Human Rights in Russia

Some talk of a human rights movement in the country. But that's fundamentally untrue. Our country is so huge, and there are such differences between regions, there always were. For example, in some, such as Krasnodar, both at the end of the Soviet period and at the beginnings of the nineties, there was active opposition to any activity by human rights activists, they even produced falsified criminal cases against them, and imprisoned them, and that continues today. In other regions, for example, in Voronezh, that never happened and does not happen, and we are not even talking of Perm or Krasnoyarsk. (Andrei Blinushov, Ryazan Memorial)

Among human rights activists, Perm, sometimes enviously, is referred to as ‘the nature reserve’, a protected zone. ‘I was talking to Averkiev’, said a visiting activist, ‘when the governor rang him on his mobile phone to talk about something. The governor! Unbelievable. Where else could that happen?’ Averkiev set up a new organization, a Civic Chamber, in 1996 but continued to head the Perm Human Rights Centre until the early 2000s. Now headed by Sergei Isayev, who worked with Averkiev from the start, it no longer has its offices in the municipal buildings, but rents three rooms and a corridor in an old building in the centre of the city. It is still probably Russia's most active and well-organized centre, dealing with a variety of problems, and recognized by the local authorities. By way of contrast, in Krasnodar, down in the south, the head of the most active human rights centre was beaten up so badly in 2010 that his life was in danger. Here long-term collusion between criminal landowners, police, and prosecutors recently ended in the murder of 12 members of a family, including women and children.

But is local variation surprising in a country the size of Russia? The country stretches across nine time zones, and from the Arctic Circle in the north to the Black Sea and the Caucasus in the south. Its regions, climatically, geographically, in terms of their resources, and their populations (100 different languages are spoken) are strikingly different. Ethnic Russians constitute 80 per cent of a population of roughly 150 million, and the use of Russian as the language of the federation dominates, but several of the republics also have their own language as an official one. Moscow, as the capital, with its population of over ten million, its resources, and power, is the place to watch. Decisions taken in Moscow reverberate down throughout the country. However, at the same time, the different regions and republics, the subjects of the federation as they called (now constituting 83 rather than the 89 inherited from the Soviet administrative map) are remarkably self-contained or isolated ‘fiefdoms’. And some of them are huge. Leningrad region, which surrounds St Petersburg, is the size of the UK, Krasnoyarsk krai¹ is the size of Europe. Whether it is true that in the late Soviet period there were Communist party first secretaries, who liked to have their region literally ‘tree-fenced’ to distinguish it from neighbouring regions, I do not know but it was, and still is, true that regions live their separate lives, remarkably oblivious to what is happening in other regions. There is one's own region, and there is Moscow.

Industrialization and collectivization in the early thirties, then the Gulag labour camps and exile, followed by the German advance into European Russia, uprooted millions of individuals and families, sending them east to Siberia and to the north. Many stayed, and intermarriage of the different nationalities produced multi-ethnic populations in Siberia and the Far East. In the south the different peoples of the Caucasus stayed or returned to their homelands in the 1960s. But by that time population movement was largely over, and the final decades of Soviet rule were marked by immobility – with one exception – the lure of Moscow. People tended to stay in the region in which they were born – or gravitate to Moscow, if they could. Perhaps to St Petersburg, or Leningrad as it then was. The residence registration system, and the (non) availability of housing was a contributory factor. There were also cities, closed to outsiders or requiring permission to visit because of their industrial profile. Nizhny Novgorod, with much of its industry based on the defence sector, where Sakharov was exiled, was closed in this sense, as was Perm. But there were also the really closed towns, built around a secret defence or research installation, towns with good amenities, lakes and forests, but surrounded by a perimeter fence, with entry and exit checks, where not even relatives could visit, and known only by a post-office number.

Perestroika produced different responses in different places. We have already mentioned the democratic activity in St Petersburg and in Tomsk. In Nizhny Novgorod the young scientists from the research institutes were active players. In Krasnodar krai a conservative, patriotic party elite, competing business clans, and the resurgent Cossacks fought over power. Alexander Auzan, president of the Consumers’ Confederation (Confop), offered one explanation for the differences:

In what sense is Russia a federation? Different regions have different types of political regime. For example, Bashkortostan has one kind of political regime, and Perm krai a completely different one.

I think that it's because of the historical culture and in part because of the history of the past twenty years […] I have often said that the civic capital of Russia is Perm. It stood out in the distant past, when it had one kind of serfdom, because it had the Strogonovs and not the Demidovs, there wasn't the barbaric exploitation that happened with merchant manufacturing, it was home to many political exiles who brought their libraries with them. At the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century a workers’ aristocracy emerged which played an important part during the civil war, then new generations of exiles began to appear. The result was a region with a high level of culture, well-developed industry, and established liberal traditions, pluralist traditions, because the exiles held very different views. In my opinion that's one of the explanations. But each factor is important. Suppose, for example, the economy was weak, it wouldn't have the influence it does, but it's got a strong economy.

In a city such as Perm local activists may have an influence unmatched by that of organizations at federal level, but, in Auzan's words:

On the other hand there are regions where the civic organizations have no influence at all. They are perceived as an unwelcome opposition, that can be the case even in a decent city like Voronezh […] I was there once with Lukin, the ombudsman, acting as a mediator in a conflict between the governor and the civic organizations. In Voronezh there are many good organizations. There's the Centre of the Human Rights Youth Movement, and Thunderstorm, a new environmental movement, there are interesting people.

