Human Rights in Russia

Politicians, political commentators and human rights activists assumed that the elections to the Duma in 2011 would provide an overwhelming majority for United Russia, the government party. United Russia won, but did worse than had been expected. The tactic, advocated by Alexander Navalny, an aspiring young blogger whose internet campaign against corruption was hugely popular, of voting for anyone except the government party, United Russia (‘The Party of Thieves and Fraudsters’, as he named it), paid off. Video and photo evidence demonstrated that the ‘official’ results (in many places) were suspect. Blatant rigging of results occurred in Moscow. Suddenly voters came to life and the first big demonstrations took place in Moscow and other cities. The breathtaking cynicism of the announcement in the autumn of 2011 that Vladimir Putin, the prime minister, would run for the presidency in 2012, while Dmitry Medvedev, the president, would become prime minister, and, moreover, that this had been agreed between them in 2008 surely contributed to the disaffection. Human rights activists joined the demonstrations, which continued until Putin's inauguration in May 2012, but they were as amazed as everyone else. Aleksei Simonov of the Glasnost Defence Foundation expressed it this way.

Russia has frozen stock still in bewilderment at herself. What has happened in Russia can be compared to the well-known joke about the centipede. The centipede was asked: ‘Tell us please, how does it happen that straight after the 17th leg, you put down your 26nd? And after that, your 33rd?’ And the centipede froze because she had never thought about this. For her it was a natural thing to do. She thought to herself: ‘How do I do that?’ And she wasn't able to move any more. There is a feeling that Russia, like the centipede, in the weeks before New Year froze stock still in bewilderment at herself. She didn't expect that she could do anything like that. She simply did not expect what happened first of all on 10 December, and then on 24 December. She honestly had not thought she was capable of anything like it […]

And the fact is that this bewilderment has been felt both by those who have been the ‘victims’ of what's been happening, and by those who have been its cause and source. In other words, those who did this and those who watched what was happening were bewildered in equal measure (and those who watched also experienced a certain horror). Because the question is, what will happen next? ¹

Before we see what did happen next – the authorities' response, that of the law and order agencies, and of the human rights community – we look, albeit sketchily, at the way citizens, 20 years after the ending of Communist party rule, were creating new ways of acting together. Sometimes, but not often, this was in defence of their rights, as the ombudsman, among others, noted in his reports.

It did not all begin in December 2011. Protest activities over local issues, street actions involving a few dozen to several thousand people, the factual transformation of the President's Council on the Advancement of Civil Society and Human Rights into an opposition, all these had become a fact of public life by 2010. And, the upsurge of informal civic activity, with people beginning to come together en masse in very different initiatives (from charitable giving to defending historic buildings) was already noticeable in 2010.

These, the comments of GRANI, an NGO in Perm, which carried out an extensive survey of social activism in 20 regions, town and villages, and produced a detailed report in 2012, ² echo the observations of activists and others in 2010–11. Among our activists Maria Sereda had suggested in 2010:

Those societies to save cats, young mothers' clubs, they are very important. It has taken twenty years for people to begin to use freedom, not individually, but collectively. Essentially, people have only now begun to understand […] that if they do something together, they can achieve something that did not exist before.

I am very aware of civil society appearing, particularly during the past two years, and quite intensively, it's coming up like grass but not in those places where we watered. It's true, it's only social activity […] People decide for example that if they can get 100 together, and each contributes 100 rubles, they can rent a place where they can have a club and listen to their favourite music in the evenings. We tried to teach people some tools, tried to get them to join NGOs, talked about human rights. And now I have the feeling that until that elementary level of interaction between one citizen and another is reached, all the rest has little point.

Volkov's survey of activists in 2010, which reaches several of the same conclusions as the Perm team, notes: ‘For some of the respondents, their motivation came from the realization that they could improve things in a particular sphere, either in their courtyard or town. They and no one else.’³ People do not wait for a favour from the government but take certain of its functions on themselves. And, in contrast to the attitudes found by Rusakova in her 2006 survey, people act together: Parents join up to pay for sporting facilities for kids, which are then cheaper, or they write a joint letter to the school director on facilities for disabled children.

The GRANI report noted how informal groups, concerned by local issues, anxious to improve the quality of life, for themselves, and for others, had started entering the public space. Their target was not only government departments, and bureaucracy, but ‘society itself – its conventions, stereotypical ways of thinking, customs’ and potential supporters. The circumstances which prompted individuals to take up or engage in such activities could vary wildly – from problems which arose after the birth of a child (no child care) to the purchase of a new apartment (inadequate repair services), to an accident with an official car that failed to stop. What had seemed to be an individual problem turned out to be shared by others. As Aleksei Kozlov, from Voronezh, put it: ‘Through the pursuit of individual interests, a social problem comes to be resolved publicly.’⁴

These local initiatives, sometimes the brainchild of an enterprising individual that attracted interested volunteers, included campaigning against a plan to mine for nickel, collecting Christmas presents for orphans, a search for lost children and helping residents whose roofs had collapsed under a heavy snow fall. Some activities, as noted by Lokshina (in the Introduction), took the form of protests. The GRANI report also draws attention to ‘national campaigns’: the ‘blue buckets’ campaign in which, following a fatal accident, participants across the country installed blue buckets on their cars in protest against official cars using their blue lights to commandeer the central lanes on a highway. In Moscow traffic was brought to a standstill. The spread of forest fires in the dry summer of 2010, when the authorities failed to respond, saw local groups spring into action, coordinating their efforts via the internet. And the flooding in the south, in 2012, brought volunteers flocking down from the north to help. Here the internet played a crucial role. According to one of the respondents, A. Loskutov, from Novosibirsk:

Today the internet is the main means of communication for civic activists, informational support for enterprises and actions is basically provided through networking sites. It's difficult to get on TV, newspapers are no longer that popular, so we are mostly oriented towards the internet.

