CHAPTER 6
THE CIVIC FORUM OF 2001:
TO TANGO OR TO SIT IT OUT?
‘Life’, according to Veronika Marchenko of Mother's Right, ‘has presented us with Hamlet's question – to be or not to be – while specifying the place and time of the action – the Civic Forum in Moscow in November. Each of us is trying today to find an answer, believing that the tragedy could end differently and we could rewrite it to spite the venerable Shakespeare.’
When carrying out interviews in 2010–11, I asked those who had been activists since the nineties whether any particular events, conferences or meetings, in their view, stood out as having been significant or important for the human rights community. I had expected some to mention the 2001 Extraordinary Congress or a 2004 conference on The Human Rights Movement Today, which appears in the next chapter. No one did. But almost all mentioned the Civic Forum. Why was this? Upon reflection, I think it was because the forum did several things simultaneously. It brought the human rights community face to face with the authorities, and compelled a decision – do we or do we not work with them; it showed what independent organizations had managed to achieve (what they were capable of) and simultaneously their limitations; it brought out their opponents too. In this sense it cleared the mist away. It allowed them, and allows us, to see how key actors within state and society – the political authorities, government ministries, the media, and NGOs – viewed each other in the summer of 2001.
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In June 2001 a strange assortment of non-governmental organizations or associations were invited to the Kremlin to discuss the question of ‘state and society’ with President Putin and a group of political consultants. Among the 28 present were those from organizations for ‘the development of civil society’, women's causes, a media union, the beekeepers' association. A well-known conductor, and a cosmonaut were included. There were no human rights organizations.
Gleb Pavlovsky, an ex-dissident, a political consultant who heads a think-tank, the Foundation for Effective Politics, and was closely associated with the Putin administration, had already flown a kite in the newspaper, Izvestiya. Referring to organizations which focus on the environment, consumers, or provide social assistance, he argued that:
Today this [civil] society is not represented by any parties, or organizations, nor by any lobbies that are well known to all, as it is in any Western or the other post-Communist societies […] The task is to help them move out into public space, into the main media, into providing real public expertise, including that of advising on government decisions […] the authorities do not have the right to ignore the existence of civil society, they must, for a start, listen to what it wants.1
The Moscow Helsinki Group received a telephone call, telling them that Liudmila Alekseeva should remain in the city on 12 June, because she might be receiving an invitation from the president to a meeting. But this did not materialize. Alexander Auzan, of the Consumers Confederation, had been invited to a meeting in the president's administration to discuss possible participants but, when the staff member said that they would not be inviting Memorial or the Moscow Helsinki Group ‘because they broke up the Soviet Union’, Auzan remonstrated and, as a result, his invitation was withdrawn.
At the meeting Putin echoed Pavlovsky's comments, speaking of the need, now that the state had been strengthened, of a constructive, continuous dialogue between ‘the authorities as a whole and the aggregate of civil society […] We are used to thinking that total responsibility for what happens in the country rests with the authorities […] but non-government organizations should share this responsibility’. After all, he stated, 300,000 are registered with the Ministry of Justice. And he referred to the fact that ‘Very many non-governmental organizations exist today on grants from foreign organizations. That is not to our credit. Of course we support that kind of cooperation with international organizations but it is obvious that our civil society must develop on its own foundation, that's self-evident.’2 Some of the participants gave this their enthusiastic endorsement in a leaflet:
We are prepared to apply all our efforts to the further transformation of our Motherland and to share responsibility with the authorities for this. Its citizens need a great Russia – free and flourishing! It cannot be built without an effective state and a great society, and their agreement and joint labour.
How though to give society such a role? Aleksei Leonov, the cosmonaut, suggested that there should be a Civic Chamber, attached to the office of the president, an idea that Putin welcomed. Over the next two months, the press and Pavlovsky's website gave details of various proposals – for a Civic Forum or gathering, in September or October, to elect a Civic Chamber. It was claimed that 500 organizations, part of an NGO network ‘We, the citizens!’ set up by a Moscow academic, Nina Belyaeva, were preparing for this. A press conference was held by members of an organizing committee, which included both some who had attended the original June meeting and newcomers – Vyacheslav Igrunov, the early contributor to Memorial who had become a Yabloko deputy, and Ella Pamfilova, a well-known non-party politician, active since the early nineties, first as a deputy, then in government responsible for social policy issues. The committee was based in Pavlovsky's Foundation. Such a forum, it claimed, would aim ‘to create a European society with a Russian soul’ – to carry society's views to the authorities – but members of the organizing committee clearly had rather different views on how this should be done. One spoke of a chamber, one of whose ‘important functions [would be] working out a consolidated position of the non-governmental organizations in a particular sphere’; another was more concerned with the forum as an occasion for focusing on ways of developing civil society; Igrunov suggested that ‘the process of preparation may turn out to be more important than the gala event itself […] organizations must think how to work with their deputies […] civil society cannot be divorced from political society, and political parties are themselves part of civil society’.3
Liudmila Alekseeva was invited to join the organizing committee but refused – how, she asked, could 5,000 delegates, however they were chosen, claim to be the representatives of civil society, and elect a chamber? A few days later she received another call – under what conditions would MHG participate? But, in the meantime, Vladimir Kartashkin, chair of the president's commission on human rights, had spoken on the radio of the importance of cooperation with constructive organizations, but not with those which ‘unfortunately continue their destructive activities – those which have not forgotten their dissident past’4 and contrasted Memorial unfavourably with the Moscow Helsinki Group. ‘I responded that we shared the same views, and it was absurd to talk about us as constructive and non-constructive. So, now the next phone call came “Under which conditions would MHG and Memorial participate?” to which I replied that you need to speak to all of us.’
