CHAPTER 5
WESTERN ASSISTANCE, AN
EXTRAORDINARY CONGRESS
Despite all the minuses, civil society and the country would be different today had it not been for Western assistance. Very many aspects of today's activity – from words people use, to technologies, to practices – were introduced with the help of donors' money, and hence you can't underestimate its importance, despite all its minuses.
Vyacheslav Bakhmin's words are echoed by others, both activists and funders, with different emphases. By the second half of the nineties, and throughout the first decade of the new century, Russian NGOs were receiving substantial Western financial assistance. Did such aid have a significant or marginal impact, contribute to or do little to encourage the development of democratic practices, fair and tolerant societies? This has been the subject of a lively debate among Western scholars.1 All I offer here are some reflections on how it influenced the Russian human rights community, both positively and negatively, before looking at an Extraordinary All-Russian Congress to Defend Human Rights, held in 2001, which provides a snapshot of the community at the beginning of the new century.
The background
What prompted the funding? It was, as we saw, a time when human rights had moved high up the global agenda, and both Western NGOs and the voices of the Helsinki Committees found a response from their governments, and from private foundations. Women's rights, media rights, prisoners' rights, refugee rights all had strong advocacy groups in the West, anxious to take the message to Russia, an unexplored territory. Activists could claim a shared identity based on the universal doctrine of human rights. It was an exciting but bewildering world both for funders and for the new rights organizations in Russia. The funders and advocacy groups shared a widely held view that Russia was engaged in a difficult transition to a liberal market economy, with a democratic politics. Quite what that meant, and whether American, Italian or Swedish experience might be the most relevant to Russia, was rarely discussed by donors or recipients. Its closed existence under Soviet rule meant not only that Russians had very little knowledge of the West, but that Westerners had very little knowledge of Russia.
How did the new activists respond in the nineties to the availability of Western money? Russian organizations, it seems, had the opportunity to choose from a rich variety of sources.2 But it was not that simple. All grant-making organizations have their own preferences, rules for applying, reporting procedures, etc. Most required applications in English. Some required Western partners. The paperwork could be overwhelming, and the questions sometimes incomprehensible. In the mid to late nineties, even Moscow organizations struggled to understand what applying for a grant, let alone receiving one, involved. Donor preferences for short-term projects and their unwillingness to fund everyday running costs had consequences. Russian organizations had to try to hide such costs within ‘projects’, and lived from month to month, unable to do any long-term planning. They dreamt of grants that included support for rent, communal services, and staff salaries (institutional support) as well as for project activities. The Moscow Helsinki Group, despite receiving large US government grants for projects, struggled to find money to cover office running costs and rent.
Vyacheslav Bakhmin knows the world of both the activists, and the Western foundations for whom he worked during our period, probably better than anyone else. In his words, while the foundations' programme staff ‘think about the results, all the same, the trouble is they think in terms of projects […] people struggle from one project to another, and don't manage to achieve anything.’ And Tanya Lokshina, with experience in different organizations, is convinced that: ‘one of the worst mistakes made by Western donors was not to create a mechanism for providing normal institutional support […] you work under the constant pressure of writing up short-term projects, thinking up complete nonsense.’
The funding world was awash with Western consultants, experts, and NGOs who, whatever their knowledge or interest, were anxious to tap into this new source of income. In the 1960s a banner ‘There's money in poverty’ decorated the Economics Faculty at the University of Wisconsin; now ‘there was money in Russia’. Western government grants almost always included their experts in projects, while the European Commission's approach to grant making (Western partners are obligatory) gave birth to ‘the Brussels bandits’, consultancy firms that bid for the projects put out to tender by the Commission. They set up, on paper, partnerships between Russian organizations they often have no knowledge of and highly paid Western experts or consultants with little or no knowledge of Russia. Western experts sometimes play a very positive role, and some partnerships, including those funded by the European Commission, for example the joint work done by Russian and Western lawyers (EHRAC and Memorial) in taking cases to the European Court of Human Rights, or that of ECRE/Migration Rights, to which we return in Chapter 9, have been and still are very fruitful. However, the waste or misuse of money under the EC system, and indeed under some of the big government programmes, is a frequent complaint. ‘Millions have been poured down the drain under the Rule of Law programme’ sighed an experienced lawyer, while Bakhmin commented:
Monsters like TACIS and USAID, and the European Commission – they often distribute huge amounts of money not only ineffectively but in a way that damages the development of civil society […] they themselves have to hand out this money because the system is such that if they do not do it today, they won't be given it in future, they have to account for it, and the reports are often a sham.
