The Dictator's Learning Curve: Inside the Global Battle for Democracy (5 page)

In fact, the need for reliable, independent information is so great the party doesn’t even trust that its own members will give it the unvarnished truth. In July 2010,
United Russia announced a new center for analysis that is intended to identify and focus on the country’s “newly dissatisfied.” Ruslan Gattarov, a thirty-three-year-old United Russia representative and head of this center, told a Russian news agency that the purpose of this organization will be to “collect information which the governors and mayors are hiding.” The party has felt compelled to create its own watchdog to report to the Kremlin on the public’s frustration, resentment, and discontent, things it fears are not moving up the chain of command or are even being covered up. “Speaking crudely, the regional and municipal powers frequently do everything [they can] to keep quiet about problems in order that nothing about them will leak out,” Gattarov told the reporter. “And who do [members of the public] blame for [the problems]? … Our leader Putin and our President Medvedev.” The flip side of centralizing so much in the hands of so few is that the regime cannot assume that
its political opponents, a free press, or local NGOs will draw its attention to the problems that must be solved—because these critics have already been sidelined. The burden rests squarely on the Kremlin and its ability to come up with new ways to get the information it needs.

After I mention some of the evidence for the country’s incredible centralization of power, I ask Popov an obvious question: Is the Kremlin in control of too much, and couldn’t this be dangerous for the country’s stability?

A faint smile passes across Popov’s face. He reaches for a pencil and a clean sheet of paper. “Any process, as you know, has two vectors of development. Questions and problems may occur all the time. But let’s see what forces are prevailing.” As he says this, Popov begins to draw a graph on the piece of paper. He draws a vertical line and then bisects it with a dotted horizontal line. Where the lines meet, he marks as point zero. As he continues to talk—or it may be more accurate to say, lecture—it becomes apparent that this senior member of the Duma is actually going to graph the state of Russian democracy for me.

“I just want to say that many of the democracies are threatened with going back to totalitarianism or authoritarian regimes,” Popov continues, without a hint of irony. “For Russia it is not possible. It is not possible even theoretically. Very slowly, very gradually, the influence of the civil society grows, and I can definitely tell you that the factor of public opinion is different from what it was ten years ago. Any power instinctively avoids critics and influence or pressure. Nobody likes it.”

He draws two arrows, both starting from zero. One arrow rises above the dotted horizontal line, the other drops below it at the same angle. He labels the rising arrow civil society. The arrow falling below the dotted line is the government. “So, as I said, there are two vectors which influence each other. From my point of view, if we build this, then the result will be here.” Popov is pointing at the dotted horizontal line. “It’s the vector of democracy development.”

In Popov’s diagram, the country’s political direction is to be arrived at by the contending forces between civil society and the government. Each acts as a pressure on the other, and the end result, he says, is a relatively healthy line of progress right down the middle.

It is a reasonable enough formulation—if we could only agree on the degree of the angles for the lines going up or down. On the graph, Popov has Russian political dominance marked at a mild 10 to 20 degrees. I suggest that many people would object to his rendering, that even much of the Russian public would say that the government is more authoritarian than he has allowed here. I point to a spot on the graph that would be roughly 60 degrees. Popov sits up in his chair and barks, “So what?”

For a moment, I’m not exactly sure how to respond.

As he stares at me, a few more seconds pass. He then repeats, “The opposition is weak, the government’s voice is powerful—so what? … We’re not talking about authoritarian or totalitarian regimes. We just say that the system is developing.”

He returns to the graph and scribbles some more lines, now circling the number 30. “The government understands,” he continues, ratcheting his voice down, “that you cannot go beyond 30 degrees. If you go down to 45 degrees, for instance, you can just slip off the opposition like a clock pendulum. So the government needs to control itself.”

“What is the guarantee that the government will control itself?” I ask. “History shows that governments do a very poor job of controlling themselves, especially when there are fewer and fewer people who have to show that responsibility.”