Internet – it's not just a tool for civic activity, but a part of one's personality. If you want to be recognized by today's generation, you have to get into a network and do something on site, otherwise you just fall behind. There are those who exist and act solely through a site, but they are known to the whole country.

All agree that the internet and mobile phones, by 2010, had transformed connections between people across the country and the opportunities for joint action. In 2011, as we saw, the internet campaign run by Navalny influenced the elections. However, more traditional forms of collective action were also beginning to make themselves felt.

Collective protest had made its appearance intermittently during the past ten years. In 2005 proposals to monetize certain benefits (for example bus passes) brought a wave of protests from pensioners. In 2007–9 a variety of strikes or industrial action gained publicity, most notably a strike over rates of pay, lasting several weeks, at the Ford motor company in St Petersburg, and the blocking of the main road by the workers and their families from the Pikalevo plant, in the Leningrad region, when it was threatened with closure. In this case Putin appeared in person as the saviour of the plant, and was filmed tearing strips off its oligarch owner. The reader may remember that Kovalev, at the Constitutional Forum in 2010, had argued for working together with the independent trade unions. Perhaps that is a place to start.

Labour relations in Russia, since the early Soviet period, have been heavily subject to legal regulation. In 2002 a new, enormously long and detailed Labour Code became law. On paper, employees' rights are many and include all aspects of working activity; in practice the non-observance of conditions, including the non-payment of wages, has been widespread. The ombudsman's report for 2010 drew attention to the passivity of the trade unions, repeating the previous year's comments ‘in almost no case of complaints regarding employment was there any sign of an active part being played by a trade union on the employee's side’. Union passivity, it suggested, may be partly explained by their having fewer rights under the new Labour Code, but also by the attitudes of the FNPR (Federation of Independent Trade Unions of Russia), the successor to the official Soviet trade unions. One would hope, the ombudsman's report states, that the government would welcome the emergence of new, independent, trade unions but ‘on the contrary local authorities often are suspicious of or show poorly concealed hostility to the new unions’. Organizers and activists, and their families, are threatened by ‘unknown’ persons, and neither local authorities nor the FNPR react to this. And then follows a further comment: ‘Employees, whose labour rights are infringed by the employer, are prepared to turn to the president of the country, to the prime minister, almost to the UN, but not to FNPR.’⁵

A group of activist sociologists, who named their group ‘Collective Action’, produced data on 70 strikes in 2009, the majority of which were ‘crisis’ strikes: the stopping of work because of non-payment of wages. This is legal, but there were instances of strikes prompted by the employer's refusal to negotiate over wage rates and conditions, which is not permitted. The Pikalevo action, the authors suggest, spurred others to engage in street action, accompanied by a request (demand?) to the authorities to nationalize the enterprise or, at least ‘to introduce order’ and punish an ‘ineffective’ owner. But all too often, they add, media reporting is minimal, and the protesters lack organizational skills.⁶

Vitaly Drozhzhakov, the trade union activist from Krasnoyarsk who participates in the phone-in network, works for a union in the food processing industry, which belongs to FNPR. As a lawyer, he relies heavily on the courts but, as he explained at the St Petersburg school, there are other tactics too that unionists can and should employ to defend rights. What is his take on the situation? The old Soviet employers, he suggests, think in terms of working together with the unions ‘but our new managers are trained to think that they must put pressure on them’. He and his colleagues create organizations with 30–50 members ‘and with such a group we can break down an entrenched practice, not only in Krasnoyarsk krai but in the whole of Russia’. They led a campaign on the correct payment of overtime, met with management, included the prosecutor, who ‘let us down, said that everything was in order. We then went to the krai procurator, and contacted the Coca-Cola factory in St Petersburg where there is a good organization, who joined up with us.’ And they won the case for all employed in their industry.

In your opinion, I ask, does the trade union defend workers' rights more actively now than five years ago?

Often young people don't have any idea of what a trade union is, and so it's easier to work with them, explain what we are about and what our aims are.

in a Soviet stereotyped way of the union as some kind of a welfare organization, providing passes to holiday resorts, and they ask why we aren't doing that […] Today the unions are probably more active, and people are more clued up, but people come under pressure today, just as they did earlier […] but people now have a quite different attitude towards us. And the employers have begun to take us more seriously. I felt that after the Ford strikes, which didn't pass unnoticed by our employers, they began a more active campaign against the unions.

Volkov's survey also came up with evidence of employers' opposition to union activity, and of changes in employees' attitudes. A prosecutor brought a criminal case against a new trade union chair, and tried to paste a charge of extremist activity on him. A human rights activist suggested that whereas individuals used to come to them and say ‘I am in such and such a situation and I don't know what to do’, now they say ‘I know I am entitled to it but my employer won't give it to me’. Another claimed:

What's important is to know the law and with its help it turns out that you can achieve something. People have changed, you can't hoodwink or frighten them today. The situation is different now, it's changing all the time. I see it from my own experiences.