As can be imagined, it was important and difficult for the different donors to keep track of others' activities, and there could be duplication or dismay at some of the projects funded by others. By 2000 those with offices in Moscow had set up a Donors' Forum (of both government and foundation funders), which met regularly. Undoubtedly helpful in creating an awareness of each other's programmes, the interests and approach to grant making of its members were sufficiently different to preclude anything like a common strategy. To some extent the private foundations, or at least MacArthur and Ford, tried to spread the load between competing grantees (MacArthur supported the Sakharov Centre, Ford the Memorial Society). If, however, representatives of the private foundations might consult, and sometimes agree, on a strategy towards an individual grantee or grantees, the Western government funders (from USAID to DIFID, SIDA, or the European Commission, to mention only a few) pursued their funding strategies independently. The need to follow the preferences of a foreign ministry or state department, to implement the results of political bargaining in Brussels, or the personal preferences of a president of a foundation, meant a field of players whose individual interests took precedence over any team work.
A new player could enter the field, announce a new programme, and suddenly a particular field would be awash with money, and grantees old and new scrambling to take advantage of it. Western funding, attracted by an organization's record, tended to follow a (successful) organization and this could lead to ‘overfunding’. (One human rights activist had the honesty to say that, by 2010, his organization had more than enough financial resources.) Rather differently, an activist might agree to take a project on board with seeming enthusiasm, but unless s/he was the right individual, in the right place, at the right time, the strategy would leave little more than a paper trace. Funders, government or private, like to see results, and this encourages grantees and programme staff to report them when a more honest (and useful) assessment would be to explain why a project failed or produced very little. Russians (and not only Russians) are good at ticking boxes, writing reports that bear little relation to reality. Ironically, Western funders' blueprints for grant proposals and reporting techniques encouraged grantees to place their imaginative ideas in a Soviet framework of unrealistic planning, fudging of reports, and creative accounting. (But, let us be careful here, some of their Western partners, with no Soviet background, were adept at such practices themselves.)
And what of Moscow versus the rest?
The larger, better known, Moscow-based organizations stood a much higher chance of obtaining funding than those in the provinces, and Soros, Ford, and MacArthur were prepared to give them institutional support. This had positive and negative consequences. It allowed organizations, in a world where no membership income existed, to establish themselves and think in two- to three-year terms. However, the downside was that donor and grantee became tied into a relationship in which the donor was loathe to pull the plug on an established organization while the grantee came to rely on its major sponsor. Not surprisingly, accusations of close or cosy relations between funders and particular Moscow organizations sometimes soured relations within the NGO community. NGOs in the provinces complained repeatedly of the favouritism shown to Moscow organizations, and of their elitism. They grumbled that Moscow activists got large salaries (by and large untrue) and resources to which they, the poor relatives, had no access (often true). The competition for grants, in the words of one activist, created market conditions, in which the big sharks ate the small fishes. There were no anti-monopoly barriers, or agreements.
