NOTES
Introduction
1. See Further Reading for selected sources.
2. There is an extensive literature on the dissident movement, which lies outside the scope of this book. However, two works which directly relate to the theme of ‘legacies’ of the past and human rights are: Robert Norvath, The Legacy of Soviet Dissent (London and New York, 2005), and Benjamin Nathans, ‘The dictatorship of reason: Aleksandr Vol'pin and the idea of human rights under developed socialism’, Slavic Review 66/4 (2007), pp. 630–63.
3. Both Yury Orlov, the founder, and Liudmila Alekseeva, were in the USA.
4. Anatoly Adamishin, and Richard Schifler, Human Rights, Perestroika, and the end of the Cold War (Washington, 2009), p. 93.
5. In Chapter 5 we see the 2001 Congress in action. Data on participants vary in different sources.
6. This, and Orlov's comments are taken from copies of their presentations.
7. I use the word ‘branches’ but these are all autonomous organizations which have chosen to ‘join’ the International Memorial Society. See Chapter 10 for discussion of this issue.
Chapter 1 Perestroika to 1993: Seedbed for Human Rights
1. See Further Reading for more on Kovalev.
2. In the newly constituted Moscow Helsinki Group, Larisa Bogoraz, Sergei Kovalev, Vyacheslav Bakhmin, Lev Timofeev and Gleb Yakunin were from the dissident community, and Liudmila Alekseeva and Yury Orlov, both now in the USA; Genry Reznik, Lev Ponomarev, and Aleksei Simonov were newcomers.
3. The Society's early years are well chronicled: see Further Reading.
4. The Congress of People's Deputies elected a smaller Supreme Soviet whose members sat in permanent session.
5. Mary McAuley, Soviet Politics 1917–1991 (Oxford, 1992), pp. 100–1 includes this account.
Chapter 2 Human Rights Organizations: First Shoots
1. Богораз, Л. И. ред., История, философия, принципы и методы правозащитной деятельности: Сб. материалов семинара Московской Хельсинкской группы “Права человека”, Series 1, edition 2, (Moscow 1995) p. 6. Kovalev, writing at the same time (XX век и мир, 6/91, p. 9) suggested that within the human rights dissident community there had always been the ‘legalists’ (zakonnye) who wanted the laws observed and the ‘politiki’ who wanted radical changes to the political system – but that in the present situation all had thrown themselves into politics.
2. The Chronicle of Current Events was a key underground publication distributed between 1968–83 to which a number of dissidents (including Kovalev) contributed.
3. http://www.prison.org. I am quoting from an early publication, no longer available.
4. Abramkin, suffering from ill health, died in January 2013.
5. Threatened with eviction by a steep back dated rise in rent in 2013. http://mright.hro.org.
Chapter 3 Early Debates Over Rights and Strategies
1. О соблюдении прав человека и гражданина в Российской Федерации в 1994–1995 годах: Доклад Комиссии по правам человека при Президенте Российской Федерации (Moscow, Iurid. lit., 1996). (The observance of the rights of man and citizen in the Russian Federation in 1994–1995. The report of the President of the Russian Federation's commission for human rights.) Trs. Catherine Fitzpatrick.
2. Правозащитники о себя, Бюллетень по правам человека, 1997, №. 9
3. XX век и мир, 1991, p. 6.
4. Между прошлым и будущим (Moscow, independent publ. Pik, 1999), pp. 136, 140–1.
5. And Sachs repeated this, elaborating on the issue, at a London meeting in 2013.
6. A key Western donor, more detail in Chapter 5.
7. The announcement was available on an earlier version of the MHG website.
8. Vyacheslav Bakhmin, a former dissident, imprisoned for his views, worked as programme officer for more than one Western foundation during our period.
Chapter 4 Local Differences, Tackling Isolationism
1. Krai is the Russian term used for some (faraway) regions.
2. ‘Правозащитное движение и механизмы защиты прав человека. Санкт-Петербург, 13–14 июня 1998г’. Stenographic report. Citizens Watch, St Petersburg.
3. See Chapters 10 and 12.
4. I write about this in an article in Разномыслие в СССР и России (1945–2008), ed. B. M. Firsov (St Petersburg, EUSPb, 2010).
5. Since 2011 items have been regularly translated and appear in Rights in Russia: http://hro.rightsinrussia.info/hro-org/parole.
