Human Rights in Russia

A new generation has come on the scene, which talks less and does more, its members are much less enthusiastic about politics, they have grown up with the realization that the democratic revolution as a democratic project has failed. But there's a huge field where you can apply yourself in concrete civic activity.

To achieve what? I ask Sergei Lukashevsky of the Sakharov Centre.

Not to achieve something, but in order to help specific individuals or resolve concrete problems. A particular problem has attracted an individual's attention, for example the problem of torture by the police, and s/he starts to get involved, gets drawn in, but without having any political ambitions.

When we compare the human rights community at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century with that of twenty or even of ten years ago, the most striking difference is the presence of an army, or at least a battalion, of young lawyers, educated in the post-Soviet period, connected through the internet, by mobile phones, and with the European Court of Human Rights as a court of appeal. From the mid-nineties onwards the demand for defence lawyers (in both civil and criminal cases) from individuals, businesses and organizations grew, and with it the attractiveness of the profession and the opportunities it offered for making a living. Law faculties opened up everywhere. While many (the majority?) of the young lawyers go into the commercial sector (as do their counterparts in other countries), some are drawn to human rights issues, and the existence of the European Court is an attraction.

In 1991 there were lawyers, active in the democratic movement, who subsequently became well known. Genry Reznik and Yury Shmidt stand out as defence lawyers taking on cases of national significance. Tamara Morshakova, a judge on the Constitutional Court, has remained active in human rights circles since retiring. Sergei Pashin, the young author of the original court reform project under Yeltsin, participates in the training of activist lawyers from the provinces under the aegis of an NGO, an Expert Legal Council, headed by Mara Polyakova, herself originally a prosecutor. But the view within the human rights community, during the nineties, and probably that of the lawyers themselves, was that they were acting as aides to human rights' activists, not that they themselves were activists. There were exceptions, for example Karina Moskalenko, a feisty defence lawyer who set up the organization The International Protection Centre, but Professor Gorelik, from Krasnoyarsk, whose Human Rights Committee was staffed by law students, did not consider himself an activist. And the young Sergei Belyaev, whose organization in Ekaterinburg, Litigator, took local authorities or government departments to court, publicizing the campaigns, was seen as somehow different. His approach was, in many ways, ahead of the curve.

Ask activists today, whether in the provinces or the Muscovites themselves, and commentators, to name the most effective human rights organizations and almost all will mention Public Verdict (Taubina, Moscow), the Committee Against Torture (Kalyapin, Nizhny Novgorod), and Agora (Chikov, Kazan). Neither Taubina or Kalyapin are lawyers but their offices are peopled by young lawyers. Some who work with Kalyapin were Chikov's contemporaries in Kazan. They all work with networks of lawyers in other cities for whom human rights activity is a particular field in which they can use their professional skills. Several of them have studied abroad. They answer the advertisements that now appear on the hro.org website – lawyers are required by the great majority of human rights organizations. As Lukashevsky put it:

The idea of the European Court appeals to them, and an individual begins to get involved, increases his or her professional competence, and begins to think of this as a career path and professional advancement. There are many more of them now […] It's a field in which you can work, become a professional, and achieve something, maybe not change the system but achieve concrete successes. Criteria exist, if it does not work in Russia, then you can turn to the European Court. And in Russia too you can achieve a great deal in concrete cases.

Today, in the Memorial Human Rights Centre, you will find three young lawyers, sharing a crowded room, busy behind their loaded desks and papers. It is a scene similar to that in the crowded London Liberty offices. A young lawyer in Memorial may have studied human rights law at the University of Essex. They stay two, three years, with Memorial and then move on to another job, perhaps abroad, in London or Strasbourg. Yet, at the same time, the justice systems with which young lawyers in London and in Moscow are engaging are very different, the only common ground they share is the European Court of Human Rights. It is not just that the Russian justice system is a continental system, based on detailed criminal and civil codes, and codes of procedure, a system where the state prosecutor has a greater role and influence, the judge has more authority but less scope for discretion in imposing sanctions, and the jury system has only recently been introduced. It also has features, some inherited from the Soviet past, that badly call for reform measures, for example the power of the chair of the regional or district court to appoint or dismiss the judges, the failure of the higher courts properly to review appeal cases, and their responding to political or financial pressure. Many of the complaints or appeals lodged with the ombudsman relate to the (illegal or inadequate) behaviour of court or justice officials. This is a topic in itself, far from straightforward. In the words of President Medvedev, himself an academic lawyer, at a meeting of the President's Council for the Advancement of Civil Society and Human Rights in November 2009:

An acquittal, in essence, means that the judge is contradicting the opinion of the investigator. It's often quite difficult for the judge to do that. I am not talking about the cases where a judge has come under some kind of criminal pressure; it is simply that it is difficult for a judge to do that from psychological, even professional, if you like from corporate considerations.