It is enormously time consuming to deal with hundreds of applications, and very difficult to monitor results – and in Russia, given its size, particularly difficult.3 Both Ford and NED set up small-grant programmes to be run by Russian organizations, with respected members of the Moscow human rights community making up their expert committees. Applications – for perhaps $5–10,000 – were submitted in Russian, as was reporting, and there were seminars to bring the grantees together. While these programmes, which lasted for perhaps ten years, undoubtedly helped local organizations, they could only offer support to 30 or so organizations a year, and the funding was for small projects. The really enterprising organizations began to apply directly to Western donors. They wanted support for offices and staff, publications, projects, events. Whether in Moscow or in a provincial city, the strategy for an enterprising organization was to get several grants, from different donors, and some succeeded. By 2001, at the end of a golden decade, all the Moscow organizations whom we have mentioned so far were obtaining funding from different sources, and there were active human rights organizations scattered across Russia who were getting direct grants from Western funders – in St Petersburg, in Murmansk and Syktyvkar in the north, in Ekaterinburg, NizhniTagil, and Perm in the Urals, in Tomsk, Krasnoyarsk, and Irkutsk in Siberia, and Khabarovsk in the Far East. South of Moscow Ryazan stood out, and Lipetsk, then, moving down the Volga, Nizhny Novgorod, Kazan, and Yoshkar-Ola had active organizations, and further south Mordova, Voronezh and Rostov. In the Caucasus there were outposts in Dagestan, Ingushetiya and Chechnya itself. Many of their activists came to know each other, and their leaders met at seminars or the Warsaw summer schools, of which more in a moment.
We met the representatives of some of the successful provincial organizations, which had existed from the early nineties, in action at the seminars and conferences in Chapters 3 and 4. In Nizhny Novgorod the centre split in 2000 into an Inter-regional Committee Against Torture (headed by Igor Kalyapin, the young activist and entrepreneur) and a Human Rights Union. Others, such as the Human Rights Centre of the Mari-El republic, the Public Committee for Human Rights of the republic of Tatarstan, and the Human Rights Centre of the republic of Mordova (under the leadership of Guslyannikov, the first elected president of the republic) had come into existence two or three years later. We are talking about organizations that had perhaps three paid staff, an accountant, and a few volunteers. Most were small, most relied on a circle of known friends or acquaintances, few were widely known, and they were learning new skills. Most of these organizations still exist today, most with the same leader, maybe a new profile, and more staff, and they keep their books much better. A few have faded or ceased to work on human rights issues. And, in recent years, new organizations of a rather different type have appeared. We shall meet them in Chapters 11 and 12.
What do we note so far? The availability of Western grants, in an environment in which Russian donors, or philanthropy more generally, still hardly existed, and certainly not in relation to human rights, enabled human rights organizations to establish themselves, and to carry out a range of activities that benefited the vulnerable and victims of ill treatment. At the same time, the jostling competition for grants set organizations apart from one another. It was rare to find someone, such as Stanislav Velikoredchanin who, while heading an organization Christians Against Torture and Child Slavery in Rostov, saw his role as one of helping very different organizations find their feet, and apply to one of the small-grant programmes. The first Soldiers' Mothers Committee I visited, in 1996 – three elderly women in a room, with a telephone, near the local recruiting office – had been helped by Velikoredchanin to get a small grant but postage costs were swallowing up their pensions. If they requested slightly more, they enquired of me, hesitantly, would it be thought they were asking for a pension increase for themselves?
And this brings us to the question of the role grants played in an environment in which people were struggling to survive. On the one hand, Western money brought a whole stratum of active individuals looking for a survival strategy into civic activities which, otherwise, would only have come on the agenda years later. This can be seen as a positive development, but it meant they could have shallow roots. In Bakhmin's view: ‘there's a whole stratum of organizations working on quite incomprehensible topics, and what they write is incomprehensible too.’ Furthermore, and he is speaking in 2010:
There are those organizations […] in particular, those related to gender issues – organizations focusing on sexual minorities, and even on trafficking […] if it hadn't been for Western funding, they would not have appeared. They would have emerged in the future, as society developed, as society came to realize that such problems are important too.