In an unprecedented move, Vladislav Surkov, a key figure in the president's administration, asked for a meeting with representatives of the human rights organizations. It was decided to invite him, the rest of the Kremlin party, and the secretary of the organizing committee, to such a meeting but to hold it in the Memorial offices, given that Memorial had been the subject of criticism. This, on 20 August, was the first of several meetings at which representatives of the two or rather three sides – the president's administration, the organizing committee, and leading human rights organizations – negotiated the conditions under which the latter were prepared to participate in a Civic Forum. Most, but not all, of the leading Moscow organizations participated in negotiating an agreement
Arseny Roginsky, from Memorial, argued:
the Civic Forum is just one episode in the development of civil society in Russia. It can turn out to be an important and necessary step, or a damaging one, or quite irrelevant. There's no guarantee on that score. However if, as a result, some mechanisms are created which will allow for continued dialogue between non-governmental organizations and the corresponding state structures, then the forum's objectives will have been fully achieved.
Journalist: But some say that you are constantly being deceived?
Roginsky: Before you can be deceived, you must first be seduced. Nobody as yet has seduced us with anything. So, suppose we are unable to defend our position – so what? The idea of establishing real mechanisms of interaction between the state and society will not be realized – that's all – and independent non-governmental organizations will remain as they were before, and the authorities will maintain their previous distance from independent civic initiatives.5
But Lev Ponomarev was totally opposed:
It's already clear: the authorities are not interested in any real dialogue with civil society. They have spat on the statements by human rights activists on the mass infringements of human rights in Chechnya, the torture and killings […] Human rights activists must oppose their politics, and the antidemocratic and antisocial course adopted by the government […] we do need arrangements for meetings with the authorities but such arrangements must be set up on the initiative of the organizations of civil society, we should not behave like petitioners. We do not have the moral right to turn ourselves into ‘the leading reins’ of the state.6
The organizing committee was reorganized, and human rights activists were among the 5,000-strong gathering that met in the Great Hall in the Kremlin on 21 November. Liudmila Alekseeva chaired the opening plenary session. Sergei Kovalev was among the participants. But Ponomarev refused to have anything to do with it, and Alexander Podrabinek, editor of Express Khronika, was scathing:
‘The entire country saw how the participants of the Civic Forum gave a standing ovation to its favourite president, a man stained with the blood of thousands of innocent victims of his Chechen escapade. Everyone could observe the trained Cheka agent sitting next to Liudmila Alekseeva, chairman of the Moscow Helsinki Group, in a spirit of mutual understanding and unity. What tolerance and goodwill! Supporters of the Civic Forum explained their decision to participate by the need for dialogue with the government to create ‘grounds for negotiations’ [… but] they will keep on criticizing power within the necessary limits and depict equal rights dialogue under the approving glance of the strict Kremlin boss. The Civic Forum has turned into the beginning of the hopeless degradation of the human rights movement in Russia.7
What does the Civic Forum (from its appearance as an idea, then the negotiations, the planning, the event itself, and any outcomes) tell us of state–society relations ten years after the Russian Federation emerged as an independent state? And what should be the response from human rights organizations to overtures for some kind of an institutional dialogue from a regime, engaged in a war against some of its subjects, and curtailing the rights of others? Who, when the dust settled, had been right? Roginsky and Alekseeva or Ponomarev and Podrabinek? My task is to tell you as much as I can of the events surrounding the forum, and yours is then to decide.
The state of play in the summer of 2001
By now Putin had been in power for a year. In Vyacheslav Bakhmin's words:
With the coming of Putin to power a system began to emerge. He's a person who thinks in terms of systems, he has to have everything organized, clear. He started by reorganizing business, then turned to the regional authorities, those were his priorities. He turned his attention to civil society, trying to understand what kind of a phenomenon it was. There was already a substantial number of organizations, many of them had made it into information networks, they were talked about, and he needed to understand what they were; he wanted to deal with them as he had with business, that is simply to create some kind of structure which would represent his interests, and he would interact with it, putting the pressure on when necessary, giving support when necessary.
And from Roginsky: ‘We entered the Putin period with some important achievements. In those years [the Yeltsin years] in Russia 70–77,000 organizations which actually do something came into being […] Looking around, we suddenly felt that we represented something significant in the life of Russia, we felt that we had some strength.’ But as the authorities gradually moved towards electoral authoritarianism, removing the oligarchs from the political scene, controlling the Duma, and mass media, the activists recognized that the direction of the wind was changing.
The term ‘civil society’ had become part of the lexicon of democratic activists and scholars in Eastern Europe in the 1980s, denoting civic activity, independent of the state, seen as a crucial component of a democratic system. It quickly became widely used (and argued over) by their counterparts in Russia post-1991. ‘Some aggregate of relationships and organizations, which act independently of the state and are able to influence it’ but did this mean it included political parties, or were they somehow separate?8 Scholars disagreed. Should it include racist or ultra-nationalist groups, or not? Where did the trade unions and the writers or artists’ associations, with their buildings, bureaucratic structures, and welfare programmes fit in, if they did? The scholars debated the issues but, by 2001, were in general agreement: if one was talking of the new non-governmental organizations, civil society was weak. According to Kholodkovsky:
Despite the emergence of a substantial number of social organizations (we are talking of some tens of thousands of real organizations) […] they still don't create the weather in Russia, they are not capable of producing the social atmosphere. Human rights organizations, consumer associations, the Soldiers' Mothers Committees and other similar structures selflessly defend human rights and social interests. They represent the real shoots of civil society in Russia but they are not yet strong enough to be equal partners of the authorities. Civic activity is drowning in an apathetic environment, occasionally achieving local successes but too often not strong enough to pierce the armour of bureaucratic indifference and self-interest.