6. See Further Reading for a translation of one of the volumes.
7. To defend Article 31 – the right to demonstrate – see further details in the Introduction.
Chapter 5 Western Assistance, An Extraordinary Congress
1. See Further Reading for some key contributions to the discussion.
2. Western governments' aid programmes: the American government's USAID, National Endowment for Democracy, Eurasia Foundation, and IREX; the British Know How Fund, and Westminster Foundation; the Swedish (SIDA), Swiss (Liberty Road), Dutch (Matra) and Canadian governments' aid agencies. The European Commission had a human rights programme, as did the United Nations' High Commissioner for Human Rights. The Americans dominated among the private foundations: George Soros' Open Society Institute, the Ford Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation all had Moscow offices, as did the German foundations, funded by political parties (the Konrad Adenauer, Friedrich Ebert, Heinrich Boll, and Friedrich Neumann Foundations). Representatives of the Mott Foundation, and the Jackson Foundation paid visits to make grants in the field of human rights and visit grantees. The Sigrid Rausing Trust, based in London, supported human rights, and in 2002 the Oak Foundation appeared. Perhaps somewhere in the order of $10–15 million was awarded annually from 1995–2005, with some of the funding going to the ‘Western partners’, and in grants ranging from $10,000 to several hundred thousand.
3. A further challenge, facing any grant maker, it how to refuse requests. The best advice I was given before starting to work in this field was ‘Just remember that it's unpleasant to have to ask for money, and it's unpleasant to have to refuse it.’ The ability to grant or refuse a request for money puts the grant maker in a position of power, not a pleasant one. This is especially so when you listen, with a sinking heart, to a proposal that you know has not a chance of succeeding (‘I want to transform the legal culture of Buryatiya with a series of brochures that I and my son will write’) but which is of passionate concern to its author who, probably, is living close to the breadline. Of course there are those who are in it for the money, and judgement about people is crucial. But there remain those bearers of unlikely ideas whom you must turn down, gently, and who will never understand why you refused them.
4. Перспективы гражданского общества в России, p. 39, in http://www.levada.ru/books/perspektivy-grazhdanskogo-obshchestva-v-rossii-2011. In later chapters further material is taken from this survey, referred to as Volkov 2011.
5. Marek Nowicki: see http://hro.org/node/181 for photograph and lecture that captures him as teacher. Also http://www.hfhr.pl/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/marek_nowicki_what_are_human-rights.pdf. And for in memoriam: http://www.hro.org/node/2924.
6. Wiktor Osiatiynski, Human Rights and Their Limits (Cambridge, 2009).
7. The details and quotations are taken from the materials distributed to those attending the Congress. Some were published by www.hro.org. Lev Ponomarev subsequently edited and published materials from the congress as Всероссийский чрезвычайный съезд в защиту прав человека. Москва Январь 2001 (Moscow, 2001).
8. ‘The need to invent, rather than reclaim, public space explains in part why the path toward a civil society was so rocky.’ Kathleen E. Smith, Remembering Stalin's Victims (Ithaca, 1996), p. 199.
Chapter 6 The Civic Forum of 2001: To Tango or to Sit It Out?
1. Izvestiya, 10 June 2001.
2. http://kremlin.ru/events/231.html 15 June 2001.
3. http://www.strana.ru/stories/2001.07.11.
4. http://RIAN.ru, 23 June 2001.
5. Nezavisimaya gazeta, 16 November 2001.
6. Obshaya gazeta, no. 43, October 2001.
7. Center for Pluralism newsletter, Winter 2002, pp. 15–16.
8. Elena Koval at a conference in December 2000 organized by Vyacheslav Igrunov, which brought academics and a few activists together; the following quotation by Kiril Kholodkovsky, is taken from a similar conference hosted by the Ebert Foundation in March 2001.
9. Z. Svetova, Novye izvestiya, 20 September 2001.
10. Exceptions were Leonid Gordon (IMEMO) and Alexander Gorelik (Krasnoyarsk).
11. A curious informal activity, spawned by a shortage economy.
12. Sergei Markov in interview with Elena Topeleva, Agency for Social Information, 3 September 2001.
13. Yury Dzhibladze, a young doctor at the time of perestroika, whose interest in non-violent campaign tactics and good English had taken him first to the Eurasia Foundation as a grant-maker, then to Columbia University, to study human rights, was now running his own organization Democracy and Human Rights. For more detail, see Chapter 8.
14. Izvestiya, 2 November 2001.
15. Izvestiya, 13 November 2001; Nezavisimaya gazeta, 16 November 2001.
16. Novye izvestiya, 20 November 2001.
17. Nezavisimaya gazeta, 16 November 2001.
18. Правозащитное движение сегодня: проблемы и перспективы (Moscow, Demos, 2005), p. 127. We come back to this, with more detail, in Chapter 7.