Ironically, perhaps, the failings of the justice system, including the judges' behaviour, contribute to the young lawyers' opportunities to intervene – and to win cases against corrupt or law-breaking government and justice officials, not only in Strasbourg but in Russian courts. Given too the extensive legislation on both socio-economic or welfare rights, and perennial issues – the non-payment of wages or pensions, or the provision of housing – there is considerable scope for intervention by lawyers who specialize in particular fields, be it migration rights, employment law, media law, or the right to a fair trial.

In previous chapters we have met some of the new generation of lawyers – Pavel Chikov from Kazan, Maria Kanevskaya from St Petersburg, Olga Gnezdilova from Voronezh – here I want to look at them and others of their generation a little more closely. Is it right to see a generational cleavage within the human rights community, and how might this spell change for the future? But, first, a brief introduction to the European Court, international bodies, and domestic courts.

By 2008 30,000 of the 112,000 cases pending before the European Court of Human Rights were from the Russian Federation (which has of course by far the largest population of any of the countries), and the number submitted was growing (from 10,500 during 2008, to 14,000 in 2009). The court was struggling to cope with its caseload, even simply to dismiss the great majority as inadmissible, and attempts were underway to get new procedures ratified that would enable it to work more effectively. By 2012 new submissions from Russia had dropped to 10,700 and, in 2013, of the 111,350 cases pending only 20,700 were from Russia.¹ But the figures suggest a strong desire, within Russia, to turn to Strasbourg for justice. Many of the human rights organizations, both those dating from the early nineties – the Memorial Human Rights Centre, Mother's Right, Litigator, Moskalenko's Centre – as well as the newer ones win cases.

As of 2012, 1,262 judgments had found at least one violation of the Convention by the Russian government. More than 100 of these concern serious human rights violations in Chechnya, and cases from the Second Chechen war are still before the court. In nearly all such cases, the court has held Russia responsible for enforced disappearances, extrajudicial executions, torture, and for failing properly to investigate these crimes. A significant number of judgments relate to the ‘absence of effective remedies’, the wrongful use of custody in remand cases, prolonged detention, and inhumane conditions in remand prisons. But there have also been judgments relating to damage to health from the environment, delays in hearing, and the non-payment of compensation. While the Russian government has generally paid the compensation awarded by the court, it has not always done so, and it has failed to implement measures that would prevent the recurrence of similar cases, or hold the perpetrators accountable.²

The Chechen wars (1994–6, and 1999–2002) produced perhaps the most horrendous crimes – the indiscriminate bombing of civilians, the murder, kidnapping and torture (on both sides) of armed combatants and civilians. But the continued use of detention, torture and murder by the Kadyrov regime in Chechnya itself, and the spilling over of conflict into neighbouring republics in the Caucasus, sometimes associated with Islamic militants, marks out this region of Russia. Activists and journalists work at their peril here, and almost total impunity continues to prevail.

While many journalists have died violent deaths in Russia since 1991, it is not always possible to establish whether the victim was targeted because of his or her investigations and publications or for political or business interests. There has been a shift, during recent years, away from total impunity to prosecutions of those committing the murders (but not necessarily of those behind it). The same is perhaps occurring when the target, an activist engaged in protest activities, is either murdered or savagely beaten up by unknown assailants. Until a few years ago it was almost unknown for anyone to be arrested and charged with murder or assault in such cases.

A variety of sources, some specialized, provide a more detailed picture of infringements. These include, for example, reports by the Memorial Human Rights Centre on the situation in Chechnya, or by the Glasnost Defence Foundation, the Center for Journalism in Extreme Situations (CJES), and a new database, http://mediaconflictsinrussia.org, on media rights and freedoms, and violence against journalists. Many of the Russian NGOs and the International Commission on Jurists, which includes two Russian lawyers, make submissions to the UN Committee on Human Rights or to the UN Committee on the Rights of Child when Russia is the subject of a periodic report. Human Rights Watch, an international NGO which has a Moscow office, staffed by Russians, issues hard-hitting reports on topics ranging from the situation in Chechnya to the fate of migrant labour to the implementation of decisions by the European Court of Human Rights. The EU Centre, a think-tank supported by the European Union, has included human rights in recent reviews, while Western governments and private foundations, which support human rights organizations, publish periodic reviews of their grants. Rather differently, EHRAC (the European Human Rights Advocacy Centre), based now at Middlesex University, which works together with the Memorial Society to take cases to the European Court, issues regular bulletins on the results. The Russian Justice Initiative, also an NGO based on cooperation between European and Russian lawyers, but now denied registration in Russia, takes cases from the Caucasus to the ECHR. Reports from all these organizations are aimed at both an international (Western) audience and at a Russian one.³

Most infringements will of course never reach the European Court, and socio-economic rights do not fall within its purview. The majority of young lawyers are taking their cases to the Russian courts, starting at the district level, either defending a client or turning to the prosecutor with a request for investigation and a prosecution. Then, as in other systems, appeals may be launched; cases travel up to higher courts. The Constitutional Court rules on cases of constitutional significance. A different channel, open to the citizen, is to turn to the ombudsman, and many of the appeals are claims against the behaviour of court or justice officials, but I leave the ombudsman's reports, which range widely over the state of human rights, for Chapter 12.