However, a grant-making strategy ahead of its time may leave traces to be picked up later. To give two examples – the monitoring of police precincts, and a social marketing campaign – both faded or came to nothing ten years ago but now have reappeared, in new form. Support for those advocating the criminalization of domestic violence has taken nearly 20 years to bear fruit, but that does not mean that support was originally misconceived. I suspect that support for LGBT activists who, by 2012, were being targeted by hostile Duma deputies and vigilantes, and who face a rough time over the next five years, falls into the category of planting seeds for the future. But here hostility and media attention has put the issue of sexual minorities firmly on the public agenda.
The enthusiasm for funding civil society was not always to its advantage. Yes, the Russian environment was one where charitable giving did not exist, and one in which, as rich Russians emerged, they took care to avoid funding activities of which the Kremlin disapproved. However, in their desire to provide assistance, Western funders largely neglected the issue of encouraging the development of domestic fund-raising strategies, including charitable giving, membership dues, public campaigns. Charity Aid Foundation's work is a notable exception and charitable giving and volunteering are now part of the scene. But too many of the human rights organizations grew accustomed to thinking of Western grants as their single source of income, and lack the mindset or skills that would allow them to focus on raising money from their fellow citizens, wealthy or not. An exception is Veronika Marchenko's Mother's Right but, when I cite this, the reply from other activists is that the wealthy are scared, and ordinary citizens not interested in the issues they address, whereas the death of conscripts is ‘a popular issue’. That itself is debatable. More important is how little attention Western donors paid to helping Russian organizations, even in or perhaps because of the unfavourable environment, to learn to look for money and support within the country.
Some provincial activists put it more strongly to Denis Volkov, a sociologist who conducted an interview survey in 2010:
some of them say that when the authorities used to listen to them, and there was foreign funding, there was no need for popular support. In the words of one respondent ‘the distance between the man on the street and the activists is the same as that between him and the governor’.4
It also gave ammunition to political opponents and, given the popular antipathy to the West, fed the belief that, if supported by Western money, activities were suspect. As Aleksei Korotaev, with experience dating from the early days of the Human Rights Project Group, put it: ‘All the same a wary, hostile attitude towards everything that comes from the West lurks in Russian popular consciousness. It is too deeply rooted to be eradicated quickly. In that sense anything that is associated with western money immediately is given a minus mark.’ In the nineties, the salaries, although miserly by Western standards, could appear substantial (an activist receiving $100 a month – the salary of a professor!) – ‘they are living off Western money, they earn more than we do, they are not being fed for nothing, they must be doing something bad.’ By the end of our period, this abnormal balance was no more, and Western money was shrinking fast, but the popular response to the ‘foreign agents’ law in 2013 indicates that the receiving of Western money was still viewed with suspicion.
It was not only Western money that could undermine the activists' credibility. In Korotaev's view:
The orientation towards Western foundations and working with them has had a major influence upon the way activists talk […] and this language is absolutely incomprehensible outside the community […] an idiotic situation has arisen in which great ideas are expressed in words that are simply incomprehensible to the majority of the citizens of this country […] and when we approach the average [Russian] donor here, we have to speak a language that they understand and not a Western language.
Short on experience of organizing, promoting their ideas and working together, their dependence on Western funding compelled activists to take up the ideas, strategies, and language used by human rights activists in the donor country. Sometimes this worked for them, sometimes it fell on stoney ground. An exception was the ‘education’ offered by the Helsinki Foundation in Warsaw. And, by the start of the new century, and as it progressed, knowledge and expertise in chosen areas was increasing, new tactics and strategies were being adopted. We shall see them all in evidence in later chapters, but here we look at Marek Nowicki's contribution.