The main traits of this new ‘civil society’, or ‘third sector’ as it was sometimes described (to distinguish it from ‘politics’ and ‘business’) were the following. First, while there might be 300,000 non-profit organizations registered with the Ministry of Justice, not only were most of these very small, with a handful of members, but many of them lived for a short while, and then faded away. A truer figure was 55–70,000 active organizations. Most of these were small. The majority were concerned with social issues – with children, those homeless or with disabilities, with invalids, the elderly, ex-prisoners, drug-users; there was a range of environmental groups, housing groups, the gardeners, hunting associations; then came the stamp collectors, artists, theatre groups, youth groups; and the human rights groups, which, as we saw, embraced a wide range of activities. As Roginsky put it: ‘Non-governmental organizations are very different one from another. The only thing which they have in common is that they demand of the authorities that they create conditions, under which each of these organizations can be independent of the authorities and can develop.’ Moscow led the field by a long way, both in terms of numbers and size of organizations, and their ability to get funding; then came the other major cities, but patterns of activity varied, and an organization might suddenly appear and prosper in a small town. So much depended on an active and committed individual, willing and able to stand up to or get support from the local authorities.
But if, as suggested by one commentator, a highly-developed imagination was needed to be able to talk of civil society, why did Putin pay any attention to it? The reasons, I suggest, were the following. While the majority of the population might have heard only of Memorial and the Soldiers' Mothers, several of the new organizations were visible to a Moscow audience, they received media coverage, and they and their criticisms of the Russian government were known on the international scene. (Kholodkovsky's choice of organizations was not accidental.) The Extraordinary Human Rights Congress in January 2001, funded by foreign donors, had attracted both opposition politicians and media attention. Then in April there was an embarrassing moment at the Civic Dialogue between Russian and German representatives, an official event held in St Petersburg, where the Russian representatives at the session on civil society were the Minister of Internal Affairs, a former prime minister, and political scientists. ‘But where’ asked the Germans, naming Memorial and others, ‘where are the civil society organizations?’ The Kremlin was put out, ‘What, how can it be, that we don't have a civil society? Organize one quickly!’ And Pavlovsky was given the task of taking it forward.9
There were other reasons too for Putin's interest. Boris Berezovsky, now fled to London, had set up an International Foundation for Civil Liberties, based in the USA, to fund Russian NGOs. Elena Bonner, Sakharov's widow, had accepted money for the Sakharov Foundation, so had Abramkin for his work with prisoners, and Soldiers' Mothers. There was talk of substantial funding to be forthcoming. By May, Berezovsky was talking of setting up a liberal-patriotic party. Izvestiya wrote of Berezovsky attempting to privatize, and Pavlovsky to nationalize, the NGOs.
According to Liudmila Alekseeva
As a clever man, Putin began by wanting to see what this civil society was. I was told by someone, in private, (I haven't seen the report myself) […] that before organizing the Forum he asked Gleb Pavlovsky to prepare an expert report on who the human rights activists are, the NGOs, and what they represent […] and the person who saw the report told me that the section which gave details on how many human rights organizations there are, and what they do, was done very competently, but there was a question – on their motives – why do they engage in these activities? And here the answer was: motivations unclear […] Because, it's true, people were not motivated for career reasons, or to make money, or even to earn gratitude. The population showed no particular signs of being grateful, and as for the authorities, forget it. Why then do the activists get involved? Pavlovsky could not come up with an answer.
As we have seen, people took up human rights activities for different reasons and, when we widen the picture to include all the non-governmental activists, the reasons multiply. It is difficult to talk of any shared views within this extraordinarily diverse NGO community as to what their relation to the state should be, and what they wanted of the political authorities. And, in their turn, the political authorities? It may be, as Bakhmin suggests, that Putin wanted some kind of a corporatist structure to play a part in a managed democracy. More interesting perhaps is the response of those to whom he turned for suggestions as to how to proceed.
Pavlovsky, and one of his young colleagues, Sergei Markov, advocated creating a structure to represent the sector. They were supported by the leader of a NGO, Maria Slobodskaya, who saw herself as a key figure in the development of ‘constructive non-governmental initiatives’, which should receive financial support from the government. (In conversation she suggested that organizations, such as Soldiers' Mothers, should be excluded.) But both Ella Pamfilova, and Vyacheslav Igrunov, with a more liberal cast of mind, came on board. The organizing committee struggled. At some point Vladislav Surkov, from the president's administration, architect of Putin's ‘managed democracy’, intervened – or perhaps simply took over. A gathering of NGOs, without the best known ones, which elected a chamber to represent the community, would not serve its purpose. This lay behind the approaches to the human rights organizations which, by the end of the nineties, had begun to play a role as the nucleus of a wider civil society.
Negotiations
Apart from some of the women's organizations, there were few civic or human rights organizations led by academics who continued to pursue an academic career.10 An exception was the Confederation of Consumers' Societies, founded in 1989 by a group of well-known academics and of individuals who had established themselves as trustworthy ‘queue-organizers’ for deficit goods in the late Soviet period.11 Alexander Auzan, an economist at Moscow State University, whose research focused on consumer markets, was elected president of the Confederation in 1990, and was still in post in 2001. By now a professor at Moscow University, energetic, a good speaker, a clear leader, he had become well known for his civic activities. The Consumers Confederation, in his view, was perhaps the most successful new movement of the 1990s.
I put it down to the fact that our revolution was not a bourgeois revolution, not a liberal revolution, but a consumers' revolution. It was a revolution, by which I mean a transition from Soviet society, from a shortage economy to a society of demand. The wind of history filled the sails of consumerism. As a result, in the space of a very few years, we, strange eccentric individuals, became popular on the TV and in the press as thousands and then millions of people began to turn to court, watched TV programmes, read advice to consumers in the papers.