The Collective Action group concluded that by 2009, while organized collective action was still rare, and pressure and threats from employers usually won out, a small nucleus of perhaps 7–10 per cent of the industrial labour force could now be considered ‘activists’. The great majority of workers still prefer individual and informal methods as a way of defending their interests and rights; they may complain but they do not act. The authors echo comments that we have heard from others – on the general population's submissiveness, the low levels of trust, paternalistic attitudes, the lack of a habit of acting collectively and, they add, a commonly held perception that those who protest are either individuals who cannot make it or extremists. Even activists may consider themselves to be odd, demonstrated by a telling comment from one: ‘And this is all despite that fact that a year ago I was just a normal person.’ It is difficult they suggest, in the face of such cultural habits, to create new cultural codes.

However, at the same time, the Collective Action sociologists are highly critical of liberal intellectuals who see ordinary people's ‘primitive’ beliefs as responsible for the persistence of authoritarian government. Rather, they suggest, it is the political elite (old and new) that has failed to live up to the prescriptions of a new democratic and judicial order and whose behaviour prompts a pragmatic response from its citizens: play by the existing rules. And attention should be paid to the slogans of those who do protest ‘At least observe your own laws’, the demands for ‘justice’ meaning equal rights for all, ‘Down with the arbitrary exercise of power’ (by employers as well as by the authorities), and ‘Put the authorities under the control of the public!’ Moreover, they claim:

An even more challenging call is heard more and more frequently ‘Rights are not given, rights are taken’. [A well-known quote from Maxim Gorky, the early twentieth century novelist and playwright.] This slogan is of an explosive character for the existing system of power, which is based upon the right of the ‘lord’ to grant rights to his ‘serfs’.

The ombudsman's office issues an annual report, based primarily on the letters and appeals it receives from individual citizens; when a case is of significant public concern, other sources of information are consulted. The report aims to direct the attention of state and society to ‘real problems relating to the observance of rights’ that have arisen during the preceding year. As Vladimir Lukin, the ombudsman from 2004–14, himself observes, they should not be seen as providing a picture of rights' infringements across the country; rather they offer us an account of chronic failings, and snapshots of particular issues on which the office has decided to focus. A choice prompted, I suggest, by the political situation, and by events that have made the headlines. As a consequence, the reports are revealing – of a variety of citizens' concerns and of the thinking of a liberal section of the Moscow intelligentsia.

First, the chronic failings. The number of applications made to the federal ombudsman fluctuates⁷ but, in recent years, the majority (perhaps 60 per cent) have been complaints relating to court procedure in civil cases or to treatment in places of detention; roughly a quarter raise social issues, of which perhaps half concern housing for veterans, orphans, and soldiers. Labour cases fluctuate. Very few are political cases. Each year the failings of the court system, the delay in cases being heard, the (un)equal rights of accuser and accused, and the failure to ensure the right to qualified legal counsel make their appearance. The non-implementation of court decisions, at whatever level, is a constant complaint. The failure of local authorities, including the city of Moscow, to observe the decision by the Constitutional Court (in 1996, and again in 1998) that the propiska or residence registration system is unconstitutional, was still being raised ten years later.

The problems relating to the observation of freedom of speech and thought are so numerous that it is unrealistic to deal with them all in one report […] here we deal with only two, frequently met with in our work […] the persecution of those who criticize state authorities and their representatives, and the restriction of freedom of thought and word by the arbitrary use of anti-extremist legislation.

The ‘misuse’ of the 2002 law on ‘extremism’ by judges is a constant target.⁸ Judges, and prosecutors, are also criticized for favouritism shown to government officials and politicians. A perennial problem is that of government departments or employers not meeting their legal obligations. The failure to provide housing for vulnerable groups or, for example, the widespread failure of pharmacies to observe the legislation on price control of basic medications, are cases in point. Too often, however, Lukin suggests in 2010, passive and clientilist attitudes among citizens contribute to the failings of the justice system. His office should not be seen as yet another window for ‘petitions’ rather ‘this new state institution is called upon both to defend the legal rights of citizens and the no less lawful right of society as a whole to become, eventually, a civic rather than a paternalistic society’.

In 2008, the year of the sixtieth anniversary of the Declaration of Human Rights, ‘a historic document which, as is well known, provided the basis for the constitution of the Russian Federation, which proclaims the rights and freedoms of man as its highest value’, the report had dwelt on constitutional rights and freedoms. In 2009 the focus shifted to certain ‘systemic’ and ‘complex’ problems. These included the inadequate pension system, the failure of legal mechanisms to ensure appropriate working conditions or wages, ‘a mass of infringements and even crimes committed by law-enforcement officers against those whom they are meant to be protecting – namely citizens of the Russian Federation’, and the case of Magnitsky, the young lawyer who died in pre-trial detention.

In place of the epigraph ‘The law is stronger than the powerful’ used on earlier reports, Lukin substituted Gorky's epigraph ‘Rights are not given – rights are taken’. His decision was prompted by dismay at the conclusion of two independent experts, in a court case in Novorossiisk, that a poster ‘Freedom is not given, freedom is taken’ was evidence of ‘extremism’ and a call to change the constitutional order by force. Both the poster and his epigraph, he argued:

are intended to alert Russian citizens to the idea that the future of democracy in Russia depends upon citizens and their active participation in public life, and their commitment to realizing their constitutional rights and freedoms within the framework of existing legislation. If such a slogan is extremist, so too are not only the calls by many respected citizens to participate actively in creating civil society, but also the Russian constitution itself.