“Well, you can never be confident in anything!” he says indignantly. He pushes his chair away from the table, signaling that our time together has come to an end. “We have an expression here. ‘Even an insurance policy doesn’t guarantee you anything for 100 percent, because insurance companies always look for a way not to pay.’ ”

He takes the piece of paper, which by now has lines, circles, and scribbles going this way and that, and signs it with a flourish across the bottom. “There, my autograph. An original work.”

Despite his attempt at near-scientific precision, it’s absurd to imagine the forces of government and civil society locked in anything that comes close to a fair fight. In Russia, these are not equal and opposite forces that, having collided, arrive at some reasonable middle ground. The Russian government has literally licensed its civil society, denying permits to the groups it finds most troublesome or inconvenient.
There may be no way in which the regime has shown more creativity than in the methods it has concocted to warn, reprimand, or bar organizations from conducting work it believes poses a threat. “
There are a lot of instruments of control, even the fire department,” one Moscow activist told me. “Fire inspections are a very popular tool.”

The European University in St. Petersburg learned this lesson in January 2008. That month, local authorities visited the school to conduct what was believed to be a routine fire safety inspection. Despite having passed previous inspections, on this visit the university was cited for fifty-two violations. The university, like many in St. Petersburg, is partially housed in historic, centuries-old buildings; it’s simply impossible for some buildings to be brought up entirely to code. But the authorities were unmoved in their judgment; on February 7, the district court ordered the university to be immediately closed, even though it was in the middle of the semester. All instruction had to stop at once. The university took steps to correct twenty of the violations almost overnight and appealed the court’s decision to no avail. In truth, the problem had never been whether fire ladders were available or whether the exits were clearly marked. The university’s mistake occurred months earlier when it accepted a $900,000 grant from the European Union to fund research on election monitor training. The grant had drawn the ire of people like Gajimet Safaraliev, a United Russia member of the Duma, who told the local press that the funds amounted to “
interference by a foreign quasi-government into Russia’s 2007–2008 electoral campaigns.” And this wasn’t just any election season: Putin was expected to pass the presidential baton to Dmitri Medvedev on March 2. On March 21, nearly three weeks after the presidential election, the government allowed the university to reopen its doors. The university’s election research was suspended, and the regime’s warning was heard clearly: this was not a topic for study.

Far subtler is the way in which the regime can co-opt or manufacture a civil society of its own. Among authoritarian governments, Russia has been at the forefront of one particular innovation—the GONGO. GONGOs are, as the acronym suggests, government-operated NGOs. These organizations typically profess to be independent entities and may hide behind innocuous-sounding names that
suggest that their chief mission would be human rights, legal reform, or the protection of minorities. In truth, their goal is to legitimize government policy, soak up foreign funding from genuine NGOs, and confuse the public about who is in the right, the government or its critics.

Take, for example, the Moscow Bureau for Human Rights. It is led by a member of the Public Chamber named Alexander Brod. By most accounts, Brod’s organization, which claims to be focused on fighting xenophobia and racism, did not begin as a GONGO. Many would say that even today the organization does some good work, publishing material on the danger of neo-Nazi and fascist groups. But somewhere along the way the organization’s statements started to shift, until it began to appear more interested in supporting the interests of the regime than anything else. As one U.S. State Department official told me, “
The term ‘Gongolization’ was invented for Brod.”

For Tanya Lokshina, the Moscow deputy director of Human Rights Watch, this became clear on the eve of a report her organization planned to release on Ingushetia, a violent corner of Russia’s north Caucasus region. Lokshina’s report detailed the abductions, executions, acts of torture, and forced disappearances that had occurred there. Ahead of the report’s release, Brod himself traveled to Ingushetia and met with local officials there. By the time Human Rights Watch held its press conference for the report, Brod had already announced his own press event—to be held with the government’s ombudsman for Ingushetia. “
The only message from his press conference was clear and simple: Human Rights Watch was lying about everything,” recalls Lokshina. “How do you figure out who to trust? He’s been there, he’s done it, he’s got the T-shirt. That is a very particular, sophisticated feature of this authoritarian regime.”