The influence of Marek Nowicki
Marek Nowicki, a physicist, originally a Solidarity activist, then a Helsinki Committee supporter, had set up a Foundation in Warsaw, with a brief to teach and train human rights activists. This included summer schools for Russian participants, where the teaching was in Russian, and which introduced them to human rights both as a subject of study and as ways of monitoring and defending rights. Nowicki was an inspiring teacher. I can attest to that. A small, slight man, smoking as he talked, walking round the room, he made his listeners think, while at the same time suggesting different ways they could advance or defend human rights. His excellent Russian, and his knowledge of Russia and the environment in which they were living and working, made him a role model for many. Sadly he died, of cancer, in 2003.5
Igor Sazhin, the young history teacher from Sytyvkar whom we met in the previous chapter, is in some ways a classic product of the Nowicki schools. There, he said, for the first time he met people, such as Wiktor Osiatinsky (professor from the Central European University)6 who actually think and write about the concept of human rights; he came to understand that human rights are an issue everywhere, that in the West too they come under attack, that the problems of ethnic minorities, attitudes towards women, discrimination, exist everywhere, and their defenders survive because people support them financially. He met people from all over Russia, and remains in close contact with some of them. And, also important, Marek Nowicki showed him how to teach human rights in a way that brings them alive. Sazhin is, I suspect, a talented teacher in his own right, but his debt to Nowicki is apparent.
Olga Gnezdilova, a young lawyer from Voronezh, who participated in a Moscow Helsinki Group project, monitoring places of detention, using methods devised by the Poles, is another young activist who attended a Warsaw school, in 2002.
It was very useful […] they talked of how Poland had overcome its totalitarian past, how they reformed the court system, and the prison system. Experts talked about the transition, about how human rights are affected, all that was for me was important because we faced similar problems. The fact that they had managed to solve these problems suggested that we too could overcome the past.
Olga appears in action in Chapter 11, and also Maria Kanevskaya whom we met in the Introduction. Maria, while still a student at the St Petersburg MVD University, aged 20, in 2002 took part in ‘a special course for 28 leaders of NGOs from Russia, in Russian, at the Helsinki Foundation in Warsaw. We listened to Marek Nowicki's lectures till ten in the evening.’ She met Marianna Sadovnikova from Irkutsk, who headed an NGO that worked in the juvenile colonies, and ‘Pavel Chikov from Kazan, Irina from the NGO The Individual and the Law in Yoshkar-Ola, Maria Sereda from Ryazan Memorial’. Towards the end of the course, the participants were invited to submit projects for a small-grant competition for which the Foundation had funding.
And Marianna, with whom I shared a room, said ‘Set up an organization quickly, I'll write up a project, and we'll bring Irina in’, and during the next three days, brainstorming, we wrote up the project. We knew we would win because all the others were simply writing their individual projects, and ours was a joint project. And of course we won.
For another young woman from St Petersburg, someone with no particular interest in human rights, and a quiet, reflective personality, a chance encounter at the Helsinki Foundation was life changing. Born into a professional family in Leningrad in 1975, Katya Sokiryanskaya studied languages at the Herzen University: English and Japanese. While still a student, she travelled to the Caucasus for a holiday and, bothered by the sight of soldiers at the border, began to read about Chechnya. After graduating she went to Warsaw, to spend a year learning Polish, and someone introduced her to the Helsinki Foundation, where she worked as a volunteer for several months, including helping with preparations for a school.
And Marek [Nowicki], very serious but with that smile in the corners of his mouth, said ‘You are interested in Chechnya? Which sources do you use?’ I said, newspapers, the media. ‘And have you seen the Memorial Society's information?’ At that time I had a vague idea of what Memorial was […] but at that School there were two representatives from the Memorial organization in Ingushetiya, one was a Chechen, the other an Ingush […] they were the first Chechens and Ingush whom I had met in my life. And during the coffee break I went up to them and said, light heartedly, ‘now I am going to pester you about what's going on in Chechnya’. To which Usam Baisayev, with his usual sarcasm, said ‘Yes, you people from Petersburg, know how to pester’, and went on to tell me what the St Petersburg special forces were doing in Chechnya […] in particular about the village New Aldy, which we later filmed, where on 5 February 2000 the St. Petersburg special forces carried out a clean-up operation and in the course of a few hours 56 peaceful residents were killed.