Yes, there are, and we shall meet them in Chapter 11. Unlike organizations in many other cities, they have office space in the centre, albeit crowded, and they can attract deputies to attend discussions on a regional law to increase the potential for NGO influence. The very fact that Vladimir Lukin, the ombudsman, came as a mediator suggests a community with some influence. In 2012 the office was raided by the security services, and some of the leading activists targeted with threatening hate mail.

The further you are from Moscow can make a difference. From Siberia, or down in Astrakhan, Moscow seems very far away indeed. But this can work both ways. On the one hand it provides more freedom for action, on the other an organization can be shut down very easily if the regional rulers so wish. The extent of Moscow's political control over the regions is of prime importance. Under Yeltsin a weak federal government practically lost control over both the local elites and the resources. Once privatization was allowed, the competition over the region's resources started, sometimes in a more orderly fashion, sometimes violently. In Perm, the new privatization committee was headed by a former city party secretary. ‘What will you do when you've completed privatization?’ I asked him in the early nineties. He smiled ‘We are always able to find something to do.’ Resources (now private property) and political power again became closely linked, but the holders could change, with a political struggle, or, since 2004, at the behest of the Kremlin. Putin reasserted federal control, and took responsibility for appointing the governors. But the lobbies exist. In the competition for the post of governor of the huge and wealthy Krasnoyarsk krai in 2002 one of the two leading candidates was backed by the nickel lobby, the other by the aluminium interests. One got the governorship, the other was given the chair of the krai legislative assembly.

The resource base matters – both for contributions to the federal budget and for subsidies from the centre – and affects the regional elite's room for manoeuvre. And, most important, regional office holders must sense the way the wind is blowing in the Kremlin, the priorities, and which problems can be ignored. This can offer a window of opportunity to a human rights or environmental group. A recent example was the campaign waged in St Petersburg against the building of a Gazprom skyscraper not far from the city centre. The campaign dragged on, getting attention, and popular support. It was a distraction, and a nuisance. The Kremlin decided that it was better that Gazprom and the city government drop the project.

All these factors influence the role human rights and other non-governmental organizations play or have played in different regions. Here is one further suggestion, from Blinushov:

In my personal opinion, and I don't pretend that it is the whole truth, a great deal depends on the local leadership of the security services which, in the majority of the regions retains a continuity with those of the Soviet period, peacefully making the transition to a new Russia, but preserving the traditions, perceptions, which were handed down from generation to generation, from one boss to another.

However, while the environment (cultural, economic, political) played and plays a role, the very uneven pattern of human rights activity across the country cannot be explained without reference to the willingness and ability of an individual or a small group of individuals to take up and defend a cause. This, the individual factor, can make all the difference. It was important both during perestroika and afterwards, and as the Putin regime made life more and more difficult for human rights organizations in the first decade of the new century.

Liudmila Alekseeva, we remember, had been concerned by the activists’ difficulty in getting acknowledgement from their local authorities. She was well aware that they might be in a minority on the regional human rights commissions. She also recognized that the combination of their stubborn individualism, lack of skills, experience, or any inclination to work with ‘colleagues’ in the same city, let alone from other regions, weakened the human rights community as a whole.

In some cities a human rights organization might be the only one but in many places, by 1996 or 1997, there were several. In the now pro-NGO environment, and the escalation of social problems, both human rights centres, and single-issue organizations focusing on children, on prisoners, invalids, or on forced migrants, or domestic violence sprang up. There might also be a Memorial organization, a Soldiers' Mothers Committee, or an environmental group. But the picture varied. Whereas St Petersburg had Citizens Watch, a strong Soldiers' Mothers Committee, two domestic violence centres, and two Memorial organizations, Perm had a Human Rights Centre, two Memorial organizations, a weak Soldiers' Mothers Committee, and no Crisis Centre; Nizhny Novgorod had its Human Rights Centre and a Soldiers' Mothers Committee, but neither a Memorial organization nor a Crisis Centre. There might or might not be an organization or individual attached to Ponomarev's For Human Rights.

However, organizations within a town, city or region tended to keep their distance from each other and, even if they worked on the same issues as their counterparts in neighbouring or other regions (for example, Memorial organizations or Soldiers' Mothers Committees), had no connections with them. As was true of the local elites, they looked to themselves – and to Moscow. For them too this had a rational basis: Moscow was the place where the funders were, the Moscow organizations had resources and expertise that could perhaps help them, and Moscow was the place where you could make connections. The realities of travel and communications in this huge country played their part too.

Travel by train or by air, from one regional capital to another, was often only possible via Moscow. Yes, you could travel by train (slowly) from Vladivostok in the east, across Siberia, stopping at Irkutsk, Krasnoyarsk, Novosibirsk, and on to the Urals – Perm and Ekaterinburg – and then on to Moscow. But, if you wanted to go from Perm in the Urals to Nizhny Novgorod on the Volga or to Murmansk in the north, then you had to fly via Moscow. To plan a trip, by train, from Rostov in the south, via Voronezh, and thence to Moscow would add days to a journey. In some sense all lines led, and still lead to Moscow. An overnight bus will take you from Krasnoyarsk to neighbouring Tomsk, and four hours in a minibus will take you on to Novosibirsk, but often it's simpler to bring everyone to Moscow. Remember too that in the nineties neither mobile phones nor the internet were part of everyday life. Telephone communication was poor, and patchy. There was internet communication in the Ford office, and (by 1998) the office staff had mobile phones. But none of that helped a great deal if the people one wished to contact had neither.