He came to know, and he respected, such people as Kovalev but their positions were very different. On meeting with Kovalev in 1993, who told him that what he was doing could not, strictly speaking, be called defending human rights, his answer was that he always bore in mind ‘Mark Twain's comment that “books by great geniuses are wine, and mine – are water. Everyone drinks water”. Defending consumer rights is a form of civic activity which almost everyone in the country understands, and, maybe it is a step towards understanding other rights.’ Kovalev did not agree, but Liudmila Alekseeva became a firm friend. She wanted to know why the trade unions and ecologists seemed to lose their court cases, whereas the consumers won. According to Auzan, it is all a matter of rewriting the legislation so that it works in your favour. If for example ‘moral damage’ is defined as ‘causing physical or moral suffering to an individual’, then you can claim damages for poor service – by a dentist, airline, tourist company, for electricity cuts, or for a faulty microwave oven. Judges agreed. (After all, one is tempted to say, they suffered from such things as much as anyone else.)
But before Putin's presidency, Auzan was not really part of the Moscow human rights tusovka or ‘talking shop’. Abramkin used to organize an evening for human rights activists on 6 January (the Russian Christmas Eve by the Old Calendar) at the Sakharov Centre at which many would gather but I do not remember Auzan (or Marina Pisklakova of ANNA, or any of the environmentalists) being present. Somehow consumer rights did not fit into human rights. By 2000 the Ford Foundation was supporting public interest law projects in many countries, and organized a conference that brought public interest lawyers from Latin America and Russia together in Moscow. A lawyer from the Consumers' Confederation gave a good presentation, but she seemed like a bird from a different world among those from the penal reform, army conscript or refugee organizations, even among the lawyers working on environmental issues or domestic violence. However, by the beginning of the new century, when some of the Moscow human rights activists started coming together on a regular basis, Auzan was among them. In his view
The nineties were a golden period for Russian civil society because the government neither provided any assistance to nor interfered, in any way, with civic organizations, while at the same time the environment encouraged them to develop freely. Yes, we knew each other, but we did not even use the word ‘civil society’, no one talked of civil society in Russia in the mid-nineties. Recognition of ourselves as a community came once the consolidation of the state started in Russia. […] And, in so far as the state was getting stronger, the question arose – could we in any way influence the process in the absence of some process of consolidation within civil society?
By 2001 a group had formed which included representatives of Memorial, MHG, Zabelin from the Socio-Ecological Union, Auzan, Simonov from the Glasnost Defence Foundation, Averkiev from Perm, and others. This, which entitled itself the People's Assembly, met regularly to discuss topics of common concern, for example the tax code, and made representations to government departments. There was also a group called Common Action, dating from the January Extraordinary Congress. It included representatives from Memorial and MHG, and Ponomarev, Gannushkina, Simonov, Babushkin (Committee for Citizens Rights) and several activists from the regions. Both these ‘talking shops’ sent representatives to the meeting with Surkov in Memorial to discuss holding a Civic Forum.
Auzan suggests that Gleb Pavlovsky favoured expert communities as the core of civic activity but
it seemed to me that I knew the expert community better than Gleb because from first hand experience I knew how far my colleagues were from the kind of civic activity that I, for example, was involved in. But the human rights activists could become such a nucleus, and they did – in 1999–2000 – and in a certain sense they still are today [2011].
Why could they play this role? In Auzan's view it owed a great deal to key individuals, such as Kovalev, Alekseeva, and Roginsky, thinking in wider terms than that of defending a particular ‘right’. Memorial and MHG stood out as the leading organizations and, around them, not only some of the single issue human rights organizations but also the environmentalists and consumers association came together. Aleksei Simonov, who had set up the Glasnost Defence Foundation in the early nineties, was another key figure, known to all the journalists. And Auzan himself, we should add, contributed a respectable academic reputation, leadership of a large, well run organization, and the much needed ability to chair a discussion, to find points of agreement rather than disagreements, and speak to the point.
At the initial meeting with Surkov, the activists presented their key conditions for participation: no elections should be held to produce a Civic Forum, rather NGOs should send delegates; the sole purpose of the forum should be that of discussing ways to encourage dialogue between NGOs and government departments; on no account could or should such a gathering ‘elect’ a structure, a chamber, to ‘represent’ civil society. Throughout this, and all subsequent discussions, the activists stressed that parliament was the place where society's elected representatives met to take decisions, and that an elected forum or chamber would have no legitimacy whatsoever. Surkov was accommodating, but wished to leave the question of a future elected structure open for further discussion. It was agreed that a group of activists, Pavlovsky, and staff from the president's administration should hold further meetings to discuss these points, and the formation of a new organizing committee.
As Alekseeva put it:
Briefly, Surkov agreed to all our conditions – there should be no elections […] and we discussed it among ourselves and decided that, if they were prepared to agree to our conditions, it made no sense to refuse to participate. Auzan said that if we were in agreement on that then we must be part of the organizing committee, be in all the working groups, and work like horses. Because, for sure, they wouldn't. But we would, and hence the forum would turn out as we wanted. And that is what happened.
Members of the original committee had been busy sending messages out to the regions, advocating the setting up of civil society chambers – to raise the profile of civil society, to help society and state work together. Some human rights organizations, they argued, are prone to see the state as the enemy and that has got them into a dead end ‘because now the key infringer of human rights are powerful interest groups, and in this situation the citizen should see the state as his main defender […] while human rights' activists fight against the state and in this way promote the infringing of human rights’.12 But, it seems, they had lost the ear of the president's administration. Over the next two weeks more than one meeting was held, until on 4 September the key points of an agreement were hammered out at a three-sided meeting between Surkov and Abramov (president's administration), Pavlovsky and Pamfilova (from the original organizing committee), and Auzan, Babushkin and Zabelin from the human rights community.
The key points were: the president's administration should openly declare its role as one of the participants in the forum; a new organizing committee should include representatives of the president's administration and government, of the old organizing committee, and of the human rights community; regions should present lists of delegates, to be ratified by the organizing committee; the forum should be devoted to ways to enhancing dialogue between NGOs and government; no elections should be held at the forum to leave a structure in place. All these decisions, including the financing of the forum and its budget, should be made public, and openness should characterize all further activities.