It is absolutely clear that during the Putin–Medvedev period jurisprudence became the key instrument. They, and others, insist on the extreme importance of law, despite the fact that they often break it […] but they created a new rule, whereas in the nineties many questions were decided quite differently […] then a well-known name was enough for a human rights organization to carry weight, now that's impossible.

Pavel Chikov, from Agora, Kazan, was only ten years old as perestroika got underway. For him, and others like him, students or children, the democratic movement was something other people were involved in; the new politics and the Chechen war were not part of their lives. Ivan Pavlov, in Leningrad, was slightly older. Upon finishing the prestigious mathematics school number 239 in 1987, he had intended to go to the Military Academy, but having suffered a traumatic injury at the time of examinations, went instead to the Electrotechnical Institute, which took the 17-year-old graduates of the maths school without entrance exams. He had no interest in the democratic movement.

At that time politics did not interest many students, including me. The country was changing before your eyes, and you were more concerned with your own fate than with that of the country. You saw how full of lies the system was, how the old system had exhausted itself, and a new system had not yet come into existence, and it was not clear whether in fact it would. Of course you had your doubts. You had to get involved in business, earn to keep yourself alive.

Upon graduating, with a specialization in information technology, Pavlov transferred to St Petersburg State University to do a law degree.

And, in principle, it was a very good thing that I had already got a higher education before doing a law degree because it gave me some experience of life, not just knowledge. Because I think that you cannot become a proper lawyer by doing a law degree straight after school.

While he was studying and working as a legal assistant in an advocates bureau, he came to know Yury Shmidt, the defence lawyer, who brought him on to work first on the Nikitin case, and then, after graduation, to work in the Far East on the Pasko case.⁴ Clearly an able lawyer, he and Shmidt disagreed over the subsequent publication of materials relating to the case, and parted company. Once back in St Petersburg, in 2001 he set up an NGO to focus on the right of access to information. In 2008, the organization was inspected, just as Citizens Watch had been, but Pavlov successfully challenged the findings in court, and then set up a Foundation that parallels the NGO and would allow work to continue should either be closed.

His Freedom of Information Foundation, with a staff of perhaps 20 full-time and part-time staff (legal experts, information technology specialists) focuses on various projects. The three most important are educating the public on how to access information from the government, so that they can track government activities and budget expenditure (for example on dealing with damage from heavy snow falls, or on housing maintenance), actively litigating freedom of information cases on behalf of citizens and organizations, and shaming regional authorities and federal ministries into providing accessible information on their websites. His Foundation is, according to Pavlov, a new type of human rights organization because its members use new technologies to advance human rights, they work for today's citizens, and they want to achieve concrete results. For example: ‘In 2005 54 of the 83 federal executive agencies had no websites.’ In 2008 a law was passed that obliged them to open them, and Pavlov's organization has been active in chivvying the laggards to comply.

And each year we monitor the official sites so as to create an atmosphere of competition, so that they want to move up our ratings […] Ministers, for example, use the results of our ratings in their reports for the government or the president […] Our EXMO (Expert Monitoring) system enables one to evaluate sites – it's all on the internet – and in the course of a month our experts interact with the officials.

Pavlov's organization is equally concerned to persuade citizens that access to information is a human right, and that anyone has a right to know how the budget is being spent. And how do you achieve this? I ask.

It's our most difficult task, to reach the individual citizen, so we carefully analyse the situation in the city […] then we hold seminars, we have a site on which anyone can raise a question, we work with a number of single issue organizations which, for example, defend the rights of residents […] we explain how to make claims and, if they are refused, then our lawyers help them to take the case to court […] ordinary people turn to us, perhaps 100 a year.

It is the lack of openness on the part of the state, and of society, that is problem number one […] People are usually closed, non-communicative. They work in a particular sphere, they see everyone as a competitor, they fear that if they divulge what they know, they will lose a certain resource. There are two different approaches to communication – one means a closed, the other an open society […] but neither are the non-governmental organizations, including the human rights organizations, open institutions.

If there was openness, then, in Pavlov's view, the economy could flourish. History is responsible. ‘It's the inheritance from the whole previous history of our state […] not only the Soviet period. Russia never was an open state.’ Its thousand-year history, he argues, has been based on the oppression of man ‘and it is very difficult to jettison the slave-like mentality which, unfortunately many still possess’. Add to this, he argues, the disillusionment that people felt upon seeing all the lies the authorities told in the nineties, just like in the Soviet period, and you have a very unresponsive auditorium.

Pavlov's concern with ‘open access’ as a human right also extends to access to archives, which has lead him to work with Memorial. He acted for the St Petersburg Memorial Research Centre in 2009 when, following a police raid, it turned to court to charge the prosecutor's office with illegal actions during the search and to retrieve its hard disks, a case that, to the surprise of all, it won. And in 2013, ironically enough, he was in the Memorial office, querying the legality of an inspection team's requests in relation to the ‘foreign agents’ law, when he received a call that a similar inspection team had arrived at his office.