In his report for 2010 the epigraph was repeated, but this time the preface suggested:

Our popular political culture, inherited from Russia's great, heroic but deeply contradictory history, includes to a significant degree faith in ‘a good Tsar’ – a monarch, general secretary, president – in other words, in any highly placed boss whom one should petition in search of ‘a favour’ or ‘justice’. This archaic belief is a serious obstacle to creating a democratic law-based state, a state whose citizens have shed the pernicious habits of requesting rather than demanding legal rights or of waiting for rights to be bestowed rather than actually realizing them in accordance with the constitution which is, as is well known, a document with direct effect.

But, we might ask, is Lukin himself a stranger to these ‘archaic attitudes’? As Liudmila Alekseeva explains:

When I am approached on behalf of someone who, say, has been remanded in custody on no grounds whatsoever, or something of that sort, I turn to Lukin. He can respond twice as effectively as I can and get something done […] Why is it important that he was a diplomat? Because all his influence stems from his being able to maintain good relations with those at the top, they respect him and support him. Being a diplomat and a clever man, he simply knows when he can convince the authorities of something, and when not. He does not do things that he knows are doomed to failure […] He says honestly that that is something he can't do …

Recently I said to him ‘Vladimir Petrovich, I am very grateful for your help’. A man was dying in a remand prison, and he got him transferred to an ordinary hospital, not even a prison hospital. How did Lukin manage this? He did not fill in a form, which stated that this, and then this should be done. He rang Ivan Ivanovich, and Ivan Ivanovich rang Ivan Petrovich, and so on, and finally the poor man was transferred. We achieve the observance of human rights more often by using non-legal than by legal means. That's the kind of country we are.

But before we start sighing with dismay we should remind ourselves that it is not only in Russia that people use connections, particularly with those in positions of authority, in order to get things done and to avoid having to go to court. The question is one of degree, and who has the authority to grant what kind of requests.

Many interpret justice not as the observance of the same rules for all, but as a wished for exception to be made in his or her personal case […] Given the existence of working democratic institutions, such as free elections, judicial control, constitutional justice and others, citizens have the real potential to participate, autonomously, in defending their rights and freedoms, not depending for this on the discretion of highly placed state officials.

But what if these democratic institutions are not working? What then should citizens do to obtain their rights?

The report criticizes government officials and judges for their response to the peaceful protest meetings organized for the 31st day of the month in support of Article 31 of the constitution. Lukin himself intervened when a list of amendments to existing legislation, which would have made the holding of demonstrations on the 31st of the month even more difficult, was suddenly introduced into the Duma. Most were withdrawn. He attended a meeting in Triumphal Square in Moscow, as an observer, and wrote to the president on what he considered the police's excessive use of force. A violent meeting, with nationalist slogans, that had taken place in December 2010 in the Manezh Square (following the death of a football supporter in which an individual from the North Caucasus was a suspect), brought a rushed statement from the government that the 31st meetings had set an example. Lukin responded that he saw no cause and effect linking the Triumphal Square meetings with the Manezh Square events, which, he concluded, resembled the riots in the Square in 2002 by football fans after Russia's exit from the world cup.

His aim, he suggested, is to be something like an advocate for Russian citizens, defending their rights and freedoms against infringements by state officials, but to do it in such a way so as

not to exacerbate the relationship between citizen and the state, rather to defuse tensions and encourage patience and constructive cooperation […] After a violent and noisy conflict all that remains in a house is broken crockery. And naïve hopes that the broken pieces can be stuck together to make a prettier dinner service.

What do we note so far? On the one hand the behaviour of government officials or the justice agencies corresponds with what we have seen in preceding chapters, and again Russia's citizens are unwilling or hesitant to organize to defend their rights. On the other hand, by 2010 they are engaging in a wide variety of ‘civic’ activities and, in a minority of cases, directly challenging employers, or local or regional authorities. In 2011, but before the protests, Boris Pustintsev had argued:

People in Russia are absolutely apolitical but even they recognize that they have rights. And that feeds not only into economic protests when they don't get paid and they go out on a demonstration. Look at what happened in the campaign against blue buckets. Totally spontaneously people across the whole country began to defend their right to use the roads in a normal fashion. That could not have happened twenty years ago. It's something new, it comes from the fact that the foundation for a law-based state is already laid. Whatever the authorities do, they will find themselves less and less able to cope with each succeeding generation.

M: Where has that recognition of rights, that legal way of thinking, come from? It does not seem to me that the human rights community has played a major role in that process.

P: I would agree. But it has assisted in the process.

Many rights that we call fundamental rights, and not political freedoms, are already part of the air people breathe. Today they may be conformists, join Ours, the Young Guard, and so on. But with each new generation, given the continuation of even today's level of political freedom, when the country is open, when unlimited opportunities for exchanging information exist, each new generation will feel itself more and more assured of its rights, and willing to defend them. It's an inevitable process.