19. Nezavisimaya gazeta, 18 November 2001
20. 30 Oktyabr, no. 20, 2001
21. Moskovsky komsomolets, 22 November 2001
22. Novye izvestiya, 20 November 2011
23. Nezavisimaya gazeta, 24 November 2001; Novye izvestiya, 27 November 2001 (referring to a well-known line from Galich, a song-writer: ‘write to us, write to us, and we'll read what you write, and we'll read what you write’).
24. Some were invited but refused (for example, Pustintsev).
25. The Telegraph, 19 January 2012.
Chapter 7 Activists and Popular Attitudes
1. The organizing committee, apart from themselves, included members of the original dissident community (Alekseeva, Daniel, Roginsky), perestroika activists (Averkiev, Dzhibladze, Gefter, Yurov), those of a post-Soviet generation (Taubina, Shvedov), and Elena Topoleva (Agency for Social Information). The conference proceedings were published as Правозащитное движение сегодня: проблемы и персепктивы (Moscow, Demos, 2005). All quotations, including that by Korotaev, above, are taken from pp. 83–143 (which include the survey materials presented to the participants) and recommendations.
2. Levada Centre surveys: see www.levada.ru/arkhiv. Interestingly enough, law students in the late nineties, attending summer schools, when asked to draw up a bill of rights for a community, usually failed to include ‘right to a fair trial’. Some of the Levada material is included, or referred to in the 2005 volume, and also by Rusakova (see below).
3. T. P. Gerber, S. E. Mendelson, How Russians think about Human Rights, Ponars Policy memo no. 221, 2002.
4. Е. Русакова, ‘Внешний имидж и общественная поддержка’ (2006), www.hro.org/files/Rusakova.pdf.
5. Conference materials (2005), p. 143: Rusakova (2006, p. 4) quoting Levada survey 2005.
6. I am here summarizing points made in his article in Civitas, 1 (2003), pp. 22–3.
7. Conference materials (2005), pp. 86–7; 127.
8. A popular view, as summarized by Rusakova (2006).
9. 2004 conference materials; Ella Paneakh, ‘EU Human Rights Policy towards Russia’, The EU-Russia Centre Review 16 (2010), pp. 36–40.
10. Quoted by Rusakova.
11. Small grants programme referred in Chapter 5.
13. Volkov, 2011, p. 37.
14. http://www.msps.su/. Originally the Moscow School of Political Studies, set up in 1992, the School renamed itself in 2013, following an investigation by the procuracy under the foreign agents law. See the website for its many activities.
Chapter 8 Army and Police Reform
1. See Further Reading both for the social movements’ literature and for the topics covered in these chapters.
2. My apologies if I have wrongly remembered her name.
3. In his report for 2012 (see Chapter 12), he takes up certain issues involving the use of conscripts.
4. Brian D. Taylor ‘From Police State to Police State. Legacies and Law Enforcement in Russia’, in Mark Beissinger, Stephen Kotkin (eds), Historical Legacies of Communism in Russia and Eastern Europe (Cambridge, 2014), quotations from pp. 135, 145–6.
5. Taylor's 2006 article (see Further Reading) provides more detail on both this, and INDEM's projects, and on the crisis centre in Ekaterinburg.
6. Federal Law No. 18-FZ, 10/01/2006, followed by Decree No. 212 of 15/04/2006. NGOs were required to register both with the tax authorities and with a new agency, the Federal Registry Service, and to submit in much more detail their sources of funding, expenditure, planned activities, and current activities; failure to submit an annual report, on time, could being disbandment; requests for further documents could be issued at any time. The FRS could also refuse to register, and hence close an organization. Elena Klitsunova, Promoting Human Rights in Russia by supporting NGOs. Centre for European Policy Studies, Working document, no. 278, 2008 (http://www.ceps.eu).
7. Volkov 2011, pp. 44–5.
8. Полный текст ‘Анализ нарушений прав человека сотрудниками российских правоохранительных органов’, http://publicverdict.ru/topics/research/analiz.html.
9. See http://eng.publicverdict.ru/topics/library/7388.html for the memorandum on the Concept of Police Reform, and http://publicverdict.ru/topics/reform/8690html.
10. http://publicverdict.ru/topics/news/8530html.
11. http://publicverdict.ru/topics/reform/8690html.
12. The report on this meeting, 10 April 2012, no longer appears on the Council's Kremlin website. For a condensed version, http://publicverdict.ru/topics/seminars/10167.html.