I am left slightly puzzled. Pavlov has little patience with an older generation of human rights activists who, he suggests, argue that it will take years, generations, before attitudes of subservience to the state will disappear. Presumably he would take issue with Pustintsev's statement:

Human rights and the rule of law is genetically coded. It is based on the experience of previous generations. […] All right the process started under Alexander II […] but for 70 years [since 1917] we were in a scorched waste land – where were human rights? It will need a few generations before the Soviet attitude towards one's own rights and the rights of others will be eradicated.⁵

New technology, Pavlov argues, itself imperative if Russia is to modernize, makes an ‘open society’ possible. Yet he believes that an age-old serf mentality is all that Russia has ever had? Why, one wonders, does he hold to a view that is not only historically very questionable but weakens his argument that social and state attitudes can change? Is new technology a magician's wand? In Pavlov, as in Chikov, we have an individual who combines a lawyer's background with another area of expertise. For Pavlov it is information technology, for Chikov it is management, and they both pay special attention to internet PR. Both attract considerable Western funding, and in 2011 Pavlov's American wife worked for one of his funders.⁶

Agora, Chikov's organization, based in Kazan, works rather differently. It is a loose association of 30 lawyers, scattered across the country, and a few key individuals who will travel to places to work with a local lawyer, using Agora's model strategies. Their main communication channel is the internet, but they meet up from time to time. They began, as we saw, by focusing on abuse of citizens by the law enforcement agencies, but they now leave that to Public Verdict and the Committee Against Torture. In 2010 they set up a small Moscow office.

We focus on legal assistance for civic activists, human rights activists and journalists. We provide legal aid for them if they are being prosecuted or face violence or whatever in connection with their public or professional activities […] Agora is a security service for Russian civil society. That's what we are best known for in Russia. We defend anarchists, the antifascists, oppositionists, NGOs, journalists, defence lawyers […] and others. Our lawyers defend those involved in Strategy 31, the group War [a St Petersburg radical art group] are among our clients […] Also Natalya Vasileva who said that the decision in the second Khodorkovsky trial was not written by the judge – she's our client. People come under pressure from the authorities as soon as they make that kind of statement, and we immediately take on their defence. That's our key priority.

In 2013 Chikov's wife, a defence lawyer, acted as defence counsel for one of the Pussy Riot trio and won her case on appeal.

They start by identifying an issue (for example the use of the law on extremism against activists) and work out a strategy for defending those who are being targeted (in the extremism case there were 15 individuals). They accompany the defence of individuals with a PR campaign, which involves not only using their own information agency (set up to attract advertisers and provide a source of funding), but also getting attention in the popular internet press. If gazeta.ru (a popular internet news site) is writing about Agora, Chikov argues, you do not need hro.org. They have initiated 15 separate cases against the Ministry of Finance – whether the judges group them together or not does not matter – the journalists will write of them as ‘the 15 cases’.

We make as much media coverage as possible […] put a lot of resources into that, try to change the situation as a whole, by attracting attention to the cases, getting them onto the public agenda […] and a judgement sets a precedent. You cannot work quietly with our court system because ours is not a common law system.

But, all the same, Chikov argues, precedence is playing more of a role because summaries of Supreme Court practice, its statements, and judges' rulings are acquiring more and more importance. ‘Because the laws lag behind actual behaviour, judges compensate by using the evolving court practice, particularly in the case of the persecution of activists. When the authorities begin to think up a new method, we straightaway expose it and get actively involved.’

Chikov is not modest about their achievements – they have worked out a strategy that enables us ‘to get involved in a case within 24 hours in any part of the country’. He doubts that in the near future any other organization will be able to offer their level of defence. The only place they do not work is the North Caucasus. They had 50 cases before the European Court when we spoke.

‘Do you think you can change, transform the court system or achieve less harsh sentencing with your strategy?’ Yes, Chikov answers, it works, and of all that they have tried this is the most effective. But he is concerned about the future. We are not talking about a campaign by bare foot lawyers.

To remain an activist you have to be able to earn, one way or another, enough to live on. That's a basic problem today because the foundations are leaving Russia. A good lawyer costs good money.

Chikov's focus is Russia, and using a combination of legal opportunities and the media to gain publicity, and perhaps eventually transform the legal system. Pavlov too thinks in terms of Russia but, for him, the target is state and society. Maria Kanevskaya, who we met in the Introduction, chairing a School for Human Rights activists in St Petersburg and, in Chapter 5, attending a Marek Nowicki school in Warsaw, focuses on providing legal assistance to struggling NGOs working on economic, social or civil rights. She clearly likes managing things.

Born in 1982, she attended a French-language school in St Petersburg, and then entered the law faculty of the MVD University, where her father taught philosophy. She was a very active student, winning essay competitions, and through participation in an informal study group on international law, came to hear of human rights. She entered a French competition and, on her eighteenth birthday, received an invitation and the airline tickets to participate in an international 16-day course in Geneva on human rights law. She became an inveterate attender of schools and trainings.

Between the ages of 18 and 23 I attended more than 15 conferences, courses of one kind and or another. Once I worked out how much my studying human rights had cost Western society – all the travel, and the different programmes.