According to several activists I spoke with, Brod repeated this pattern a few months later when war broke out between Russia and Georgia over South Ossetia. Brod was there again—on the scene—echoing the government’s most dubious claims about ethnic cleansing committed by the Georgians. I went to meet with Brod in his spacious, if spartan, office at the Public Chamber, and he of course would not characterize himself as the head of a GONGO. He spoke slowly and in a measured way that often omitted important details to give the
best possible gloss to Russian politics, as it is practiced. (For example, Brod told me straight-faced that all political parties were guaranteed equal access to television airtime. When I pressed him, he qualified his statement by saying this was true of parties that were registered to participate in presidential elections. Which might be persuasive unless you knew how effectively the Kremlin had barred liberal and other unwanted parties from registering or fielding candidates.) Ultimately, Brod explained his activity with a familiar rationale, saying, “
The activity of an NGO is not really possible without making good contact with government people, without meeting with them, without consultations, without expertise, without discussion, without all of this.”

Of course, what gives the biggest lie to the lines and angles on Popov’s graph is the number of journalists and human rights activists who have been murdered for their attempts to unearth the truth. Despite the Kremlin’s continued pledge to protect activists and journalists from these threats, very few have been punished for the killings in the past decade.
According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 2010 was the first year since 1999 without a targeted murder of a Russian journalist. Since 2000, nineteen journalists have been killed. In the past year, journalists have been beaten and threatened for covering topics deemed politically sensitive. And the government’s record for chasing down those who harass or murder members of the human rights community is no better. “Attacks and beatings have become almost routine,” says Lokshina. “People are concerned. People are looking over their shoulder. I mean, I am.”

For Lokshina, the risks that come with fighting for human rights are not abstract. “2009 was an absolute disaster; it was just the most tragic year for Russia’s human rights community,” she says. “So many people were killed—someone like Natasha Estemirova, who was very well-known, Stanislav Markelov, and that young girl Anastasia Baburova. That was at the very start of the year.” Lokshina can count friends among the murdered. Natasha Estemirova, a leading researcher for the human rights group Memorial, was her best friend. Estemirova’s reputation extended beyond Russia. She won numerous international awards for her work, including one named for the Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, another fallen friend who was executed as she
entered her Moscow apartment building in 2006. Estemirova was considered a meticulous, crusading human rights researcher and activist, always drawn to the toughest places. In Russia, that meant war-torn Chechnya. On July 15, 2009, she was abducted outside her home in Grozny. Witnesses at the scene would later tell investigators that they saw a woman being thrown into a sedan, yelling, “I’m being kidnapped!” Later that day, she was found on the side of the road in a neighboring republic, shot dead. Shortly after Estemirova’s murder, Lokshina wrote in the
Washington Post
about how she and Natasha had attended the funeral of Stanislav Markelov, a human rights lawyer, earlier in the year. “
We sat at my kitchen table talking into the wee hours about Markelov and Politkovskaya and speculating about who would be next.” She hardly expected it would be her friend sitting across the table from her.

Lokshina and her husband, Alexander Verkhovsky, have had numerous death threats. Like her friend Natasha, she has been doing research on Chechnya for many years. Her husband is the director of the SOVA Center for Information and Analysis, a Russian NGO that monitors hate crimes, racism, and xenophobia. Just a few days before I arrived in Moscow, a senior judge was assassinated in a contract-style killing inside the stairwell of his downtown apartment building; the judge had handed out heavy sentences to ultranationalist and neo-Nazi groups. The government is concerned about the growing levels of violence tied to such extremist groups, but critics note that its past policies which have stirred up nationalist fervor while repressing Russian civil society have helped spawn the problem. Because of these threats, Lokshina and Verkhovsky have had to change apartments to find a place with better security that is not listed in the phone book. Lokshina claims it’s not just because of the sensitivity of her work at Human Rights Watch. “It’s because of his work as well. Basically, we have had quite a few visits paid to us by skinheads who have a thing for him,” she says, smiling. “We are quite a hazard.”