13. Volkov, 2011, p. 32.
Chapter 9 Prison Inspectors, Juvenile Courts, Domestic Violence and Refugees
1. Четверикова И. В, ‘Институционализация общественного контроля соблюдения прав человека в местах принудительного содержания (в рамках набдюдательных комиссий)’ (EUSPb, diploma thesis, М.А., 2011) has a good chapter on the background to the legislation, and an analysis of commission reports.
2. Z. Svetova, Novye Izvestiya, 20 November 2001.
3. These included remand centres, and colonies, the detention centres (under the police), the places of detention and punishment under the security services and armed forces, and the special schools under the ministry of education.
4. A commission should have a minimum of five and a maximum of 20 unpaid members recommended by affiliated organizations (e.g. ex-prison officers, veterans), by social or human rights NGOs which had existed for five years or more; a list (with no more than two from any one organization) should be submitted to the (federal) Civic Chamber, which would determine the final choice for each regional commission. Members must be 25 years or older. NGOs should support their members financially. Their term of office was to be two years (reset in 2011 at three years). The commissions should report, in detail, to the Civic Chamber each year. One sighs to see that an institution was created, with very complex rules – a pocket book for the commission member, produced by Babushkin, makes daunting reading – one whose reporting procedures can only encourage the hapless commission secretary to tick boxes and claim all kinds of imaginary visits and outputs.
5. Novaya gazeta, 1 January 2013; see also http://ovdinfo.org/news/2013/11/01/obnarodovany-novye-sostavy-onk-pravozashchitniki-ne-v-bolshinstve.
6. A recent case, where the prison governor is only now on trial for the abuse prisoners were subject to, demonstrates the limits to monitoring, and the testimony of the Pussy Riot duo witnesses to practices that continue.
7. However, as we see in Chapter 11, the Voronezh activists have developed some innovative approaches.
8. Дети в тюрьме, issue 1, Moscow Centre for Prison Reform, 2001.
9. I have written at length on juvenile justice in Russia and England and Wales (see Further Reading) and here draw from these publications. For an up-to-date account on Russia, see L. M. Karnozova, Responses to infringements of the law by young offenders in the Russian Federation, in the third International Crime and Punishment Film Festival. Juvenal Justice. Academic papers, ed. Prof Adem Sozuer (Istanbul, 2013).
10. http://rusk.ru/ 17 December 2007; http://r-v-s.su/.
11. Справка по результатам обобщения информации судов субъектов РФ об использовании ювенальных технологий судами общей юрисдикции, подготовленная Рабочей группой при Совете судей РФ по вопросам создания и развития ювенальной юстиции в системе правосудия РФ: unpubl.memo.
13. Human Rights Watch has focused on these issues in a letter of 16 January 2014 to the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights of Migrants: http://www.hrw.org/news/2014/01/16/russia-letter-un-special-rapportuer-human-rights-migrants-and-un-independent-expert.
14. For an interview with Gannushkina on Radio Svoboda, translated into English, see: http://hro.rightsinrussia.info/hro-org/migrants-1.
Chapter 10 Past And Present: The International Memorial Society
1. Beissinger and Kotkin, ch.1, pp. 1–27.
2. Между прошлым и будущим, p. 191.
3. An interview with Roginsky from http://www.colta.ru (31 January 2014), titled ‘What is Memorial?’, translated in Rights in Russia (10 February 2014). It is even more complex than this. The International Society has individual members as well as organizations (registered as legal entities); the Russian Memorial Society, which exists on paper but does not undertake any funded activities, includes both the registered and some non-registered organizations. Long and wearisome negotiations with the Ministry of Justice over the status of the Russian Society (which is a separate legal entity from the International Memorial Society) and changes to the Civil Code persuaded the Society to redraft both charters in 2014. Not surprisingly Western commentators confuse ‘the Russian Memorial Society’ with ‘the International Memorial Society’, which, as of the end of 2014, was not under threat. See http://www.hro.org/node/20981 for statement by Elena Zhemkova, 17 November 2014, hro.org/node/20619 for the detailed legal explanation, and hro.org/node/21243 for the January court case.
4. See Chapter 11.
5. This, a successful and popular project, based on the well-established EUStory, which started in Germany funded by the Korber Foundation, and which produces fascinating essays (within a few years over 1,500 were coming in each year), has its local winners as well as those who make it to Moscow to collect their prizes as national finalists. It is too early to say whether its young participants or their teachers will go on to influence the teaching or understanding of history in their localities, and more widely, attitudes to historical memory. The project did bring many local organizations together but brought them no closer to the human rights activists working on Chechnya.