Her first project concerned young offenders, then she moved on to providing assistance to refugees. The fact that all six members of her organization were from the MVD University made cooperation with government officials easier. However in 2007 her organization was shut down, ostensibly on the grounds that it was issuing educational certificates without having registered status, but really, in her view, because of the receipt of grants from the Dutch government. She lost her case in court, and her confidence and faith in the court system. And, at that moment, she says, she understood that anything was possible in Russian courts. Boris Pustintsev, who with Ivan Pavlov had attended the hearing, urged her to fight the verdict but she did not have the courage.

In 2008 she set up a new organization, The Human Rights Resource Centre, whose aim is to provide legal and institutional support to NGOs (especially young NGOs) and citizen initiative groups in four federal districts of Russia. She set up a hotline by signing a contract with a mobile phone company under which, for a monthly fee, calls to and from NGOs across Russia to the centre's lawyers are free. In 2011 Kanevskaya in Petersburg, and lawyers in Saratov, Krasnoyarsk, and Novorossiisk were available on the hot line from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. If one of them was engaged, the call switched to one of the others. In 2011 they were receiving from five to 20 calls a day on issues ranging from how to register an organization, how to challenge a ruling or inspection, how to take a case to court, etc. Their website provides further information, and they organize (as we saw) schools to help a wide range of small NGOS with their activities, including taking cases to the European Court.

Kanevskaya became a member of the city's Human Rights Council, an informal body of an older generation of leading activists, in 2010. But when, in December of that year, the city council was to elect a children's ombudsman, and the Human Rights Council nominated one of its members – Natalya Evdokimova (an ex-deputy, and well known in the city) – to stand against the official candidate, Kanevskaya decided to put herself forward as an independent candidate. She campaigned for two weeks, using PR assistants, and lobbying methods that she had learnt from a three-day seminar; she rang all 500 organizations that her organization had helped, contacted key deputies, and got two votes more than the official favourite. This should not have happened. Someone quickly pressed his voting button, but the damage had been done (and Evdokimova came third, and was now out of the competition). A second round had to be held. It was better organized and, as expected, Agapitova, the official candidate won easily. A representative from the United Russia party apologized to her: ‘we liked you, maybe another time, but we have a strict hierarchy, and we only support candidates put forward by Matvienko [the governor].’

The Human Rights Council was sharply critical of her for having stood and, according to her, ‘harangued her for an hour and a half’. But amiable relations were soon restored, and she participates as a member. In her view: ‘[the older activists] don't really understand that one should put more in the hands of young people. Some are positively against having younger activists as members […] And if they won't, then they have no future.’

There are other organizations in St Petersburg, run by younger people, some which have been active for ten years or more (Anti-Discrimination Memorial, an offshoot of Memorial, which works on ethnic and racist discrimination, and has now suffered under the ‘foreign agents’ law), others that are newer (LGBT groups), and Egida (labour rights, discrimination at the workplace). Their members, while respecting the older activists, are not convinced that their time is best spent by participating in the council. But nor do they see Kanevskaya as a natural ally.

In St Petersburg a generation gap, at least to an outsider, is very visible, perhaps because here there are young leaders. In Moscow, home of the heavyweight organizations, it is different. But the 2010–11 interview survey, conducted by Volkov in six cities, found that:

Only a few leaders make an effort constantly to attract new staff members, train them, and encourage them. There are very few which from the start set themselves the aim of ensuring generational change within the organization, providing guidance, bringing young members into the process of decision making. In the eyes of young leaders, the old organizations often appear closed, hierarchic structures where the leader takes all the decisions.

The survey also revealed that the most able young people were leaving the provinces for Moscow or to go abroad. Youthful initiatives can fail because their organizers lack experience or reputation but overcoming the generation gap, Volkov suggests, will be critical to the future of civic activity.⁷ But is it just a gap between the original perestroika activists, many of whom are now in their late sixties or seventies (and Kovalev and Alekseeva are both over eighty), and these, the latest recruits to the human rights community? Chikov thinks not.

Crudely, I would distinguish three generations of human rights activists: generation one – the dissidents, two – the managerial-experts – people like Taubina, Dzhibladze, Lokshina, Kalyapin […] it's not always age, it's a way of thinking […] and the third, those who appeared in the Putin period (I think of myself as a member of this generation) […] they are highly professional in what they do. They are among the best lawyers, the best PR-shiki [PR professionals], the best journalists – first and foremost they are highly skilled in their professions.

Although only a few of the perestroika activists had a dissident past, Chikov's characterization is telling. Dissidents and perestroika activists shared a Soviet past, a set of common experiences. Most abandoned their professions (which ranged from those of physicists to historians to film directors) to set up human rights organizations that, as both they and younger activists recognized, they often ran very incompetently. In Chikov's view: ‘It was a terrible problem – these elderly people, who didn't know how to manage money, didn't know how to write reports, they simply couldn't adapt to these requirements.’ Tanya Lokshina, as we noted, was shocked by the way the MHG was run. Today, she suggests, things are very different.