Before we look at strategies to link up organizations, either within a city, or across the country, we turn to a conference, organized in St Petersburg in 1998 under the patronage of the president's new commission on human rights, in honour of the fiftieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration, and funded by the British Know How fund. The conference was entitled ‘The Human Rights Movement and Mechanisms to Defend Human Rights’.² Its proceedings illuminate both the context in which the organizations were operating – a new context, with an overlay of past practices and attitudes – the isolationism within ‘the human rights movement’, and the difficulty of reaching agreement on how to move forward.

In the spring of 1998 the Duma (parliament) signed up to the European Convention on Human Rights, a major step forward in the eyes of the human rights’ activists. But in May it elected Oleg Mironov, a Communist party deputy, who had supported the war in Chechnya and favoured keeping the death penalty, as the ombudsman. Nor were some other developments encouraging. Sergei Pashin, a well-known and erudite young judge, who had headed a now defunct presidential task force on judicial reform, was under threat of dismissal by Moscow city court for his too liberal judgements, and Alexander Nikitin, a retired naval officer in St Petersburg working for an environmental group, Bellona, had been charged with espionage.

The conference was organized by the human rights commission, headed by Kartashkin, together with support from leading Moscow centres and Citizens Watch, the St Petersburg organization, led by Boris Pustintsev, which was actively supporting Nikitin. The conference proceedings followed a standard pattern. They opened with the reading of a letter in which the president sent his greetings and support for the conference, and referred to the majority of the regional commissions’ having well-known human rights activists among their members (which was quite untrue).

Pustintsev then welcomed the participants. He reminded them that the conference had been Kartashkin's idea, and suggested that

we in our activity help the state to become law-based, therefore we should not set out from the start to be confrontational with the authorities – dialogue is what is required, and in those instances (not so frequent, alas) when the authorities react favourably to important public initiatives, we welcome close working relations.

Kartashkin took over as chair. As was customary, a commission was elected to work on preparing a draft resolution to be adopted at the end of the conference. Then Kartashkin made a conventional presentation: NGOs have a role to play, he affirms, and he regrets that not all the regional authorities have included human rights activists in their commissions and that, in their turn, some NGOs have been unwillingly to participate; while he regrets the ombudsman's position on the death penalty and alternative service, the president's commission will support him on social and economic rights; the past year, 1996–7, has seen much greater activity by the commission – seminars, distribution of information, including on methods of work. (Any Soviet institution or organization always reported an increase in such activities over the previous year.) But then, he suggests, ‘human rights work should be undertaken by all the democratic forces in society’, not just by the human rights activists who sometimes insist that they should take the lead. To be fair to Kartashkin, in concluding, he refers to the European Convention, and how this makes possible the taking of cases to the European Court of Human Rights.

Liudmila Alekseeva, as the most eminent human rights activist present, spoke next. She was in a robust mood:

The idea behind the [human rights] movement remains the same today as it was earlier: to defend the individual from the state and its officials. Its core principles remain the same: a principled refusal to use violence, instead to base oneself on the laws of the land and international documents on human rights, on the Universal Declaration […] Today defending human rights has not become any easier [here she refers to the recent murder of a democratic editor, Larisa Yudina, in Kalmykiya] The constitution contains a rich list of rights and freedoms, but the law doesn't work. Officials, including judges, repeatedly fail to observe the constitution or the laws. [Neither, she points out, did the president in the offensive against Chechnya.]

Given the size of the country, she argued, Russia needs ‘tens maybe hundreds of thousands of human rights organizations’. However, things are moving forward – Ponomarev's For Human Rights now has branches in 58 regions, and MHG is working on education. ‘And we shall become strong – and the greatest blockhead in officialdom will respond to us, will be taught to obey the laws – after all, that, is the one thing human rights activists demand of the authorities.’

Oleg Mironov, the new ombudsman, followed with a short statement describing his task as being one of restoring rights, improving Russian legislation in accordance with international standards, and raising legal consciousness. No one paid any further attention to him – but then there was hardly any attempt by anyone, over the next day and a half, to respond to points raised by a previous speaker. Most had come with their prepared texts; their task was to present them. There were too many of them to fit into the timetable which, by the second day, had become overcrowded, partly because it included an outing to the palace at Peterhof, and it was not clear how there would be time to get the draft resolution printed out, circulated, and discussed. Had this been a Soviet conference, it would not have mattered because the prepared resolution would have just gone through. But now there were those who wanted it to be done properly, ‘democratically’, and the participants cared about what they had to say. The interjections, and proposals as to how to manage the outing, and lunch, and circulation of the resolution took up even more time.

What did they want to say? There was no organization by theme, which made reporting quite difficult. The topics included, among others, restrictions on freedom of information, pressure on trade unions, the rights of those repressed under Stalin, the need to create a new police force from scratch, to reform penal institutions, to ensure open local elections, and the Nikitin case.