6. Sarah E. Mendelson and Theodore P. Gerber, ‘Activist Culture and Transnational Diffusion: Social Marketing and Human Rights Groups in Russia’, Post-Soviet Affairs (2007) 23, 1, pp. 50–75.
7. http://Colta.ru interview.
8. See Chapter 6 for Podrabinek on the Civic Forum.
9. See Chapter 4 on leaders leaving office feet first.
10. Is it the same in Germany or Italy I wonder? It would be interesting to compare the impressions of observers from, say, Italy, Sweden, Argentina and the USA to see what that might tell us of different political cultures.
Chapter 11 Young Lawyers Step Forward
1. Protocol 14, ratified by the Duma in 2010, has brought some relief, and a reduction in numbers coming from all the countries, including Russia. ECHR website www.echr.coe.int.
2. See Further Reading, Bowring in particular.
3. See Further Reading.
4. See Chapter 4 for Nikitin, Chapter 6 for Pasko.
5. Although, see Chapter 12, Pustintsev thought the process was now well underway.
6. In the summer of 2014 Pavlov’s wife’s resident status in Russia was unexpectedly annulled; she left at short notice, with their child, for Prague.
7. Volkov, 2011, pp. 21, 49.
8. Maria Sereda has since moved to work for Amnesty in Moscow.
9. Правозащитное движение сегодня (Moscow, Demos, 2005), p. 101.
Chapter 12 Twenty Years On: Human Rights, Society and Politics
1. January 2012, Interview for Rights in Russia: http://www.rightsinrussia.info/archive/interviews-1/simonov.
2. ‘Российский неполитичный активизм: наброски к портрету героя’. The research, funded by the Mott Foundation, was carried out between March and November 2012, and covered a range of issues, as well as localities, and urban/rural differences. Http://www.grany-center.org/catalog/analiz/details_849.html Quotation, p. 55.
3. Volkov, 2011, p. 19; further quotations from pp. 23–4, 39, 42.
4. Future quotations from GRANI are taken from pp. 14, 22–3.
5. We draw on the annual reports presented by the Federal Ombudsman's Office for 2008–2012, available on http://ombudsmanrf.org/doklady.
6. Carine Cleman, Olga Miryasova, Andrei Demidov, От обывателей к активистам. Зарождающиеся социальные движения современной России. Trikvadrata, Moscow, 2010. All quotations are drawn from pp. 234–9, 250, 315, 348–50, 610–12.
7. 57,000 in 2010, 24,000 in 2012. The number of appeals is not large for a country the size of Russia, and there is no way of knowing when turning to the ombudsman is seen as worthwhile. The introduction of ombudsmen by the majority of the subjects (regional authorities) of the Federation – 71 in all by 2012 – surely also affects the federal figures.
8. The SOVA Center for Information and Analysis (www.sova-center.ru) monitors and reports on the use of anti-extremist legislation, and on incidents involving racism and xenophobia.
9. I am drawing on GRANI, pp. 53–8.
10. The events were extensively covered in the Western press. For the NGO ‘foreign agents’ law, the most important piece of legislation for the human rights organizations: Federal law No 121-FZ 20 July 2012. ‘О внесении изменений в отдельные законодательные акты Российской Федерации в части регулирования деятельности некоммерческих организаций, выполняющих функции иностранного агента’ // «Российская газета», 23 July 2012.
11. Volkov, p. 39; Collective Action, p. 612.
12. Statement by 4 Perm NGOs 20 May 2013. Translation from Rights in Russia, Weekly update 21, 27 May 2013.
13. The law required the NGO to make the request to register; its refusal could result in heavy fines, and closure. The procurator could require changes to a charter, impose administrative penalties, issue a warning. For a detailed account, and of individual organizations, see the Human Rights Watch website: http://www.rightsinrussia.info/international-comment/hrw-13 and further updates.
14. http://closedsociety.org/.
15. http://kremlin.ru/news/19146.
16. http://spb-egida.ru/story/rima-sharifullina-prokurature-esli-im-poruchili-ubrat-sornyaki–to-zachem–je-korchevat-rozyi Bold in the original.
17. http://www.hro.org/node/18258.
18. http://www.civildignity.ru/ru/application-results.
Conclusion
1. Между прошлым и булущем. independent publ. Pik, 1999, p. 119.
2. See Further Reading, Donnelly, pp. 204–6.
3. For the Russian reader, Vladimir Pastukhov ‘Конституция несуществующей России’, http://www.polit.ru/article/2014/03/29/constitution/ may be of interest.
4. Without in any way depreciating the courage of LGBT activists, it is the actions of their vociferous political opponents that have recently made their cause widely known and publicized.