Working with the European Court – that requires working on a different level, not with an activist but with a professional approach; [working in a human rights organization] is now far removed from volunteer work, and we are not talking about those pitiful salaries which I remember so well. An effort is made now to support young professionals, there's a recognition of professional expertise, of what should be done to organize the work. Then there was none of that, it was simply a [tusovka] get-together.

But what of Chikov's second generation, the managers, which would include Lokshina?

With the exception of Kalyapin, they do seem to constitute a bridging generation in that they focused on professionalizing the community and its activities: teaching skills, and strategies, whether collecting data, writing reports for international audiences as well as Russian, organizing a campaign, or managing grants from Western foundations. Taubina's skills as an administrator brought her the post of director of Public Verdict in 2004, but by 2010 Dzhibladze, now that campaigning and organizational skills had professionalized the human rights organizations, found himself looking for work. In the words of a fellow activist:

He's an ideal rapporteur, he's a very good expert, he's an excellent organizer or coordinator of any discussion, particularly, in an international context where Russians are participating. In that capacity he is practically irreplaceable. But he does not have an organization.

Known, smilingly by other activists, as the Minister of Foreign Affairs for Human Rights, his future probably lies somewhere in the international field.

Both Tanya Lokshina and Grigory Shvedov, as we noted, were simply looking for an interesting job where they could use their professional skills. They have this in common with the newer recruits. Shvedov, Chikov agrees, has strong traits of the third generation about him: a focus on effective, innovative strategies, thinking ahead of one's opponents, and achieving results. ‘The ability to continue to develop, grow, as circumstances change.’ To support yourself, and your activities. And would not Kalyapin, the entrepreneur, also qualify? After all we are talking about attitudes and behaviour, not age. Chikov hesitates and compromises: yes, and Kalyapin's office is staffed by young, third generation lawyers. Perhaps though, when we talk of generations, it is better to recognize that there are always exceptions, and Kalyapin is an unusual activist – a radical democrat at the time of perestroika, then a successful entrepreneur who gradually moved to working as a volunteer for a human rights organization before setting up his own, and is both an effective manager and a tireless activist. And how might Igor Sazhin, up in Syktyvkar, fit in? In his own words:

My attitude to the authorities is as towards something sacred, whereas the attitude [of the young people he teaches] is quite different […] their approach is wholly pragmatic, but on the other hand they believe that they can change something. I also think that you can change something but at the same time I think that change can come from on high […] I still believe that there can be such a thing as a good ruler. But that doesn't interest them […] For them justice is very narrow and concrete, it involves them and their surroundings […] The world, in principle, in their view, is unjust and cannot be just.

It is striking that while the first, now elderly, generation of activists is heavily Muscovite, and many of them were scientists, our young activists, both those who bridge the generations, and the young recruits, are either lawyers or have a humanities background. There are no physicists, biologists, or mathematicians among them. Taubina, Lukashevsky, Shvedov, and Lokshina are from Moscow. Others, the younger ones, come from St Petersburg, the Urals (Perm), Tatarstan (Kazan), the south (Voronezh), the north (Syktyvkar), the Volga (Nizhny Novgorod) and Siberia (Krasnoyarsk). Moscow may have reasserted itself as the political capital of the country, but as regards human rights organizations the scales have tipped the other way.

What else has changed? First, in many ways today's young activists are much more like their contemporaries in the West. Particular events or meetings awakened their interest in rights or human rights, and led to their becoming involved. For Pavlov it was being put on the Pasko case, for Chikov, talking to his friend from the police, for Latypov in Perm it was attending a summer camp, for Sokiryanskaya it was meeting a Chechen and an Ingush in Warsaw. For Drozhzhakov, the trade union lawyer from Krasnoyarsk, it was the treatment of Chinese workers by his employer.

He began bringing potential workers to Russia, under any pretext, took away their passports and then used them for any kind of work. People lived without any rights, wherever they could, ate what they could scrounge, weren't paid. I did not like it, and took it up with my manager, began to help the Chinese, and a conflict of interests arose, because I, the organization's lawyer, was working against the organization. I managed to get it shut down but then I was without work.

He moved into trade union work, first as a legal inspector, and then, as we shall see in Chapter 12, into actively defending workers' rights.

Some of the youngest generation attended the Nowicki schools, and/or the schools organized by the Human Rights Youth Movement, an organization set up by Andrei Yurov in Voronezh in the 1990s. This offered summer schools, where young people could learn how to use, for example, flash mob tactics, and then as members of this ‘movement’ that had branches in Ukraine, Belarus, and reached out to Europe, to work as volunteers on projects in their localities. Maria Kanevskaya, for example, practised volunteer work in St Petersburg, based on MPD training. It is difficult to assess its impact, or how many of its youthful members retain any interest in human rights today. It still exists, Yurov is now honorary president, and Dmitry Makarov, based in Voronezh, but frequently travelling, is perhaps its best-known representative, and now its director. But what does MPD actually do, except to react to events, for example the Bolotnoye process, or bring out a statement on the Syrian conflict? I pursued the question with Maria Sereda, a young activist in Ryazan:

I don't really understand what the MPD is.

