1996 she proposed that the Moscow Helsinki Group should invite all the activists whom they knew in the provinces to the conference.

And we should suggest to them that MHG, as the oldest human rights organization in Russia, should serve the human rights movement, simply serve other organizations, not deprive them of their independence. I had gained a huge amount of experience from working in America as a consultant to the Helsinki Group […] I had understood that you should create a network, not try to work from the top down, claiming to be the leader, because that's a Russian sickness, each wants to be the boss […] and I took this idea to the Soros committee⁶ […] each organization should do what it considered needed to be done, and our job would be to see that they did not die.

This, she argued, could be done by teaching them, bringing them together for seminars, providing them with information. MHG could publish a free information bulletin, ‘in which they all featured, so they would not feel that they were quite alone in their town, rather that some kind of a community existed and together they could defend each other’.

The Soros Foundation gave $20,000 for the conference. Yury Orlov, the founder of the original Moscow Helsinki Group, now a professor of physics in America, came, representatives from the former republics and those from the regions attended, in all 35 were present. On the opening day, Mikhail Krasnov, a lawyer from the president's administration, unexpectedly appeared. Alekseeva seized the opportunity to ask him whether he could not arrange a meeting with Yeltsin for Orlov, who had suggestions regarding the negotiations with the Chechens. Krasnov arranged it.

Preparing for the meeting, Yury Fedorovich [Orlov] said to me ‘Liuda, let's write a letter, saying that MHG needs office-space’. I said ‘You are going to talk about Chechnya, about important things, and then you mention office-space!’ He said, well we could at least write the letter, and see how the meeting went; if it seemed appropriate, he could hand it over. To that I agreed. I wrote that we needed office space inside the Garden Ring, 300 metres with subsidized rent, as was appropriate for non-governmental organizations. And he took the letter.

At the conference those from the provinces had complained bitterly that their local authorities refused to recognize or to engage with them.

When Yeltsin asked how he could be of help to MHG, Yury explained that the activists from the provinces do not have any access to officials, could not he, Yeltsin, make some recommendations to the regional governors that they should work with the activists […] Yeltsin said he would think about it […] and issued a decree that recommended the governors set up commissions for human rights, modelled on the president's commission, and give them office space with subsidized rents […] Literally, a week after Orlov met with Yeltsin, we were given office space.

Responding to individual appeals, particularly if made by people they knew or, for whatever reason they wished to have on board, was the way heads of institutions (of all kinds) operated in the Soviet Union. Both Yeltsin and Orlov felt comfortable with this. Yeltsin responded with a decree, and with office accommodation (we should perhaps remember that he needed all the support he could get in the forthcoming election). As relevant, he saw himself as the guarantor of constitutional and human rights, and the commission on human rights was there to assist him. The state was responsible for seeing that the laws are observed. From this perspective, independent critical organizations or activists may be an irritation, particularly at local level.

Two weeks later, MHG reported that on 13 June Yeltsin had signed a decree commending the decisions of the conference and expressing his support. This, the announcement continued, together with the general acknowledgment of the Moscow Helsinki Group as the foundation of the International Helsinki Movement, gave the MHG ‘a unique opportunity’ to promote ‘cooperation between government bodies in the centre and the regions, a cooperation which, at present, is virtually absent’.⁷ The MHG was asked to send lists of their proposed candidates to the regional authorities for inclusion in the new commissions, which it did. But this produced a split among its board members. Kovalev and Bogoraz were categorically against human rights activists being members of such commissions – they would be bought off, they were inexperienced, and the human rights movement would die. It was decided to put it to a vote. Alekseeva, as chair, made the vote one of confidence in her leadership; if the proposal to reverse the policy passed, she would resign. A minority voted for, the rest abstained, and Alekseeva continued as chair and with the policy. Admittedly it only resulted in a couple of activists being included in the commissions in 8–ten regions but, she suggested, that was at least something – after all people lived in those regions too. In most cases these commissions were staffed by officials.

On one occasion Kartashkin, chair of the president's commission, brought them to Moscow. In Alekseeva's account, when he spoke, everything was all right, but ‘when I [Alekseeva] spoke all the officials started muttering – who is this, some human rights activist? I thought they were going to leap up and tear me to pieces. I felt real hatred, not even just coldness, but hatred.’