Maybe. But in 2010–11 it was as though the majority of these new social or community activists and volunteers had simply turned their backs on the state. They were making use of the opportunities, the uncontrolled spaces, and inadequate government services, to improve their lives. The different kinds of social activism – their prevalence, geographic distribution, relationship (if any) to one another – are a subject for in-depth study. I am interested in them here as a backdrop to the role or the niche that the human rights community was occupying by the end of our period. What was the relationship between these new forms of social activism and the human rights organizations? Very slight. Connections between the new activism and worker or pensioner protest, independent unions, and the NGO community, including the human rights organizations, were minimal. As the GRANI report noted, these new activists preferred to operate with the safety net of ‘having nothing to lose’; they did not want to spend time and resources on setting up registered organizations; they were more likely to be trusted by the public if they worked on a volunteer basis, spent no money on an office or drew salaries. They might protest, but not, we shall see, in support of the human rights organizations.

Young and old came out on the streets in 2011–12, including those who had never engaged in a public protest before, but the organizers (where there were any) and the speakers tended to be from new fringe political groups or media/ literary figures. In smaller towns, where there was no political opposition, an NGO leader sometimes played a key role; but in the big cities the established NGOs were largely marginalized. This was not their scene. The participants, with their symbols and slogans (a portrait of Rousseau with ‘Let's renew the social contract!’, photos or portraits ‘Kafka for honest elections!, Gogol for honest elections!’, and the writer Dmitry Bykov's brilliant caption ‘Don't rock the boat, our rat is feeling sick!’) were anxious to show that they were different from those who took part in the 31st of the month demonstrations, or traditional politicians and human rights activists.⁹

In this atmosphere, demonstratively apolitical, but with a political subtext, the key human rights organizations, as organizations, stood to the side. Activists participated in the demonstrations, but as individuals, and both Memorial and the Sakharov Centre made their facilities available for discussions on key themes. Arseny Roginsky, from Memorial, suggested:

It did not occur to us that we should participate with our posters and transparencies […] we should have been obliged to take on some organizational responsibilities. But we don't know whom to lead and whither! We know how to defend ourselves, including in a moral sense, but we don't know how to advance, to lead a movement, which has suddenly appeared in a quite different context […] There was no role or place for Memorial, and other established NGOs […] Wait a little, and we shall have a place again […] they will either cut off the oxygen, or society will become apathetic […] we know how to live in a period like that and can do a lot that is useful. But a period of outbreaks and a mass movement forward – that's not our epoch.

And, GRANI argues, that is what has happened and, paradoxically, despite the insignificant role of the NGOs, it is they who have been seen as the chief culprits, and hence the target of the ‘foreign agents’ law. And this in its turn has confirmed the new activists in their view that it is best not to create and register organizations.

Following Putin's re-election to the presidency in the spring of 2012, a demonstration in Bolotnoye Square at the time of his inauguration brought a tough response, and 26 individuals were charged with provoking ‘mass disorder’. Some were held in detention awaiting trial until late 2013 and early 2014, and some sentenced to imprisonment. Poorly drafted legislation, which included punitive fines for participation in unauthorized meetings, the limiting of public places for meetings, the reintroduction of libel as a criminal offence, and amendments to the law on NGOs were rushed through the Duma. The amendments to the NGO law required an NGO that received foreign funding and engaged in ‘political activity’ (undefined) and in ‘influencing policy […] and public opinion’ to register as a ‘foreign agent’. In September USAID (the US funding agency) was asked to leave the country. In October, two-year prison sentences for two of the Pussy Riot demonstrators were upheld.¹⁰

The new NGO law brought vehement denials from NGOs that they were engaged in political activities, i.e. in seeking political power: they were not political parties. All workers' organizations, NGOs, and volunteer-activists kept their distance from ‘politicians’ and thus, they claimed, from ‘politics’. But such a stance, which became more and more disputed, reflects a very narrow and untenable (even for them) concept of ‘political’. They were, after all, aiming to influence public opinion and, in its turn, the behaviour of political authorities, both as regards legislation and its implementation. They were engaged in public criticism, protest, and trying to influence the policy agenda. They were, one can say, acting as responsible citizens in the political life of their country.

The degradation of the electoral system, the corruption within government, and the blatant use of power by unaccountable political rulers led them to try to distance and distinguish themselves from actors in ‘the political realm’. However, Volkov suggested, even those who try to stay out of politics, find themselves being dragged in by the authorities themselves. And Collective Action argued that times were changing: politics is no longer that which occupies the authorities. ‘It is important to emphasize the recognition of what is a new concept of politics for Russian society – politics is a matter for each individual, a shared activity for all who want to influence the fate of their community.’¹¹

Perhaps more than for many others, a characteristic of our country is its very complex and sometimes multi-vectored development. In this respect the past year was no exception. In writing of the year's events, it seems appropriate to remember an old political formula ‘One step forward, two steps back’. Probably only future historians will be able, calmly and objectively, to grasp which of the year's events were the most important and significant for the further development of our society, in particular as regards its legal and human rights aspects.

With these words, and reverting to his original epigraph ‘The law is stronger than the powerful’, Lukin begins the conclusion to his report for 2012. Drawing attention to the increase in voluntary and political activities of some of its citizens, and a conservative reaction both on the part of others and of the authorities, Lukin bewails the tendency to see ‘others’ as ‘enemies’, and calls for a willingness to listen to each other, for tolerance.