Professor Gorelik from Krasnoyarsk was there and restated the need to re-educate the judges, who still thought their task was to fight crime. He cited a survey showing that American 12-year-olds think the task of the court is to decide whether an individual is guilty or not, whereas Russian 12-year-olds think it is to convict criminals. He complained that appeals, on correct legal grounds, were returned by higher courts without explanation.

Valentina Melnikova from Soldiers' Mothers (Moscow) spoke in favour of working with the authorities over, for example, budget issues, and defended their cooperation with the prosecutor's office over an amnesty for conscripts who absconded. She was challenged by Ella Polyakova from the St Petersburg organization, which was dealing with 200–250 conscripts a week. Polyakova's criticisms of the authorities were so hostile that Kartashkin became uncomfortable, and probably so did most participants. A quick survey found that 60 per cent favour dialogue with the authorities; 30 per cent – dialogue on some issues; only 3–5 per cent favoured confrontation. The representative from Ivanovo referred to their having a council of representatives from different NGOs, which ‘is not a place for politics, it puts forward suggestions to resolve concrete problems facing the citizens […] political discussions, slogans, attacks of any kind are forbidden at the meetings by the council itself as pointless and unproductive’. Democracy, he argued, requires opposition, but constructive opposition.

Svetlana Gannushkina's contribution, presented in her absence, was the longest and most professional. She brought up the residence registration, the propiska issue – despite the Constitutional Court's ruling it illegal in April 1996, and again in 1998, the mayor of Moscow had simply stated that he would not observe the judgement. The residence restrictions continued to apply, and, moreover, had popular support. But then she turned to the more general issue of attitudes to the law, and raised key issues:

We went on about a law on refugees but when in February 1993 a law appeared we didn't even bother to read it; we reckoned it would make no difference […] we still assumed that the only way to get results was to go to the top person but, when the structures of power and authority broke down, we gradually came to understand that the only way to prevent chaos is to create ‘legality’, a legal territory, in our huge country.

People still doubt whether it is possible to make laws work in our country. People often say to us – surely you are not such optimists that you believe in the law? It's the equivalent of asking us: do you believe in air? If there's no air, we can't breathe, we simply won't exist. The only space in which mankind can live is one with air. And the state, at present, is so constructed that it can only exist in a law-based space. If such a space does not come into being, Russia as a state will die. There's only one way out: we must create a law-based space.

Our task today, she continued, is ‘to change state policy towards migrants and refugees […] and most important of all – to help migrants defend themselves – not to act as petitioners in the offices of all powerful officials, but to demand the observing of their rights, as defined by law’.

However, the theme which, not surprisingly, received most attention was the human rights commissions themselves. But even here there was little attempt to respond to another's comments, and engage in discussion. Pustintsev queried the dubious composition of the president's commission, and spoke of the difficulty of getting information from government departments; Nikolai Girenko, a liberal St Petersburg academic who wrote against racism and would shortly be murdered on his doorstep, argues that the combined efforts of the commissions and rights activists would be insufficient ‘to break up Russia's reinforced concrete bureaucracy, or rather its viscous padded version which has to be dismantled, and rebuilt in such a way that its officials obey the law’. Others, from different regions, spoke of the difficulty of getting any representation on a commission. The representative from Arkhangelsk described a two-year struggle, following the June 1996 decree, first to get a commission set up, and then (April 1997) to get one NGO representative on the commission, which was staffed by a professor of political theory, a political scientist, a writer, and representative of the tax inspectorate. The commission met once, in April 1997, to draw up a plan of work, and then in September had proposed Petrov, the head of the administrative apparatus of the regional authority, as the new ombudsman. With his election, no further need was seen for the commission, whom, she was told, had worked well – in six months 12 citizens had turned to it, and in nine cases their complaints had been satisfied.

Lev Ponomarev was aggressive. Eighty per cent of the commissions, he argued, are ‘fictitious’ but, then, ‘would one expect regional authorities to include human rights activists in the commissions when the federal human rights commission is headed by an official, and includes hardly any?’

This was hardly polite towards Kartashkin, but then from Ponomarev one expected confrontation. We cannot stand aside, he argued. ‘The present political system has become one in which “politics” is only practised by the political nomenklatura [an appointed elite], together with the new rich.’ So we should participate in elections. His organization For Human Rights would put up candidates in 60 regions in the 1999 elections.

The only attempt to respond to some of these comments came from the representative of the commission from Orenburg. He had hoped to meet more commission members at the seminar, and was surprised by the criticism of government officials – he was a government official, and failed to see why this might mean he could not do his job properly. He was amazed to hear that there are 23 rights organizations in Sverdlovsk – should they not unite? In Orenburg there was perhaps one. And he was puzzled by the references to the Nikitin case, and to judge Pashin: he did not know who they are and therefore cannot support statements on their behalf. Perhaps on the bus to Peterhof, palace and park, someone told him. His comments illustrated just how large, and how localized, a country Russia was, and we note that for him Ekaterinburg still has its ‘Soviet’ name – Sverdlovsk. In ten years’ time, the internet and mobile phones would have cast a web over most of the country, and drawn its faraway parts closer together – but that was a decade away.