Over the next few days they explained how Memorial tried to monitor and report on the situation in Chechnya.
And for me this was a complete shock, I was totally unprepared for it […] as a product of perestroika I lived with the feeling that now we live in quite another country, that the totalitarian past is over, and life will become more interesting, freer, with every passing day. And now suddenly I learn that in my country people from my city are carrying out special measures, absolutely fascist measures, like those in Hitler's Germany which we read about in our school books. This shocked me so much that it changed my life.
As a graduate student, she moved from St Petersburg State University to study ethnic relations at the Central European University in Budapest, from where her research took her, in 2003, to Nazran, in Ingushetiya. She found the Memorial group, and stayed with them for five years, travelling to teach at Grozny university in Chechnya until 2006 when it became too dangerous. In 2008 family illness brought her back to St Petersburg, from where she continued to work for the Moscow Memorial Human Rights Centre, preparing and writing reports on the Caucasus, before moving to work for the International Crisis Centre.
Nowicki also came to Moscow, invited by the Moscow Helsinki Group, to participate in the training of those involved in the monitoring project. According to Lokshina, he began to teach them
what defending human rights is, what that crazy word ‘monitoring’ means, what an activist ought to do in a more or less normally functioning country. At that time Russia looked as though it was moving in that direction […] what the Poles did was very significant.
Her words are telling. What if Russia was not moving in that direction, was not ‘a more or less normally functioning country’? How appropriate then was the Helsinki interpretation of human rights and strategies? Whether a future generation of activists will interpret human rights in the same way is an open question but the Polish model – an emphasis on the UN conventions, on monitoring infringements by state institutions, and on the defence of an individual's rights through the courts – was a key component in the education of many of those who took up human rights in the late nineties. And, as important, the Helsinki schools created links between people across the country.
In Russia itself, the end of the nineties and the early years of the new century were home to endless training seminars and schools on everything from human rights education to how to organize a campaign or write a report for a UN committee. Opinions differ on the value of these programmes, much beloved by Western funders and trainers. Jens Siegert, with 20 years' experience working for the Heinrich Boll foundation in Moscow, is sceptical.
Criticism can be levelled against the EC, TACIS, and American government programmes, USAID, partly too the Soros Foundation. In the main against those programmes which saw support for civil society in terms of a technical task. There were a whole number of centres which put on courses on how to write applications, organize work, and so on, provided technical information but which lacked any normative, ethical or moral presuppositions which are needed to give an activity some real content.
However, all would agree that by 2010 the degree of professionalism within the community – preparing applications, presenting reports to the UN committees, assessing results – was light years away from that of the early years. In Chapters 8–9 we shall see evidence of this. But here we return to the situation as the new century opened, with a brief visit to an Extraordinary Congress to Defend Human Rights. The congress, funded by Western foundations, where more than 500 delegates from human rights organizations from all across Russia gathered, provides a snapshot of the community in 2001, a community that could be likened to a herbaceous border whose plants and boundaries change over time and look different from different vantage points.