There is a great deal in the report on particular rights (and some of the sections – on environmental issues, which includes the building of new airport runways, on the slowness of dealing with migrants' requests for citizenship, on the shortage of kindergarten, or of housing for young people – sound strangely familiar to the English ear) and customary themes reappear. ‘People do not judge a law by its words but by how it is realized in practice. Our Achilles heel is not so much the creation of laws, but their implementation.’ But the report is sharper in tone than earlier ones, taking issue, directly, with new policies or legislative changes.

Lukin mentions that he had to intervene in particular instances, without waiting to receive a complaint. On both the Pussy Riot detentions, and those connected with the Bolotnoye demonstration (where Lukin saw no evidence to justify detaining individuals on the grounds of ‘participating in a mass disorder’), he voiced his disapproval. While welcoming some legislative innovations, he was particularly critical of the speed with which poorly drafted legislation was rushed through the Duma (within two weeks) without proper discussion and, at times, he suggests, of ‘a questionable constitutional’ character. This includes those we listed above. As regards the ‘foreign agents’ NGO law, his report claims:

the extremely wide interpretation of ‘political activity’ threatens to embrace almost all the human rights organizations in the country. Such an interpretation allows any criticism of government institutions to be seen as political activity. But, in a democracy, the movement for human rights a priori has an apolitical character and, characteristically, unites people of very different political persuasions. Such people – they are not enemies but allies of their state, striving to assist it in the correction of its errors, and thus to become better and stronger.

To see critics as enemies, he suggests, is to revert to a Soviet template, inappropriate for ‘our developing democracy’.

How the badly worded law of July 2012 on foreign agents would be implemented was quite unclear, even after it went into force in November of that year. Ministry of Justice officials expressed their concerns. Nothing happened. However, following a public statement made by Putin in March 2013 to a security services gathering that the legislation should be implemented, prosecutors swept or stumbled into action. Officials from the prosecutor's office, tax inspectorate, Ministry of Justice, and sometimes the security services, appeared, often without warning, at the offices of human rights organizations and NGOs across the country, demanding documents, charters, hard discs, budget statements, etc. After a shaky start, the human rights community showed a remarkable solidarity and, despite minimal public support, stood its ground. Here I describe briefly key features of a strange campaign (whose details await a future historian), and whose outcome was still uncertain by the end of 2013.

The people who live in our country hold diverse religious faiths, world views and ideologies. Yes, we differ from those who determine government policy nowadays. Yes, we think and serve our country differently from them. But these differences do not give anyone the right to put us on any ‘foreign agent’ registers. We will not allow ourselves to be struck from the list of respectable Russian citizens and law abiding NGOs. Russia belongs to all of us. We have to learn to live together.¹²

Few would have expected GRANI, Averkiev's Civic Chamber, the Perm Human Rights Centre, and its Youth Memorial to be targeted. And, indeed, this case can serve as an example of a campaign that was so badly orchestrated it defies a coherent explanation. Andropov was surely turning in his grave.

Briefly: over the following months hundreds of organizations were paralysed by visits, inspections, and requests to provide four copies of every conceivable document. A group of 13 human rights organizations turned to the European Court with a claim against the law; Lukin lodged a case with the Constitutional Court. By 20 June, organizations (including the Memorial Human Rights Centre, Chikov's Agora, Public Verdict, the four Perm organizations, two LGBT organizations in St Petersburg, a research centre in Saratov, and Golos, the election-monitoring organization) had received instructions to register as foreign agents. By the end of the year the list of those required to register was much longer, and still being added to (Pavlov's Access to Information was a late addition). None had registered, and the only organizations that, having lost an appeal and facing a substantial fine, were dissolving themselves were Golos and the St Petersburg ADC Memorial (which works on racial discrimination cases).¹³ While the reason for targeting some seemed clear (Golos, monitoring elections, for example), other cases suggested prosecutors and a Ministry of Justice quite unsure how to act, with local leaders' receiving different signals from Moscow. By the end of the year some of those targeted had won their cases against the prosecutor (the four Perm organizations, for example, one of the LGBT organizations), others were still awaiting hearings, or had had them deferred more than once (the Memorial Human Rights Centre). Websites sprung up, plotting the situation across the country, and offering help to organizations.¹⁴

Some officials were threatening; others admitted that ‘we don't know why we are doing this, what the point of it is, we have more important matters we should be dealing with’. According to some activists, ‘Ministry of Justice officials are fed up – it's a law that is so badly worded they don't know how they should apply it.’ The Stork Park in the Amur region of the Far East, home to six of Russia's seven kinds of storks, which received assistance from the International Fund to Protect Storks, on being requested by the regional prosecutor to register as a foreign agent, responded:

We cannot register as a foreign agent not only because we do not have the money for a further audit and reporting but also because we do not consider ourselves to be the agents of any foreign government. We consider ourselves to be agents of nature, or at the least of our storks, and of those who strive to preserve them for our descendants.¹⁵

If legislation is badly worded, and instructions unclear, officials struggle. The lack of a clear line from the Kremlin meant law and order agencies, and judges, were at a loss and sometimes found themselves at cross purposes. They were as confused as anyone else as to what counted as ‘political’. One can imagine the prosecutor in the Stork Park case cursing under his breath as he received its response. And how should one interpret judges' decisions, sometimes in support of the prosecutor, sometimes of an NGO? Were judges sometimes using their own judgement because there were no instructions from above, or were they responding to local or federal pressure? Opinions differed.