Towards the end of the presentations, Andrei Babushkin, from Moscow, in a rapid fire delivery, suggested 12 detailed points to be included in the resolution. Babushkin, a dynamic and unusual individual, abandoned the teaching of scientific communism at the time of perestroika to join the democratic movement, and won a short-lived seat on Moscow city council. While still involved in politics today as a Yabloko supporter, it is his 20 years’ work with the homeless and ex-prisoners that makes him well known in his locality, and to Moscow officials. We shall meet him again, but here it is his detailed proposals, relating to the work of the commission, to the ombudsman's office, draft legislation on changes to criminal procedure, and recent concrete cases involving activists – to mention only some of them – that we note. Even were time not running out, and lunch and the excursion to Peterhof approaching, there was no way most of them could possibly be discussed and debated (as Yury Shmidt, the well known St Petersburg defence lawyer, points out).

But now we were already into calls from the floor on the need to discuss the resolution before or after lunch. How this was finally resolved we do not know but the transcript includes a two-page ‘final document’ which includes some of Babushkin's recommendations in shortened form, and others. Two, which had emerged as leading demands from the human rights sector in recent years, were legislation on alternative civilian service in place of military service, and public inspection of places of detention. Chapters 8 and 9 follow their trajectory over the coming years.

The document lays the main blame for the infringement of human rights on the failure of a law-based state to come into existence, and the slow development of civil society. Federal, regional and local authorities, it notes, do not observe the laws and introduce legislation that infringes basic rights. Its recommendations include the ombudsman and the commissions working together to produce federal and regional annual reports, and that the human rights community should participate in working out a Federal Conception of Human Rights for Russia on the Eve of twenty-first century. (This proposal, thankfully I am tempted to say, went no further. But then no one really assumed that it would.)

The conference addressed a letter to the chair of the Supreme Court regarding the Nikitin case, and one to the higher collegium of judges on the Pashin case. The letter to the Supreme Court may have influenced the subsequent decision to drop the charges against Nikitin, but Pashin was dismissed. It was clear to most that their recommendations would have little impact.

During the conference, Valentin Gefter, who works with Kovalev (then still a deputy, but also heading a small human rights research institute) had asked: ‘Which of us, state institutions or civil society, is the weaker in defending the rights and freedoms of man?’ and claimed that both were equally weak.

Not only are we not moving forward along the road to a law-based state, not only is judicial reform and many other reforms not proceeding, but we are in stops and starts moving backwards […] So what should we do? Somehow we have got to move to a coordinated system of working together.

We note the isolationism of the individual participants, each focused almost entirely on the issue that concerned him or herself, the speaking ‘across’ rather than engaging with each other and the non-correspondence of the resolutions or final document with clearly thought-out, and agreed, positions of a majority of the participants. These are difficult things to achieve even when one brings together groups of people who share many views in common, so one should not be surprised. But we do want to ask – what purpose then was the conference meant to achieve? And, to return to Gefter, how could the activists begin to work together?

The first thing that strikes you about Russian society is that the communists have money, the nationalists have money and for some reason or other the democrats do not. And the second thing – all we Russians, including the democrats, including the human rights activists, lack the ability to work together. Even the best people, the best workers. It's a historically-inherited national characteristic. Perhaps we simply lack experience in civic activity. I see this very clearly because I lived for thirteen years in America. Americans work together better than we do.

NGOs in Russia are often criticized for their inability or unwillingness to work together. One of the reasons surely is their need to compete with others for funding, sometimes from the same donor. Such a pattern of behaviour is hardly limited to Russian NGOs. The search for funding is highly competitive, and there is no reason to think that this free market – where donors have competing preferences and NGOs, institutions, or individuals develop strategies to take advantage of them – produces outcomes that are of the most benefit to the community or indeed guarantee the promotion of a donor's preferences. By the second half of the nineties, there was money, substantial amounts of Western money, funding human rights organizations, and in Chapter 5 we assess its impact. But what about inherited national characteristics? Some Western scholars have written of a ‘Russian intelligentsia tradition’ in which ‘purity and principle take precedence over strategy and action’ and we shall meet others, including Vladimir Lukin, elected ombudsman in 2004, and leading activists, who stress ‘the archaic attitudes’ of the people.³

Cultural arguments are tricky. Cultures are multi-faceted, and they can change or adapt to new circumstances. Some Russian cultural patterns that existed at the beginning of the twentieth century surely influenced Soviet rule, in various ways, and themselves, over the years, changed with it. Which new traits were brought into being by Soviet rule, industrialization, and twentieth century developments is a question for endless exploration. There is however plenty of evidence of people or organizations joining forces, and, working together, throughout the nineteenth century, during and after the 1905 and 1917 revolutions, and into the 1920s. People, in all strata, worked together effectively, either to challenge, change or to support the existing order. They worked together during World War II, no less doggedly than did their allied counterparts. Lenin complained, it is true, that the problem with the social-democratic movement was its lack of organization. Sometimes, when driven to despair by an endless discussion that closes with resolutions, forgotten as soon as they have been passed, or ends without agreement on any course of action, his words come back to haunt me. But they do not offer an explanation for today's actions. For that we must look to the attitudes, and patterns of behaviour, that existed within society (whether among intellectuals, state officials, students, the industrial labour force, or pensioners) when Russia set out to chart a new course in 1991.