The Extraordinary Congress of 2001
Yeltsin, who had won a shaky victory for a second term in 1996, proved to be a corrupt president increasingly unable to function, but he had left the media, the electoral system, and the non-governmental sector largely alone. In 2000 a popular, tough, young president was in the Kremlin. Putin, the working class boy from an inner city courtyard in St Petersburg, who had decided on a future career in the security services while studying law at St Petersburg State University, won the presidential election comfortably. Able and energetic, he had been appointed by Yeltsin to head the FSB (security services) in 1998, and then to the prime ministership. But, if in April 2000 a human rights activist, a respected dissident, might voice the opinion ‘I think we can do business with Vladimir Vladimirovich, he's like a blank sheet of paper’, by the summer of 2001 few were optimistic. It was disturbing, walking home on a summer evening to find members of the special services, with their black balaclavas and weapons, surrounding the house of Vladimir Gusinsky, owner of NTV, the best of the independent TV channels, and to learn he had been arrested. He was later released and allowed to leave Russia, after selling his channel. Boris Berezovsky fled abroad. The parliament was becoming more and more subservient. The oligarchs were beginning to look over their shoulders, and pack their bags. Working for a Western foundation that funded, among other things, Russian NGOs advancing the cause of human rights and legal reform, one sensed the atmosphere slowly changing. Ministerial and tax officials were flexing their muscles, making any activity, any small operation, even more time consuming – changing the regulations, changing the colour of the paper – and, with a sigh, I recognized that the informers were back, and the office probably bugged.
Held in the huge Cosmos hotel, the leading Moscow organizations had called the congress in the spring of 2001 because of ‘the growing threat to human rights and freedoms’.7 In their words, court reform had stalled, the free press was under constant attack, government and society was becoming increasingly militarized, demands for a healthy environment ignored, and the war in Chechnya was continuing, accompanied by serious and widespread infringements of human rights and the norms of humanitarian law. Particularly worrying was talk, emanating from on high, of a constitutional assembly to review the 1993 constitution. Their statement:
Taking part in the congress are human rights organizations of different kinds, those defending freedom of speech, rights of forced migrants, of conscripts and many others, and other non-governmental organizations (environmental, womens, youth groups) for whom defending human rights is only one of the aspects of their work, and also the free trade unions.
suggests that they perhaps held different views on how to interpret prava cheloveka or ‘human rights’. The titles of the seven sections at the congress illustrate the wide range of issues that were seen as relevant: the defence of the constitutional order and a law-based state (signed up to by 89); Chechnya (72); citizen control (66); right of access to, obtaining and distribution of information (37); the defence of independent private enterprises (42); the strategy and tactics of the defence of the social rights of the population (85); ecology (47, agreed after a debate). The issues ranged from Chechnya to heart operations for children, from the rights of small business to penal reform or honest elections, from access to information to environmental damage.
Sergei Kovalev was there, now president of the International Memorial Society, still a deputy in the Duma. The debate over whether human rights activity should be or can be non-political of course took place, and perhaps pride of place was Kovalev's contribution. After listing the worrying developments in the political sphere, he suggested that:
The human rights community must react more strongly, than previously, to political developments. Politics – that's not our affair? Law is outside politics and above politics? Certainly, but only while politics does not threaten the basis of law and democracy, only as long as the primacy of law is recognized, and there is no attempt to turn law into an apparatus to serve politics. If such a danger arises, then the human rights community is forced to become ‘politicized’.
What forms can this take? Kovalev suggested the expert monitoring of infringements and distributing the analysis, non-violent opposition – petitioning, picketing, boycotts, legal cases, and, if necessary, well-organized demonstrations. But none of this should take the place of everyday human rights work, and of working with other non-governmental organizations. Not all, probably not even a majority of the participants, agreed with him. Many of the new rights organizations abjured any kind of direct action, cooperation with the authorities heavily outweighed confrontation, and only a small minority wanted to engage in political opposition.
The organizers suggested that each section should discuss: ‘those activities of the authorities, including legislative initiatives, that present a threat to human rights and freedom’ and ‘the changes that need to be made to laws and other normative acts, defining the rights of different groups of the population’. On this basis, they continued, ‘it will be possible to work out both the demands to be made to the authorities, and strategy and tactics for national campaigns devoted to the most disturbing issues’ while ‘each section should devote time to discuss the problems facing NGOs – the increasing pressure from the state on the structures of civil society.’
And, finally, the organizers emphasized, a key objective of the congress is
to present society with clear and well-argued evidence of the real threats to rights, freedoms and the lawful interests of individuals and social groups, in order to present a programme of action to counter those threats.