Organizations continued to argue their case before the courts, or to make public statements. I quote only two. Egida, a St Petersburg organization that 'provides assistance to employees and socially-vulnerable people for the collective defence of their social-labour rights and interests, and the raising of the level and quality of life in the north-west region' had disputed the legality of the district prosecutor's attempt, accompanied by two security service personnel, to inspect the organization without an authorized instruction from the city prosecutor. At the court hearing, Rima Sharifullina, the young chair, put her case:

Your honour! In your opinion, why is there a mood of protest in society? It's because of the arbitrary acts of officials. Those are words of the President of Russia, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, spoken at his presidential inauguration. Those who hold power, both in his and in our view, must provide support for simple citizens. And the actions of supervisory bodies must be transparent and intelligible to all.

But, your honour, what happens in practice? […] Prosecutors have begun to accuse us who wish to see changes in government policy of being foreign agents. But we are defenders and representatives of pregnant women and mothers […] How can we be agents and criminals if we are providing the most hapless citizens with free legal aid? […] If prosecutors have been given some kind of secret assignment to clear the weeds from the allotment, why is it digging up roses? In reality, we are carrying out the work of the prosecutor, defending our mothers from the arbitrary behaviour of officials and employers. And the prosecutor, by its illegal actions, is attempting to paralyse the socially-useful work of our organization, while at the same time causing great damage to the state, to which we provide assistance. One has the impression that the work of the prosecutor is directed towards undermining authority at the pinnacle of state power in Russia. Thank you for your attention.¹⁶

The best public statement came from the four Perm organizations, part of which was quoted at the beginning of this section. It began with the announcement:

To everyone who knows us, we declare that our organisations will not register as ‘foreign agents’, since neither we nor our organisations are anyone's agents, let alone foreign ones. No one could use us to harm Russia, nor would dare to do so. We are free people who are loyal to our country and we have the honour of working in responsible public organizations that have never been party to the struggle for power. For our organisations, being called ‘foreign agents’ is an offensive lie […]

If we lose every case in court, and our organisations are shut down by the authorities, we will find other legal ways to do what we consider necessary. We will not desist in our active attempts to defend human rights and to act in the pressing public interest, whether that means fighting corruption, assisting the disadvantaged, defending the rights of the exploited and aggrieved or improving the quality and availability of government services.

By the time the NGO law appeared as an agenda item at the President's Council for the Advancement of Civil Society and Human Rights in September 2013, the council had changed its composition. Several leading human rights activists (including Alekseeva, Dzhibladze, Gannushkina and Gefter) had resigned in 2012 in protest at the rigging of elections. Putin had responded with the proposal that internet voting should produce a short list of candidates. It was indeed a strange (and far from transparent) procedure, many refused to participate, but Chikov, Kalyapin, and Andrei Yurov (from the MPD) threw their hats into the ring and were appointed. From the Memorial Society, whose board voted by a majority for continuing participation, Sergei Krivenko remained as a member.

The need for radical amendments to the NGO law was argued by Elena Topoleva, from the Agency for Social Information, a key member of the Civic Chamber. Putin agreed that perhaps the law needed amending and the matter should be addressed. But nothing had materialized by 10 December, International Human Rights Day, when Putin hosted an informal reception for representatives of the human rights community. According to Topoleva, her suggestion that he should repeal ‘this wretched law to mark this special day’ brought a smile, and the response that the law was still needed to prohibit engaging in political activity with foreign money. When asked what counted as political activity, he replied that human rights work did not qualify as such. When pushed further – is political activity then the struggle for power? He replied ‘Yes, but not only that.’ And again he indicated that both sides should work on amendments.¹⁷ Nothing had materialized by the end of the year.

Meanwhile the preceding months had witnessed some unusual developments. Behind the scenes, Fedotov (chair of the President's Council) and Lukin held discussions with representatives of the president's administration on the need to amend the law, and to find Russian funding. If nothing came regarding amendments, suddenly there was money. In the summer, human rights organizations were encouraged to apply for grants from the President's Fund for NGOs, administered by the Civic Chamber, and at the end of August the Memorial Human Rights Centre (awaiting a court hearing on its appeal against the prosecutor's demand that it register as a foreign agent), the Moscow Helsinki Group, Ponomarev's For Human Rights, and Agora had been awarded grants. Then, in September, Putin announced another 500 million rubles (£10m) for human rights organizations to be distributed by a committee, chaired by Ella Pamfilova. There should be no government oversight: ‘independence’, he declared, was essential to civil society activity. A large selection committee was formed; Vyacheslav Bakhmin advised Pamfilova on procedures, and in December many well-known outspoken human rights organizations featured in the list of grantees, including a regional branch of Golos.¹⁸ A few organizations (including the Moscow Helsinki Group) returned foreign funding, but the great majority continued to receive new grants.