Not all the activists were happy. Elena Bonner suggested that while the war with Chechnya continued, any cooperation with the authorities was out of the question; Samodurov (from the Sakharov Centre), Ponomarev (For Human Rights), and Podrabinek (Express Khronika) were opposed. Memorial sent out a long document to all the local Memorial organizations, laying out the reasons why the Society's board had agreed to participate but emphasizing that they should take their own decisions.
By 17 September, a much larger organizing committee existed on paper but it was a working group of 21 individuals (seven each from the original committee, from state structures, and from ‘the activists’) that mattered. The activist members were Auzan, Simonov, Roginsky, Babushkin, Zabelin, Dzhibladze13 and Alekseeva. For the next two months this working group, at protracted and exhausting meetings, devoted itself to organizing a two-day event that would bring 4,000 delegates of Russia's extraordinarily diverse civil society to Moscow to meet with representatives of the government.
By early October a budget of $1.8 million had been announced. The working group had agreed that the forum would focus on ways to develop civil society in Russia and its interaction with the state: on the mechanisms, priorities for dialogue, and on recommendations to the authorities regarding the guaranteeing of legal, economic and other conditions to allow for the effectiveness and development of civil society institutions. The regions were encouraged to send in lists of proposed delegates. A memo sent out on 12 October stated:
Civil society is not the authorities' vassal, just as it is not their adversary. It is a natural and equal partner with the state in creating a strong and prosperous society. But an effective state is the natural partner of civil society in its day to day activities […] We are convinced that a free and flourishing Russia is impossible without a dynamic, developing, responsible and innovative civil society.
Apart from these key actors, others too would play a part. We have referred to the academics, who were busy discussing civil society. They were perhaps the least important. But, at this time, there were still liberal academics who held positions in government ministries, or as consultants to members of the political leadership, and their advice could be helpful. Most of the government officials, the long-term civil servants, whether at federal level or in the regions, had little knowledge of and even less interest in the third sector. The Duma deputies showed no interest in becoming involved, neither did the political parties. The business community was busy with its own problems.
What strikes the observer (and was remarked on by some of the academics) is the absence of intermediaries, in the form of interest groups or political parties, between these new civic organizations and the state. The only interest groups, wrote one, are the elite oligarch groups, while the parties lack any grounding in social constituencies. But what of the media, the ‘fourth estate’, as it was sometimes referred to? In Moscow at least, it entered the fray. According to Auzan, the fact that Aleksei Simonov was part of the Moscow human rights community was important here. Simonov was a special case because
Uncle Lyesha, as the journalists call him, son of the wonderful writer and poet Konstantin Simonov, has belonged to the world of literature and journalism since he was in nappies. And he is someone who defended the Communist press in 1993 when Yeltsin tried to close it down, and the liberal press in recent years. So all the journalists trusted him. And we understood that when Lyesha Simonov stood side by side with us, the press, regardless of their view of what we were doing, would not shoot us down.
The journalists welcomed the opportunity to write about the disagreements within the non-governmental community and wrote extensively of the unfolding ‘drama’ and the event itself. A very acrimonious exchange of views between well-known members of the ex-dissident community at the Sakharov Centre (where Kovalev and Alekseeva defended participation) was reported at some length. But, in general, journalists gave very different voices a hearing – whether those of the activists, Pavlovsky, or Abramov from the president's administration, who was still hankering after ‘the setting up of a body whose members will organize discussions on different levels, including at presidential level, but not all in the organizing committee support this’.14 By the time the Civic Forum opened, the Moscow press and a couple of websites were devoting daily articles to the topic. Banks and oligarchs were approached with enquiries as to whether they had been asked to contribute funding. While they refused to mention sums, it was clear that they had. The most expensive item was travel and hotel accommodation for the 3,000 plus delegates from the regions. The Moscow contingent dwarfed the rest.
By early November 60 of Russia's 89 regions were showing signs of drawing up lists of potential delegates to be forwarded to the organizing committee for approval. Ten were simply silent. Dzhibladze's organization was sending out an information email bulletin (Grazhdanka!), which kept its readers abreast of developments. The committee also had a website. By now it had been agreed that after a plenary session participants would attend one or more ‘negotiating tables’ or discussion sessions with relevant members of the government and their officials. It was Surkov who had suggested that government officials should be brought in. The task of the working group was to decide the themes for these ‘negotiations’ and who should be in charge of organizing them. In all 21 were agreed, ranging from ‘Local self-government and local community’ to ‘Military reform, military service and human rights’, from ‘Public health and the environment’ to ‘The youth movement and youth policy’. All would gather for a final session, chaired by Mikhail Kasyanov, the prime minister, at which the recommendations of each negotiating session would be presented by one of its members.
Pavlovsky and Belyaeva were still talking of the forum becoming institutionalized, in some way or other. Auzan wrote of the disagreements within the working group on this score. The ‘political technologists’ wanted to organize a structure of representatives of NGOs from the top downwards, a structure that could influence the press and put pressure on the Duma; the activists themselves wanted none of this, rather that there should be ‘coalitions, complex working groups, which would meet to discuss key issues’, and a system of ‘sluices’ by means of which government officials and working groups would meet for discussions. According to Alexander Oslon, a sociologist and member of the original committee ‘the human rights activists were, are and always will be frosty with distrust. For one simple reason – they are emotional people. But today the distrust level has dropped to such an extent that it is possible to work together.’ Is it going to be possible to organize the negotiating tables, the reporter asks? ‘As far as I know Putin will instruct all ministers and top officials to be at the disposal of organizers on the day of the Forum.’ But, Oslon continued, it is quite difficult to imagine Kasyanov, the prime minister, spending two days going from one table to another. ‘In fact, the Forum will not be an easy test for the authorities too, after all for many officials it will be the first time that they meet with this far from straightforward audience. So, I think there will be some opposition from the side of the officials […] We'll see.’15
Sceptical journalists raised their voices. Why should one assume that government officials would be interested in attending negotiating tables? A recent roundtable on a draft law to allow public observers into the penal institutions, attended by Duma representatives and members of the prison service, had been ignored by the prosecutor's office and the Ministry of Justice.16 Perhaps the Forum would change this?