Here, given that the issue is ‘working together’, I remind the reader that the many years of Soviet rule had denied its citizens the right to engage in public discussion and move to independent collective action. This found expression, in the post-Soviet environment, in a divorce between public speech (was it even discussion?) and action.⁴ The possibility of talking openly about issues, old and new, was entrancing. Conferences! There had always been conferences but now they would be ‘real’ and Western funders put up the money. There was a strong belief in education or enlightenment – very much part of a Soviet inheritance – and a practice of adopting resolutions to pass to those above, or to the outside world, resolutions which, it was assumed, would now, somehow magically, be significant because they ‘really represented’ what the signatories thought. The practice of writing of public letters to be sent to the authorities could surely now be used to effect. Often these activities took precedence over running an organization. Understandably. There was little experience of organizing, let alone democratically.

In the summer of 1998, 25-year-old Tatyana Lokshina returned to Moscow with a contract to work in a publishing house. Eight years earlier, upon finishing school, she had left with her parents for Boston, Massachusetts, and had now finished graduate school. But, as she arrived, in August 1998, at the time of the financial crash, the publishing house froze all vacancies. Her pre-raphaelite face and halo of hair would, a century earlier, have brought her work as a model, but in Moscow in 1998 jobs were next to impossible to find. Someone told her that the Moscow Helsinki Group was looking for a person with English language skills for a USAID project. Tanya had no particular interest or knowledge of human rights but her language skills, and her having done a little part-time work in the Sakharov archive at Brandeis University in Boston, brought her the job. She thought of it as a short-term fill in, until she could get into publishing.

You were given an untrained assistant, and gigantic tasks, and you either carried them out as far as you were able, or they defeated you. If you had some success, then you were quickly moved up. By 2003 I was already the executive director of MHG. Absolutely inexperienced, without a clue of what it was I was engaged in, but somehow or other it seemed to be working, and after all you have no other points of reference, no one is explaining how you should be doing things […] There was such a strange combination of, on the one hand, some kind of irresponsibility, and on the other unlimited possibilities for you to set yourself targets and do certain things which, in a different context, and at your age, you would never have attempted.

Would it have been the same, I ask, if you had been working in publishing?

No, definitely not. Working in a publishing house is very specific work, it's a craft. It's clear what has to be done, and how to do it.

So why wasn't it like that in human rights work?

Because everything was only just being born, everything was absolutely new, living material that was being born and changing. Now it's very different, today that kind of thing is impossible […] I am not here passing any judgements, I am just stating a fact.

The same situation surely characterized the new world of business, property, and making money. It would be interesting to compare the degree of professionalization, which all agree distinguishes the human rights community today from that of the nineties, with that in the business world. And to ask, not merely what accounts for changes in that realm but whether any older cultural patterns persist across such very different spheres of activity. What else was present in the human rights community? The looking to a leader who, while he or she holds the position, has power and authority. The absence of accepted procedures for removing some one from office. Leaders of organizations, as someone put it, tend to leave office feet first. There was the trust which existed between a small group of long-term friends or acquaintances, and the distrust of others. All these factors came into play. None of these practices would disappear overnight.

Liudmila Alekseeva welcomed a Soros initiative to set up local centres for civic initiatives ‘a space where all could meet – organizations and individuals, who share the idea of an open society – from political parties to, say, gardeners’. This might encourage them to work together. However, while sometimes offering office space, and a place to pick up information, such centres did not usually result in joint action by the members, any more than did the Research Centre on Human Rights in Moscow. After all, they might well be competing for funding. To bring them together one needed Moscow's involvement. Liudmila Alekseeva defined the task of the Moscow Helsinki Group as one of attracting funding for large projects in which human rights groups from across the country would participate.

Thanks to my American experience, I withstood the pressure from my fellow countrymen who, in keeping with the national tradition, wanted to create a vertical organization. They wanted to create associations, filials of MHG – no way! Let each organization retain its complete independence and be our partner. I stood to the death on this, quarrelling with everyone, especially with Ponomarev. He is a much bigger fan of vertical organizations.

NGOs from the regions who participated in a project would come to Moscow to attend seminars and training sessions, and meet each other. Depending on the project, the participants would differ. And, meanwhile, MHG would devise educational programmes. This idea, inadvertently, produced the first community-wide website.

In 1996 the Moscow Helsinki Group and Sergei Smirnov (of the Russian Research Centre on Human Rights) were trying unsuccessfully to design an educational programme. Sergei had just graduated as a geophysicist, but his hobby was computers. He and Andrei Blinushov, from Ryazan, who had started reading computer journals on the internet, decided to see what they could find on the web about Russian organizations. The answer was nothing – and then, in Blinushov's words ‘we thought, and the idea seemed to us very daring, to try to set up a website, not just with educational materials, but a shared site which would have information about different organizations, where there would be editors too’.