Meanwhile legislation criminalizing LGBT propagation of beliefs, directed towards the young, had been passed. In September Navalny was convicted for fraudulent business practices, but then permitted to run in the Moscow mayoralty election, where he received 27 per cent of the vote. Lev Ponomarev's organization was subsequently ejected (physically) from its office, ostensibly by order of the landlord, but then, in a gesture that caused amazement, given a new office by the mayor of Moscow. The Arctic Sunrise Greenpeace crew were arrested and detained. However, in mid-December, under a poorly worded amnesty to mark the twentieth anniversary of the constitution, the Pussy Riot duo (due for release in March), some of the Bolotnoye detainees, and members of the Arctic Sunrise crew joined the several thousand convicted prisoners who obtained release from detention. And suddenly, like a bolt from the blue, as the media was reporting the preparation of a new case against Khodorkovsky and his YUKOS colleagues (due for release in August 2014), Khodorkovsky was pardoned on humanitarian grounds (his mother was sick), flown secretly to Berlin, and talk of a further trial was dropped. In January his colleague, Platon Lebedev, was released.

How can one make sense of this? Did the leadership have a game plan? Some believe that the Sochi Winter Olympics were responsible, not only for the pardons of the internationally known figures but for the contradictory and delaying tactics: once the games were over, and Lukin's term of office came to an end in the spring, any critical, independent activities would be targeted. Government funds would support human rights organizations for a couple of years, foreign funding would diminish, and then government support would cease. Others were less sure that there is agreement on how to govern a society that has recently shown its discontent with its rulers, who now, in their turn, are aware that stifling of independent political and civic activity leaves them ignorant of the views of their citizens. Somehow citizens need to be incorporated into a managed democracy. But how?

It was not that the human rights organizations received public support (in fact disappointingly little) and hence represented some kind of threat to the Kremlin, but the way the campaign had developed (or rather had not) was very unsatisfactory. If the continued receipt of foreign funding by human rights organizations irritated, perhaps angered, the authorities, the state's mechanisms for dealing with such organizations were clearly inadequate. Should or would different measures be taken after Sochi? Opinions differed within the human rights community but there was a striking and surprising solidarity in regard to the foreign agents law – by December 2013 not a single organization had registered as such.

A year later, with a civil war underway in Ukraine, relations between Russia and the west had deteriorated to a degree unknown for twenty years. An analysis of the policies and postures which brought about the armed conflict, and the new cold war, lies outside the scope of this book, but it has had and will continue to have implications for the human rights community.

Briefly, with Putin's popularity enjoying an upsurge from the Crimean adventure, and with western governments' support of the new Kiev government, itself hardly a beacon of neutrality, the tug-of-war over Ukraine endangers not only its peoples and those of neighbouring countries but reduces the likelihood of Russia and the west working together to find peaceful solutions to global problems. The patronizing statements of some western politicians, talk of Ukraine joining NATO and the European Union, and western financial assistance, have only fanned the flames in an environment where the Russian TV carries an unremitting message of Ukrainian aggression, backed by the west, and dwells on the hundreds of thousands of Russian refugees fleeing from the war zone into Russia. Ukrainians, in turn, flee from rebel-held territories or the Crimea to Kievan territory. Denials of military involvement come from the Russian authorities, while the Ukrainian authorities, unable to control hastily formed or volunteer units, deny civilian targeting. Neither sets of assertions are credible. Surely this was a ‘war’ which more far-sighted and competent politicians – in both camps – could have avoided. Meanwhile the sanctions tit-for-tat which has shaken the Russian banking sector and affected the consumer, accompanied by the falling oil price, bodes ill for the economy. The rising living standards of the past ten years are history for many who have become accustomed to them but, for the moment, a siege mentality, and a sense that for too long Russia was treated with condescension by its western ‘partners’, is likely to sustain support for the Kremlin leadership.

Still, from its point of view, why not take some precautions – why not demonstrate that ‘we are in control’? Those who receive ‘foreign funding’ and engage ‘in politics’ are an easy target in this new cold war environment. It is not, we suggest, that the Kremlin sees the human rights organizations as a threat, as the incubators of a future ‘Occupy Red Square’, but they raise awkward questions and, as independent-minded and outspoken critics of government policy, they challenge the new orthodoxy of control.

The ‘foreign agents’ law has been amended: no longer is an organization required to register as such, now the Ministry of Justice has the right to include an organization in the list, and this carries with it more onerous reporting requirements. Fines, and closure, threaten those who do not comply. The St Petersburg Soldiers' Mothers Committee which publicized the fate of young Russian soldiers sent to assist the Donbass ‘Russian’ separatists was quickly added to the ‘foreign agents’ list. By the end of December 2014 the Ministry of Justice’s list included more than 20 NGOs, and among them were those with whom we are acquainted – Agora, Public Verdict, Citizens Watch, Pavlov's Freedom of Information foundation, and, two recent additions, Lev Ponomarev’s For Human Rights, and the Sakharov Centre, and, from St Petersburg, Maria Kanevaskaya's Human Rights Resource Centre. In January 2015 the Committee Against Torture was included. None of these, as the new year opened, had closed. They were continuing to fight their cases through the courts. In January the Supreme Court ruled in favour of the Russian Memorial Society. But the Memorial Human Rights Centre had lost its appeal against being classified as a ‘foreign agent’, and the International Memorial Society (the voice of the Society) may come under attack in the near future. A variety of poorly-drafted and punitive laws which include listing the passing of information to foreign organizations as treason, the widening of the interpretation of ‘libel’ and ‘extremism’, and statements by prosecutors or Ministry of Justice officials that ‘political activity’ includes any criticism of government policy do not bode well for the future. But, while there is an even stronger sense of a leaf turning, of a chapter closing, I do not feel the Conclusion requires re-writing – so, for the reader who has read this far, here it is for you to judge.