No one understands that. It's some kind if a thingamajig, a civic nesting box. In the first place it's some kind of a sub-culture, some kind of a space, whose legal status is unclear, with some bits of an organizational structure […] it's some kind of a changing milieu, into which people come and go […] many leave very quickly but go into human rights organizations, as people with good professional skills.

Everyone knows of the MPD, but finds it difficult to describe. One of its offshoots is the Voronezh Interregional Human Rights Group.

In 2000 the MPD was running a programme, Start, which included a series of evening lectures on different human rights themes, followed by volunteer activity. Olga Gnezdilova, a third year law student, attended, and joined a letter-box project in which law students answered prisoners' letters (copying Gorelik's initiative in Krasnoyarsk). After graduation, she acted as coordinator of the project, and joined the Interregional Human Rights Group, set up by Yurov and registered as an independent organization in 2000.

Similar to the Human Rights Centre in Perm, the Human Rights Group's lawyers focus on a number of issues, ranging from prisoners' rights to the freedom of association in the surrounding Black Earth region, or providing for example, legal advice to NGOs threatened with closure. These multi-issue centres, popular in the nineties, are now fewer in number, partly because the human rights community has become more specialized, partly because only the strong ones have survived. The Voronezh centre manages to attract some independent funding from Western sources, and participates in Moscow Helsinki Group projects, but its five lawyers earn a living while working part time for the centre.

Voronezh is a pleasant southern city, with wide leafy streets, some eighteenth and nineteenth century architecture, parks, and a wide river cutting the city in half. Fortunately, during World War II, the Germans remained on one side. There's a plaque to Mandelshtam, the poet, who died in a camp, and a statue of Platonov, the writer, now stands in its park, not far from the statue of Lenin. The human rights groups, which include a Memorial organization that works both on Stalinist repression and on migrant and refugee rights, share the floor of a crowded building in the centre of the city. I talked to Olga, a young mother, as she nursed her new baby. We sat on a park bench in the sun while her husband, an environmental activist, pushed their sleeping toddler up and down in a push chair.

In 2006, they took up the issue of public access to court hearings, and court procedures. With great difficulty, they got access to and monitored court hearings. The press took up their critical report, the chair of the regional court responded, and now only a passport is required to gain entry to a hearing.

Do you think, I ask, that the court system can be changed by pressure from below?

Vyacheslav Ilich [chair of the Voronezh Memorial society] argues, quite convincingly, that one should begin from below because it's easier to appeal to the district court judge's conscience, and the higher courts are prone to confirm decisions taken further down. But of course the district court judge is also very dependent upon his or her superiors.

They have noticed that when they take students or a journalist with them, the judges make efforts to observe the laws, and they have a greater chance of getting a favourable decision. But she would not claim that they have achieved significant changes.

In 2009 they produced a report on the teaching of religion in schools, and presented it to the Ministry of Education. They do an annual report on the infringement of social and political rights in the region, and make recommendations, for example of the need to introduce an ombudsman, and this has been accepted by the regional authorities.

We try to educate some of the government agencies. We worked with the Ministry of Justice on the inspection of NGOs, because previously they were acting so harshly, issuing warnings for trivial things that they wanted to consider infringements of the law.

They sent the Prosecutor General's office a report on police use of torture. This may have prompted a visit from the Prosecutor General, and a meeting at which some of the police chiefs received disciplinary reprimands. And what do they hope to achieve?

That those rights which are in the European Convention are observed. We take the issue of police torture very seriously, we want every case to be rigorously investigated by the prosecutor, and those who are guilty to receive real sentences, not today's suspended sentences.

And they want freedom of association – for meetings in the main square. Are they interested in changing the law or in its implementation? Her response echoes those we have heard previously:

Changing the legislation is of course an interesting question but, in Russia, the laws themselves are not so bad. The fact of the matter is that here people do not observe the law or bear responsibility for breaking it.

Here we have a human rights organization, working until recently in a reasonably favourable local environment. We note its ‘monitoring’, taking up issues, attempts to influence local legislation, to educate officials, and to improve court behaviour. And we see how its lawyers contribute to and benefit from participating in projects organized by the Moscow Helsinki Group and Public Verdict. However, in 2012, before the crackdown on NGOs, the shared office was raided by the security services, some groups had discs confiscated, and unpleasant anonymous phone threats persuaded some to take time out abroad. Surprisingly, the organization was not targeted in the ‘foreign agents’ campaign in 2013.

The two characteristics Lukashevsky drew attention to – pragmatism and a desire to help people ‘to help specific individuals or to solve a concrete problem’ – come out very clearly from conversations with young activists, be they lawyers or not.

Alexander Zarutsky, a young lawyer working in the Memorial office in Ryazan, tells me that ‘My ambition to become a lawyer was motivated by my desire to help people who were destitute and had no one who could help them […] that remains my main motivation to become a good, skilled lawyer.’ Legislation, in his view, can be inadequate but the main problem is ‘the banal bureaucratic attitudes of officials’. He follows court practice in other regions – for example he will use the ruling in a recent case in which the Memorial Human Rights Centre in Syktyvkar won damages of 70,000 rubles for a citizen for the lengthy non-implementation of a court decision.