In 1997 they came to the Ford Office with a proposal for an internet project, Human Rights On-line, a proposal that included setting up a website, providing a limited number of local organizations with computers, travelling out to the regions to show them how to use them and how to provide material for the hro.org website. Over time the local organizations could create their own websites and gain local publicity. The website, with its online board, was to be operated out of Ryazan and Moscow. It was the first internet site where organizations from across the country could send in information and keep themselves informed of what others were doing. Today it provides ongoing information on the human rights community (conscription, and arbitrary police behaviour, are the most popular topics), a bulletin of daily happenings, has a large archive, and has organized internet campaigns in defence of individuals or organizations.⁵ Since 2000 it has suffered more than one hacking attack, the latest coinciding with the 2012 presidential election.

By the late nineties the ideas of networking, of shared projects or activities, as a way of overcoming both local and regional isolationism had begun to catch on. Western donors were enthusiastically promoting it. Maybe, by creating networks, the isolationism and individualism of NGOs could be overcome, and the NGOs themselves, as members, would carry more weight at local level, and at federal level? As we shall see, some worked better than others. But the most ambitious project, which lasted ten years, was MHG's regional monitoring of the observation of human rights.

In 1997 the National Endowment for Democracy gave MHG a grant to conduct a pilot project: organizations in five regions would send in reports on the human rights situation in their region. In 1998 this was extended to 30, by 1999, with a major three year grant from USAID, the number had risen to 60, and in 2000 all 89 regions responded. USAID continued to support the project until 2009, although with decreasing funding, and the number of participants dropped to around 20. In the words of Nina Tagankina, at the time a member of the Nizhny Novgorod Human Rights Centre, now executive director of the Moscow Helsinki Group:

At first, they sent in bits, then we sent them details, and a form to fill in; they did not have to fill in everything. We suggested key groups: psychiatric patients, women and children, prisoners, Aids sufferers, groups whose rights, there is good reason to think, will be infringed. And then we sent ‘theme reports’ to our experts.

When we look at the 20 or so regions which, from 1999, stayed the course and submitted reports, we notice that, in most cases, the same organization with the same leader was in charge. But some strong organizations had dropped out – presumably because they were busy doing other things. And, as Tagankina put it, ‘There were those who simply weren't able to monitor the situation throughout the year. You have to have a system – using both the media, and a public reception centre to which people turn with their complaints, and human rights activists who appear in court, write documents, hold press conferences […] The work has to be systematic and multifaceted.’

As funding decreased, centres were asked to send in what they could, and their ‘bits and pieces’ were included in an overall report. This was a project that provides us with insights into what working together could mean, and the results it can bring. Let us look at it first from the perspective of its young administrators, one of whom was Tatyana Lokshina, and then from that of a participant.

When I began to work in MHG I was astounded by the level of professional irresponsibility. With my university background I had a fairly clear idea of what constituted research. What was being called the Russian monitoring of human rights did not seem to be based, in any way at all, upon a methodology […] then Sergei Lukashevsky, who had just joined the MHG, wrote one up, and I sort of helped along but there was also the question as to how the regional partners would react. There were some organizations which turned out to be prepared to learn, out of interest, and there were others who weren't prepared to lift a finger, because they did not care about research at all. The results were horribly uneven. The all-Russia report which we compiled annually, on the basis of the regional reports, was very different from the regional ones. We had to rely quite heavily on our own monitoring of the media.

Sergei Lukashevsky, who had recently graduated from the Russian Humanities University and, while a student, had worked in Memorial, brought his writing and editing skills to the project. The themes, he suggested, were proposed by the regional participants, several of whom were part of the Ponomarev network, or by members of the liberal parties. But some were quite new to the human rights community.

One of the participants was Igor Sazhin, a young history teacher in Syktyvkar, in the northern Komi republic, whose family had been deported there in the 1930s. Interested in his family's history, in 1996 he approached Mikhail Rogachev at the Syktyvkar Memorial organization. When word came of the MHG project, Rogachev suggested he might like to set up an organization and participate. He decided he would; he would set up a Memorial human rights commission to collect material on the infringements and do this in his free time. But then he began to think: should he not be offering legal advice to those in conflict with the authorities as well as collecting the data? He struggled at first but in 1998, when MHG was paying local organizations for the editorial work on the monitoring project, he was invited to a seminar in Moscow, and Marek Nowicki from the Polish Helsinki Foundation came to explain how to do the monitoring. He went to a summer school in Warsaw at the Helsinki Foundation. The connections made at these meetings, in his words, made him feel part of a community of individuals, who are linked up electronically, not through Moscow, and who exchange information on new legislation (for example on the public commissions to oversee places of detention), on court cases they have won (or lost), on practices such as pressing for bail if remand centres are full. While Sazhin is a member of Memorial, and on the International Society's board today, his connections are not necessarily with Memorial organizations. Andrei Yurov, from Voronezh, who set up a Human Rights Youth Movement, which we meet in Chapter 10, is a close colleague dating from those early MHG meetings.

Starting in 1998, Sazhin and his colleagues began to produce a shorter annual report, based on their report to MHG, to send to the head of the Komi republic and to republican officials, and then moved on to sending quarterly reports.

We should educate them too. We tried for a year, no response, just an acknowledgement, but then I learnt that they did pay attention to the reports […] and most important this played a PR role, they began to notice us […] Making use of the report at local level in order to change the situation turned out to bring significant results.

But it took them time to realize that they could use information, for example on police behaviour, to lobby for change. The majority of the organizations, he suggested, who participated in the MHG project simply sent their reports in to Moscow, and did not think of using them at local level. When he registered the Memorial human rights commission (in 2002), it had already established a reputation for itself. It is an atypical organization.