By now Memorial was renting a building from the city at a subsidized rent, the MHG had good office space and, in 1995, the city authorities had given the Sakharov Foundation (based in the USA) ‘a 25-year rent free lease on a 10,000-square-foot, two-storey building located in a handsome park across the Garden Ring Road from the flat’ where Sakharov had lived, now housing part of his archives. Renovation funded by Freedom House, the National Endowment for Democracy, and USAID allowed the building to open as the Sakharov Centre in the spring of 1996. Yury Samodurov, originally from Memorial, became its director, organizing educational and cultural events. The Moscow Helsinki Group saw itself as a more practically oriented organization. It would act as a centre to provide regional human rights organizations with information and literature; would defend them before regional and federal authorities; issue bulletins on the state of current affairs; organize free legal aid for citizens regarding their constitutional rights, and provide educational courses for human rights activists.

We shall hear more of the commissions and we shall meet up again with others among our perestroika activists. But some of them feature in Vyacheslav Bakhmin's assessment of the situation in 1996, as Yeltsin entered his second term of office:⁸

At that time, it seems to me, structures began to emerge out of the original atmosphere of enthusiasm and a human rights ‘soup’ of different ingredients – some were of the Kovalev type, or of those who were close to him, for example Ponomarev. These people took a very tough stance against the state, one of non-cooperation, opposition. They saw how the state openly ignored human rights, and it seemed that to achieve anything through the state was very difficult, if not impossible. […] another, more pragmatic group, carried on working with the state, simultaneously attempting to defend human rights […] among them you could include Soldiers' Mothers, for whom it was important to achieve something for their constituents. They understood that without cooperation with the authorities they could not achieve anything […] You could probably put Abramkin [the penal reformer] in this category. MHG – that's more complicated – because it wavered between outright opposition, depending upon Liudmila Mikhailovna's [Alekseeva] position, to cooperation. It was the same with Marchenko [Mother's Right].

And then there was the third group whose members were prepared to work closely with the authorities, and tried in this way, to achieve something for their target group […] invalids, the elderly, children with Downs syndrome. These were organizations which had nothing against the state as long as the state supported their efforts. They had far more lobbyists inside state structures than the others because all were concerned by the social problems […] and where the state did not respond adequately enough it was for lack of resources and not because of principled objections to what these organizations wanted.

In several respects 1996 was an important year for human rights. With its admission to membership of the Council of Europe, Russia took on certain commitments (to abolish the death penalty, to sign up to the European Convention on Human Rights, and to transfer the prison system to the Ministry of Justice). A moratorium on the death penalty was introduced (and renewed indefinitely in 2010). All institutions involved in the implementation of sentences, and the remand centres, were transferred to the Ministry of Justice in 1997. In May 1998 the Russian Federation signed the European Convention on Human Rights and Freedoms and, by the end of the year, its citizens were able to turn to the European Court of Human Rights. A further condition for membership was that Russia introduce the post of commissioner or ombudsman for human rights, a post already referred to in the constitution, and in 1996 the appropriate legislation was passed. The creation of such an institution had been the subject of often acrimonious debate since the early nineties, and it was 1998 before the Duma could agree on the election of Oleg Mironov, a Communist party deputy, as the first ombudsman.

The debates within the human rights community would come and go over the next ten years, changing focus as the political and economic situation changed. Both the way demands were framed and the choice of strategies to influence state officials or to get popular support will attract our attention. We can identify three or perhaps four different ways of framing and making demands of the authorities: confrontation, cooperation, and collaboration. Petitioning is the fourth, lying somewhere on the borders between cooperation and collaboration. Confrontation assumes the state is an adversary; cooperation implies state and NGO recognize each other as legitimate independent partners, willing to work together; petitioning implies a subservient relationship, the appeal to a higher authority; and collaboration signifies a willingness on the part of the NGO to follow the game plan set by the state. The strategies adopted are influenced by their members' concerns and the state's actions. It takes two to tango, and who led and who responded, and how, altered the pattern of the dance over the period.

But now we must move out into the regions, with their sharply different social and political elites, peoples, and traditions, all part of a landscape scarred by fighting in the Caucasus, by dying industrial towns, and poverty, where disillusioned politicians, Western aid, and new recruits sought to advance the cause of human rights.