Roginsky agreed with Oslon that ‘very complex relations persist’, seemingly little things provoke disagreements, for example the singing of the state hymn (the original Stalin hymn that had been brought back by Putin) at the opening of the forum. ‘We in Memorial took a position – we won't stand […] but I hope it won't come to this – the hymn after all is for state occasions, and not for social events.’17 And it did not. The organizing committee decided that Liudmila Alekseeva should chair the opening plenary session, at which Putin would speak first. How embarrassing it would be, she pointed out, if she did not stand when the president did. The idea of the hymn died a quiet death.
The Civic Forum itself
The Forum got off to a bad start. Long queues of delegates moved increasingly slowly through the check points at the two postern gates into the Kremlin. Whereas in Soviet times the holding of a party congress always went smoothly, this time (for whatever reason) only two-thirds of the delegates were in the Great Hall when, 45 minutes late, a decision was taken to open the proceedings. Liudmila Alekseeva and the rest of the speakers were in place.
We had agreed that the speakers would go in turn – one from the government, one from the NGO sector. And, given that I was to open the proceedings, I got there early, and had the list of speakers. The head of the protocol department came up to me and asked to see the list. He was not at all happy. ‘What is this? First there should be these, and then those.’ I said to him ‘This is the list. Go and open the meeting. I am following the organizing committee's instructions’.
Putin stepped briskly out of the wings, and we rose to our feet. Liudmila Alekseeva gave the floor to the president, who, after a short statement of welcome, passed the baton to the first of the speakers. They included several members of the organizing committee (Auzan so hoarse from negotiating during the past week that he could hardly speak), the chair of the Duma, a Constitutional Court judge, the ombudsman […] but, in all honesty, the audience was engrossed in observing Putin, and many delegates could not resist the opportunity to present him with documents, leaflets, books, letters and petitions. They brought these down the aisles to his assistants or security guards, who placed them on the long table, at which he was sitting, together with Liudmila Alekseeva. The piles grew. He looked at some. After perhaps an hour, he explained that, while it was more interesting to be here rather than engaging with mundane affairs of state, he had to leave to attend to them. He also, with a smile, said he was surprised by a request from one delegate for a joint photograph, and by another, given this was a civil society gathering, asking him to remove the chair of a non-governmental association. His assistants carried the piles of materials out after him. As Bakhmin commented: ‘I was amazed when, from among the 5,000 present in the Kremlin Hall, so many began to bring him petitions, and he piled them up. He was amazed too, and he asked, what kind of a civil society are you if you respond to the authorities in this way?’
Does that mean that Putin himself, and state officials, feel comfortable with such a relationship? It is said that in the nineties, on the day Yegor Stroev, the elected representative to the Federal Council, held his weekly meeting with his constituents in Orel, the queue would form, the black Volga appear and Stroev emerge, to go down the queue, listening in turn to the requests, granting some, refusing others. The landowner speaking to his serfs? But Stroev himself had had a long career as a party official, and this suggests that perhaps we should look to a more recent past. The results of a survey, conducted in 2004, led its authors to conclude ‘The majority of our citizens, including those who are liberal minded, think of rights as something given to them by the state.’18 But then of course that was the way it had been under the Soviet system. Was it so surprising that, when re-registering the Ford Foundation's office and its programme, in the late 1990s, the Chamber of Commerce queried the programme on support for the defence of human rights with the statement that it was the Russian government's job to defend its citizens' rights? Yes, indeed, but hence the dilemma – because governments so often fail to do so.
The 21 negotiating sessions that followed were almost all organized and chaired by members of the organizing committee, some of whom took on responsibility for more than one. Roginsky and Orlov were in charge of ‘Chechnya […] ways to achieve peace and agreement’, Alekseeva, together with Belyaeva, took on ‘Civic control and civic expertise’, Dzhibladze had two – one on tolerance, another on the legal and economic preconditions for effective NGO activity, while Babushkin and Abramkin organized ‘Guaranteeing human rights in the justice and penal system’; Simonov was responsible for ‘Open sources of information from the state’, Auzan for ‘A social contract: society – business – government’, and for ‘Local self-government…’, Igrunov, Grafova and Gannushkina organized several on migration policy, forced migrants and refugees. The idea behind these ‘negotiations’ (‘peregovornye ploshchadki’), a term consciously chosen to distinguish them from one-off roundtables, was that civic activists and government officials should sit down to discuss issues, and plan ways to maintain such a dialogue in future. Did they work?
All agreed that some achieved something, others very little. For a start, they took place all over the city, and there were delegates from the provinces who either never managed to find the location or decided to go shopping instead. According to Alekseeva:
The part that should have been organized by the president's administration was very badly done. I subsequently said that if we ever again organize a joint event, then let those who work [in MHG] first give you a training seminar on how to organize things so that people aren't waiting up half the night to get their travel expenses. The discussion sessions were all over Moscow, and people were struggling through the snow to find them. Key individuals did not turn up at all the sessions. But the Forum itself was all right. And they observed our agreements. We had warned them that if they begin some kind of voting, I would rise and leave the hall, asking others to do the same. There weren't that many of us – 400 out of 5,000 – but they did not want a scandal, and everything went smoothly.