We have seven activists who regularly come to the office and work. And about 20 members. Our approach is unusual: the largest membership dues are paid by the members of the board, they pay 1000r [£20] a month.

Yes. I work in a school, and I earn a bit more by teaching human rights. What I do in the organization is voluntary work [i.e. unpaid]. I believe that if someone doesn't have the ground firmly under his feet, he can't become the defender of someone else. So, already firmly on your own feet, and with an income, then you can join an NGO and help people. So far this works for us.

On our board we have a businessman, two lawyers who are well established, one person who, while not a lawyer, earns pretty well from a law practice, and I, a history teacher. We manage to put together about 10,000r [£200] a month and that's enough to pay for the office, communal charges, telephone and internet […] yes, there are problems but we are trying to think up new approaches […] donations through a bank […] soon we're going to have a donation box. If the population trusts us, they must supply us with some resources. That's my vision for the future. Everywhere in the world NGOs work like that, it's only we who turn for help to the West.

With Sazhin, Lukashevsky, and Lokshina, we have representatives of a new, second generation, those who began to work in human rights organizations towards the end of the nineties. In 2004 Lokshina left MHG to set up an analytical centre, Demos, to report on and analyse human rights infringements, and by 2010 she was working for the American-based Human Rights Watch in their Moscow office, travelling, including to the Caucasus. Lukashevsky replaced Samodurov as director of the Sakharov Centre in 2010.

I come back to the ‘generation question’ in later chapters, here we are interested in what the monitoring project produced. For the first few years MHG produced annually book-length reports, in Russian and in English, and accompanying volumes that reproduced edited versions of the regional reports. They varied in content and structure. The report on 1999 contained special sections on the electoral franchise, on social, economic and labour rights, women's rights, children's rights, and mass violations in the Chechen republic. These, in approach and style, vary with the expert (sometimes an academic) who wrote them. The 2000 report is organized into sections, starting with the Inviolability of the Person, and continuing with Observance of Fundamental Civil Liberties, moving on through political rights, and social rights, to the status of the most vulnerable groups, and again the hand of invited experts is visible. As can be imagined, the reports by the regional organizations vary wildly.⁶

Liudmila Alekseeva suggested that: ‘Working on the monitoring project helped weaker organizations become stronger. That was the first thing. And second, it was joint activity. We did it together, we met to study how to do it, then did it, then met to assess the results. And that played an important part in creating a community.’

Yes and no, would be my response. Certainly, as we saw in the Sazhin case, it played a crucial role in getting an organization off the ground, and established in its locality. But there were others that came into existence because of the foreign funding and faded away once financial support shrunk, and, despite the claims from some regions that their report is a collective effort, one has to be sceptical. St Petersburg is of course not typical but here, within a few years, a council of human rights organizations was producing its own annual report, while another organization, Strategiya, participated in the MHG project. The project did not leave behind it a network of organizations engaged in collectively mapping human rights infringements, either in a locality, or across Russia. However, the seminars and discussions in Moscow, and the part played by Marek Nowicki from Poland, played an important part in bringing younger participants together, and creating lasting personal networks. I look at his contribution in the next chapter.

At the presentation of the first set of books, the results of the MHG monitoring project in 1999, Arseny Roginsky, from Memorial, in his congratulations to Liudmila Alekseeva, brushed aside the issue of human rights – what she was doing, he said as he embraced her, was furthering the emergence of civil society. At the time, I was puzzled. But this was its contribution, and an important one, to the idea of a civil society, where independent voices and organizations, separate from the state, and from across the country, talk to each other about infringements of rights, and sometimes work together to try to hold the state responsible.

MHG today has a small and efficient staff – Nina Tagankina, from Nizhny Novgorod, as its executive director, and Daniil Mescheryakov, from Irkutsk, as project organizer – and a well-organized website. It continues to seek funding for projects that involve local organizations. A coalition against discrimination proved very popular. At twice-yearly board meetings, according to Tagankina, ‘Liudmila Mikhailovna decides our basic strategy […] and on strategies for action […] there was Campaign 31,⁷ we sought some funding for that.’ Donor preferences obviously played their part. Today, faced with the ‘foreign agent’ law, MHG no longer accepts foreign funding and, in this instance, it has surprisingly broken ranks with long-term allies in the human rights community.

Liudmila Alekseeva, in many ways, was still the voice of the Russian human rights community in 2013, widely revered by local organizations, and recognized by officials as someone who cannot be ignored. (She received a greetings telegram from Putin on her eightieth birthday.) A visit from her to a meeting in a provincial city raises the profile of local activists. According to Lokshina, ‘Russia is a country of authorities and well-known names’ she remembers people coming from the provinces to see Alekseeva – ‘they simply wanted to touch her hand. It was very important then.’ In her Moscow apartment her large clumsy telephone, which she manages with extraordinary dexterity, rings constantly – it could be the police chief (about a future demonstration), or ‘a very unpleasant deputy’, a journalist, Lukin the ombudsman, or the young National Bolsheviks. Somehow she has time for everyone, before ordering a delivery of pizza for an evening meeting to discuss how to move the judicial reform process forward.