The conventions which exist, the European and UN conventions, they have more of a latent, perhaps virtual character. Maybe somewhere they work. I study court practice, including that of our Constitutional Court, and I see that the court often refers to the convention in its decisions. But as far as the everyday courts are concerned, the conventions are not used.

And if we meet in five years' time, what will you hope to have achieved?

That I shall have become a professional lawyer, in the sphere which I specialize in now. I love my work […] My aim is to help people.

Pavel Levashin, the young lawyer in Perm, whom we met in Chapter 9, talks in a very similar way:

I apply all my energies somehow to help people who need assistance, people who don't have any means of resolving their problems […] I don't aspire to change the situation in the country or in our region, but at least I can help with the problems that exist in our region […] if I win say four cases a year which benefit the pensioners, grandmothers and grandfathers, if I at least assist in helping solve the problems in our region, I'll be glad. There are so many problems.

Zarutsky, himself an orphan, was working on a project to help young orphans get housing once they leave a children's home. The region's population of 1.2 million includes about 4,000 orphans who, by law, should receive housing, but local officials use the excuse of lack of funding to take no action. In 2011 he was dealing with perhaps ten cases a month. While he was taking cases to court, other members of the Ryazan office engaged in social marketing, placing photos of individual orphans in the windows of a mock-up poster of an empty building – as though they were building a house for them – and attracted media attention, and donations from people who signed the photo-cards. They raised funding for 20 flats. The campaign was led by Maria Sereda who had participated in the Gerber and Mendelson project on social marketing, mentioned in the previous chapter, and who subsequently completed an MA in Glasgow on marketing and PR for non-commercial organizations. She returned to Russia to teach the techniques to others while participating in campaigns.

Sometimes we need a dry and serious text by Kovalev, and sometimes a comic strip. These are absolutely different things but as instruments, they are used in the same way.

Sergei Adamovich [Kovalev] once said, after I had made a presentation at a conference, that the imprint of the devil is to be found on all that marketing. Sakharov, as regards mass communication, was almost unintelligible, very difficult to understand. It was his principled position that worked for him, because at that time that was what was most important, 100 per cent truth and sincerity. It still has a role to play today but it's disappearing. It has become absolutely clear that, in today's very different world, honesty, on its own, as a rule does not work, you have to think how to present it.

In answer to my asking what she would like to be doing in five years' time, she responds that she would like to be developing non-commercial marketing for the human rights sector.

‘And how do you define “the sector”?’ I ask

I would consider all organizations which, one way or another, are involved in normalizing [the right of the citizen to interact with the authorities] to be human rights organizations. Using the law is not the most important strategy. Regularizing the relationship between citizens and the authorities, maybe legally, or not by law, but with the help of communication, dialogue, analysis etc […]

No one likes torture, violence against women, when kids can't go to school, no one can like that. Therefore in practice there is no avoiding human rights. What will in time happen to them in the realm of ideology – it's very interesting to think about that. But fortunately that doesn't determine everyday activity. Fortunately, you have to defend people when the police beat them up […] I have the sense that that human rights means ‘security’ […] human rights is the means of creating a safe, an unspoilt world. ⁸

Meanwhile Natalya Brikker, the young office manager of Memorial in Ryazan, likes administration.

In many ways we are a generation of administrators, managers […] We join human rights organizations because we understand that not everything is right with the world, that something must be done. We are very focused on getting results […] when we can say – yes, our organization achieved that.

Memorial does not work together with the authorities but neither do we position ourselves as out and out oppositionists, we always try to find some entry point that will work. Because we are involved in major social issues, such as orphans and invalids, we find that if we position ourselves constructively, well-prepared, we can achieve much greater results.

Members of this youngest generation may well disagree (as do their parents) whether or not one should engage in political protest. In 2011 one such issue was the protest meetings of the 31st of the month in support of Article 31 of the constitution, the right to assemble. Some joined in, others stayed away. The results of the elections in 2011, and then the 2013 inspections, posed similar issues, requiring political decisions but this, and the response of their contemporaries is the topic for the next chapter. Here we conclude by returning to the young lawyers.

Aleksei Korotaev, whom we heard suggesting in 2004 that no one apart from the human rights activists were interested in the Universal Declaration and UN conventions, characterized the situation as follows.

In reality what human rights activists are basically doing today is helping the observance of the law. As for the percentage of their activity that relates to the international understanding of human rights – it would be lucky if it amounts to ten per cent – writing a report for the UN Committee or to the European Court. Everything else is a straightforward struggle to get a right observed. Full stop. The word ‘human’ does not appear. Simply rights and law. And that is all one can do in order that one day, on this basis, a demand for human rights will emerge in this country.⁹

Or simply a law-based state, but not one necessarily committed to human rights? Might not that be a more important achievement?