While attendance by government officials at the plenary had been ordered from above (in the words of one commentator ‘from the faces of the officials it was obvious that they were bored out of their minds and only wanted to leave as quickly as possible’) participation at the negotiating sessions depended upon one's immediate superior. Liudmila Alekseeva noted that, at the discussion on civic control:
Very few came – we made a whole list of those who should participate in the discussion but all we got was a deputy minister of justice, and someone from the central electoral commission – and at the negotiations when we had to work out some concrete measures, there were no representatives from the prosecutor's office, nor from electoral commission, just two young women who weren't clear why they were there.
Gannushkina and Grafova wrote to Kasyanov on the failure of either the Minister of Internal Affairs or a deputy minister to respond to proposals for discussions, despite their new responsibilities now that the federal migration service had been abolished. Furious exchanges did occur – for example between the president's press spokesman and Kovalev over the war in Chechnya – and disagreements were marked at the session on army reform but some concrete suggestions, or agreements on future meetings, were presented at the final session, chaired by Kasyanov, the prime minister.
How did the activists assess the event at the time? Roginsky, as always, refused to dramatize it – some discussion had taken place, and it was good that it did not always work like clockwork because that showed it was not a stage-managed imitation of a meeting.
Are the authorities willing to share their power? asks the reporter.
There can't be any sharing of power. Our ambitions do not go that far. Power is power, and as such its holders are authorized to take decisions. Our responsibility is to make proposals. And to put a well-argued case to the authorities, if their decisions seem to us to be wrong – that is what is called ‘public expertise’. And to track how they are implemented – that's called ‘civic control’.
To talk about equal rights is very naïve, he continues, ‘Half the officials a few weeks ago had no suspicion that non-governmental organizations existed’, and some of the organizations see themselves as clients of the state in order to obtain all sorts of benefits so how could they be ‘partners’? But, he suggests, the use of phrases ‘equal partners, negotiations, dialogue, civic control’ has introduced new terms into the political rhetoric.19
He expanded these comments in an article for the Memorial bulletin: ‘there is a large group of non-governmental organizations which view their relationship with the state in the old categories – the authorities are the source of all and any “goods”, the organizations relate to the authorities exclusively in the role of petitioners’. The Civic Forum got press attention, including a lot of hostility, and scepticism. Why? Human rights organizations are seen as oppositionists, and the press sees itself as the intermediary between the authorities and the people, and therefore is not happy with the ‘new role’ of human rights organizations. And the political parties too were upset. ‘But what is interesting is that the journalists' criticism of human rights organizations for participating meant that they were actually upholding the idea that NGOs must be independent.’ His conclusion ‘In some sense, what did not happen at this event (i.e. the creation of an organ which usurped the right to speak for civil society) is as important as what did’ was one shared by many.20
Liudmila Alekseeva referred to a radio broadcast, where she was asked to choose one of the following three statements: ‘the Forum was a sincere endeavour on the part of the authorities to have a dialogue with society’, ‘The Forum was a wish to build society under the authorities' control’, and ‘the Forum was simply an empty bureaucratic idea’. ‘When I was asked which answer I would give, I said: “I can't give you one answer because, the Forum was all three rolled into one”. To some extent the authorities recognized that a civil society already exists in Russia and wants to have some active contact with it. But are our authorities capable of partnership or are they in thrall to a grasping-domineering instinct – only time will tell.’
And Vyacheslav Igrunov, surprisingly perhaps for a democrat and a liberal, favoured continuation of such meetings once a year:
After all such meetings are not, as it were, meetings with workers and collective farmers, but with the most active citizens, who bring with them ‘the pulse of life’. A meeting with them could help both the president and the government to recognize new problems, to feel life's demands.21
The critics and the aftermath
A publicist, Leonid Radzikhovsky, wrote a damning critique as the forum opened. Reminding the reader of the old Russian tradition of meetings where ‘the people’ directly tell the Tsar ‘the whole truth’, a tradition mocked by both Dostoevsky and Gogol, he refers to ‘the inappropriate meetings from the tsarist Duma to the Congress of Peoples' Deputies’. Nothing exciting could be expected from the Civic Forum, which would also be managed, but why was it needed? The assembling of ‘the people’, he argued, is seen as necessary because the ‘parliament’ doesn't work as a representative body whereas ‘if it, and its lobbyists, was working, it would seem odd to collect “the people”’. As it is, he continued, the Civic Forum is attracting little interest from society:
And this suggests we should think about the relationship between the authorities and society in Russia. The democrat and liberal continually moan that we don't have a civil society. Two postulates underlie this statement: a presumption of the guilt of the state, and of the innocence of civil society. First, that civil society, i.e., the aggregate of social organizations, political parties, the independent press and so on, is significantly ‘better’ than the authorities, the state, or officialdom – it's closer to the ideals of democracy and liberalism. Secondly, that the authorities, officialdom, and so on, from every side squeeze this very civil society, do not allow a hundred flowers to bloom, they have even thought up the forum in order ‘to take them under control’.
Both these postulates, he argues, are as old as Russian public opinion. Society remains very primitive, and the authorities are a police power, similar to that of Nicholas I; at local level things are still at the level they were in Gogol's The Inspector General. Sending letters to Putin regarding the infringements of human rights in Chechnya has no effect. What is needed, he concludes, ‘is a parliament’.22
Criticism from (liberal) party politicians and parliamentary figures was surely theoretically correct from a democratic point of view. Gennady Seleznev, the speaker of the Duma, pointed out that all draft laws first went through a parliamentary hearing, with experts present, and that the Duma had a council of NGOs to assist in its work. Vladimir Ryzkhov, a young democratic deputy, expressed it more strongly:
the Civic Forum was a profanation […] dialogue should be through elections, with strong political parties, with local self-government, the independent press, NGOs, with the business community […] each of which in its town, village, or region – achieves its rights, including through an independent court system – that's what is civil society.
while Sergei Mitrokhin, from Yabloko, quoting an ex-prime minister ‘Well, give us your proposals, and we'll stack them up all together in one place’,23 suggested the same would happen for those from the forum. While all this might be true, neither the Duma nor political parties were managing to pursue or defend the rights and interests of the majority of the population, and hence such criticisms left them with questions to answer.