Unfortunately, they suggested, our citizens are not sufficiently aware of the ‘rights clauses’ in the constitution, and how to defend their rights through legal means. ‘We, human rights activists, have considerable experience and must defend the constitution as it is.’
Quite a set of tasks, one might say, and quite unmanageable. Apart from different conceptions of what ‘defending human rights’ meant, the particular issues the activists worked on (prisoners, children, conscripts, the media, the environment) prompted different responses. Other factors too – the need for financial support, the variation in politics at local level, and political change at federal level – pulled organizations in different directions. Perhaps all they agreed on was that they had a right to exist as independent organizations, and to pursue their activities legally and by non-violent means. Imagine such a gathering in the UK. What would the participants agree on? And a programme of action – should that not be the task of political parties, professional associations, the media? The plenary sessions, and then the sections or panels, produced statements, heated discussion, and long resolutions, but no collective strategy.
Was there agreement on aims? That the government and the judges should obey the laws – yes – but, naturally enough, the participants held very different views on how and where the legislation needed to be changed. And, as regards legislative control of the new powerful corporations, this simply did not enter the picture. It was the state's misuse of its power that held their attention. Strategies? Regarding the state's and the judiciary's observance of the laws, the strongest weapon used so far was critical presentations at international gatherings, reports to UN committees, the Council of Europe or OSCE and, just beginning, the taking of cases to the European Court – but this only scraped the surface. How could government officials be brought to assume that they should implement instructions, fairly and legally? The justice system would have to be reformed, from within, but how to achieve that was far from clear. Campaigning for legislative reform was still in its infancy. And here the politics of the nineties had played an unhelpful role. The successes that had been achieved (penal reform, improvements to the criminal codes, compensation for the victims of Stalinist oppression) had come from having the right people in the right place at the right time, from being able to use political connections, not from being able to exercise the weight of organized political support. By 2000 even the liberal parties that did exist were not particularly interested in the human rights organizations.
Historically it has been groups with sufficient weight or support behind them who have compelled rulers to recognize their rights, get them written into law and then implemented by the justice system. The Russian activists hit the ground running at a time when ‘the human rights agenda’ was the name of the game but the institutional environment provided little entry into or influence upon political authorities. Meanwhile, with the constitution affirming a huge array of rights, including social rights, the property free for all and the pauperization of the population produced massive violations of basic rights. This would have presented any judicial system with intractable problems. The activists were faced, however, not only by a conservative state apparatus and a continental legal system inherited from the old order, with its detailed codes and emphasis on individual claims, but an environment in which trade unions, pressure groups, independent professional associations or charitable organizations, engaged in the defence of their constituents, or the poor and vulnerable, existed only on paper, if at all.
The equipment the new activists brought with them – a reliance on known and trusted friends, the ability and willingness to survive on a shoe string, enthusiasm but little organizational experience – and the resources they drew upon – Western ideas and Western funding, links with leading individuals, opportunities to experiment – had to be deployed with little support from either public or professional organizations. Many who included themselves under the human rights banner would, in other societies, or at other times, have called themselves supporters of civil liberties, or simply pressure groups with a specific focus (similar, for example, to the Howard League for Penal Reform, or the NSPCC in the UK) or have gone into politics. The human rights organizations found themselves trying to fill in the empty space between the state and its people, taking upon themselves tasks that in other societies are often filled by these kinds of organizations, and political parties.8
Could this be called a movement? No. Was it even a community? Yes, in the eyes of many of its members, and it was exhilarating to be part of such a large gathering in the Cosmos hotel. I can vouch for that. I had been sceptical initially, but then won over to provide some financial support. People left for the provinces with the feeling that they were part of something bigger. Surely their voices must carry weight in the political arena, even if the new president, Vladimir Putin, came from the security services? All too soon he would throw down the gauntlet, and they would need to respond. That is the subject of the next chapter.