Events shortly afterwards were not encouraging. Memorial and MHG wrote a letter to the president on 26 December expressing their dismay at his decision to dissolve the commission on amnesties. Grigory Pasko, an environmental campaigner, who had been the spokesman for the session on access to information at the Civic Forum, and greeted with applause, was subsequently found guilty of publishing restricted materials and sentenced to imprisonment. A year later, pardoning had been drastically curtailed; nothing had come over proposals to demilitarize Chechnya; draft legislation on prison visitors was stalled, and a disappointing variant of the law on alternative service for army conscripts had been passed.
In 2004 Surkov returned to his idea of a chamber of civic organizations to assist the president and government on policy initiatives, and to disburse grants in an annual competition. Legislation, passed in 2005, provided for the president's appointing 42 members, they in turn choose 42 more from among Russia-wide associations, the 84 choose a further 42 from among regionally-based NGOs. The first session of the Civic Chamber was held in 2006. Academician Velikhov, a respected elderly physicist, was appointed secretary. Several members of the original organizing committee were given seats, as was the occasional oligarch, TV personality, and defence lawyer. None of the troublesome human rights organizations, and not even Auzan, were included,24 but over the years (the Chamber has a three-year term of office) a few respectable campaigning organizations have been brought in. No claim was made that this Civic Chamber represents civil society.
Bakhmin suggests:
Putin understood [from the Civic Forum], that they [the NGOs] are pretty weak structures, very ill assorted, they do not have any real strength of their own and, more than that, they are oriented towards the government, they ask the government for assistance […] It seems to me that this was some kind of a turning point: he understood that nothing new will come out of this in the near future and there is no real strength in this society. The theme of civil society was taken off the agenda for a while.
But at least the human rights and other organizations were left largely alone until 2006. And Putin recognized that it was useful to have contact with the leading organizations, and that they would speak their minds. He dissolved Kartashkin's commission on human rights and in 2004 set up a President's Council for the Advancement of Civil Society and Human Rights, headed by Ella Pamfilova, to which she invited several of the leading human rights activists, and which we see in action in later chapters.
By 2005 the sky had darkened. In the December 2003 elections to the Duma the barrier for party representation was raised to 7 per cent, and the remaining small ‘liberal’ parties failed to make it. Kovalev was out. United Russia, the president's party, swept the board, while the Communist party and Zhirinovsky's Liberal Democratic party, both willing to play the part of a loyal opposition, retained some seats. In the spring of 2004 Putin won the presidential election for a second term of office. September 2004 saw a tragedy in Beslan, down in the Caucasus, when Chechen Islamic militants, demanding the withdrawal of federal troops from Chechnya, took more than 1,000 hostage in a school in a neighbouring republic; its storming by the federal army brought the deaths of 334 hostages, including 186 children. Georgia, and then Ukraine, witnessed unprecedented action on the streets, with NGOs playing a part, which brought in new rulers. In December 2004, after mass protests, the election results in neighbouring Ukraine were overturned, and the pro-Western Yushenko returned as president.
These developments brought a tough response from the Putin regime. Regional governors were to be appointed, not elected. And, according to Bakhmin,
Putin understood that some civic organizations could play the role of some kind of intermediary structures, through which, he felt, certain Western forces could exert an influence on the situation in the country. That made an impression upon him, and the examples of the successful orange revolutions in Georgia and especially in Ukraine, really scared the authorities. And they straightaway began to pay attention to the youth, and the human rights organizations, and civic activists.
As the Civic Chamber began its work in 2006, a new law on NGOs introduced stringent registration and reporting procedures (with the Ministry of Justice and tax officials) which threatened the ability of many to exist, let alone function. Western foundations and Western funding came under heavy attack. In the spring of 2006 a spy scandal erupted: a British embassy official, responsible for a programme of support for human rights organizations, was photographed using a fake stone as a cover for a transmitter to contact agents and download information.25
Looking back ten years later, those who had supported participation in the forum reckoned it had been worth it. For Dzhibladze the Civic Forum was the first attempt to control society but ‘Then we were strong enough to say to them – Come out of the shadows […] and we had a number of supporters in the government, and in the Ministry of Economic Development.’ He reckons that until 2004 civil society organizations grew stronger, better able to work with state and with society but after Beslan everything changed. Auzan views as fruitful the years until the arrest of Khodorkovsky, the oil oligarch who criticized Putin, at the end of 2003, and ‘the war by the state against society was delayed for three to four years – we became the object of attack from a stronger authoritarian regime not in 2001 but in 2005’. What else was gained? ‘Did we achieve our aims? No, in the sense that civil society does not have the influence it had in 2001. But it was worth doing.’ It was one step along the path of establishing conditions for a dialogue between officials and civic organizations: all those terms – equal partners, negotiations, protocols – changed the format of meetings and laid the basis for a new culture, where an agenda, points of discussion, and decisions are noted.
Alexander Daniel, from Memorial, partly agrees:
there was the idea of setting up ‘negotiating tables’ at different levels […] they proved to be ineffective and short lived, but some still exist and there are public councils attached to some of the ministries. And as regards the Civic Chamber? Yes, it is some kind of a superstructure over part of the non-governmental organizations in the country, but only over some of them. And of course in that structure the state wishes to have the driving wheel, as it does, but I cannot say that it is a wholly useless organization. It does quite a few useful things. And sometimes it demonstrates a certain independence. To put it briefly, it has not become particularly harmful, but at the same time neither has it become particularly useful as an organization.
So, albeit with the wisdom of hindsight, which still leaves questions that are difficult to answer, how would you, as a human rights activist, have replied to Veronika Marchenko in 2001? Would you have participated or refused to engage?