Ilia Zharikov drives a small, white delivery truck in the provincial Russian town of Ryzan, about two hours outside of Moscow. For the most part, the 24-year-old former army cadet told me when I met him last year, life is good. He lives with his girlfriend and is planning on getting married in a year or two, dependant of course on whether he can save some money. But for now, Zharikov is preoccupied with other matters -- namely prosecuting the military commander, who, after an all-night bender, shot and killed Zharikov's younger brother in November 2005.
The Russian army is legendary for dedovschina, or extreme hazing and torture. Last year, 16 soldiers were officially listed as killed in hazing incidents and 276 others committed suicide. But over 1,000 servicemen died in various "crimes and incidents," which human rights activists say are really abuse cases. The abuse in the military and the mandatory two-year draft are two of the main human rights issues in Russia. Zharikov said that while he knows many stories of extreme hazing, he still can't believe his only brother was a victim.
Zharikov had heard of Memorial, a national nongovernmental organization with a regional bureau in Ryzan, at the time of his brother's death, but he wasn't quite sure what its lawyers could do to help him or whether he could afford their services. He visited the cramped office, housed in a dilapidated apartment project on a quiet side street. Once there, Zharikov learned that Memorial's lawyers work for free and would help him prosecute the military commander for murder. The commander pleaded insanity, one of the most common and effective defense strategies in cases of military abuse. It is almost unheard-of to successfully prosecute a high-ranking military officer in Russia for abuse and hazing.
But on the same day I visited Ryzan, Zharikov learned that the commander's defense plea of insanity had been rejected by the judge. With the insanity plea no longer an option for the accused officer, Zharikov and his lawyers believe that they will have a fair trial and may actually get a guilty verdict, although they aren't sure how severe the sentence would be. Still, the relative success of the case has convinced Zharikov that NGOs, especially ones like Memorial that fight for human rights, are a necessity in Russia today. "They should of course be in every town, but they should also be near every military base so that any soldier, any military man can address someone for help if anything happens," he said.
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But an expansion of human rights organizations like Memorial is unlikely to happen anytime soon. Instead, such groups are facing a crackdown on their work in the wake of a new law passed last year that dramatically restricts the independence of NGOs across the country.
Every one of the estimated 450,000 NGOs in Russia is now required to follow the dictates of a new government agency staffed by intelligence and security agents. Registration with the new agency is a Byzantine process that often allows the agency to reject the legality of the NGO for an obscure technical reason. During the first week of the registration process once the law took effect, the agency temporarily suspended the activities of several large international human rights groups, like Human Rights Watch, until they could be properly registered. NGOs that deal with sensitive issues, like the war in Chechnya, are facing the worst pressure, with some no longer being allowed to register. Once registered, the NGOs are subject to the agency's scrutiny. Meetings are to open to agency officers and all foreign funding must be listed.
The law is part of the larger crackdown on democracy, human rights, and press freedom in Russia. In October, famed human rights journalist Anna Politkovskaya was gunned down in her Moscow apartment building days before she was to publish an exposé on government-sanctioned torture in Chechnya. Politkovskya earned her fame for reporting on human rights abuses in Chechnya. She was no stranger to death threats, but as she told me in late 2005, it was her duty to report on the loss of democratic freedoms in Russia. "It's absolutely forbidden to cover democratic activities," she said in a phone interview from her home in Moscow. "It's a special Russian theory that if you can't change the whole world, you need to do some little things to help specific people. Russian journalism was and now is the possibility to help people first of all in their everyday life." Politkovskaya's death was a huge blow to activists lobbying for an independent press, human rights protections, and other democratic norms.
Then, weeks later, Kremlin critic and former spy Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned in London. (Litvinenko had said he was investigating Politkovskaya's death.) The poisoning brought Russia back into the spotlight, with newspapers around the world dissecting all the possible theories behind the murder. British Prime Minister Tony Blair vowed to make the investigation a top priority, sending a team of investigators to Moscow to interview subjects. But Putin rejected any calls for extradition and largely suppressed the story at home. Indeed, some prominent broadcasters suggested that Litvinenko had poisoned himself, committing suicide and trying to pin his death on Putin to discredit him.
As the murder held the world's attention around the world, the Kremlin calmly resumed its plan to dismantle the country's network of NGOs, the remaining independent voices in Russia following Moscow's crackdown on private news sources and purging of political opposition in the Duma.
The assaults continue. Two more journalists at Novaya Gazeta, the paper for which Politkovskaya reported, have received death threats. The leader of the Russian-Chechen Friendship Society, which operates an information service out of Chechnya, is currently facing jail time. An appeal to keep his organization was formally rejected this month by the Supreme Court. Memorial is locked in an almost constant state of litigation. The organization's work in promoting public awareness of torture in the military and human rights abuses in Chechnya have earned it the particular scorn of the new NGO agency and the Kremlin, which does its best to suppress any negative news about Chechnya.
Last year, as Zharikov was debating whether to file a case against the commander that killed his younger brother, a well-known and respected NGO called the Committee of Soldiers' Mothers was taking the military to task for the abuse of a soldier in the Siberian city of Chelyabinsk after local doctors alerted the group of a military cover-up. Pulling on all of its resources, the group brought the story to national attention, leading to calls for the resignation of Russian Defense Minister Sergey Ivanov.
At the same time, state television released a series of alleged documentaries showing supposed Russian spies collecting information from hidden rocks in a public park. The spies were accused of collaborating with two British embassy staffers. The Kremlin drew a connection between the spy scandal and the country's NGOs, accusing the British government of funneling funds to 12 NGOs to carry on anti-government activities in the government. Putin said that the scandal proved NGOs were up to no good in Russia. "The money stinks," he said, arguing that the law is necessary to keep foreign governments from interfering in Russian affairs. No embassy staffers were deported from the country, but the stunt, which dramatically turned public opinion against NGOs, demonstrated how seriously the Kremlin intended to place NGOs under government control ahead of the 2007 parliamentary elections and the 2008 presidential elections.
In March, the government froze $6 million dollars in bank assets of Russia's largest domestic NGO, the Open Russia Foundation. Officials filed court orders against the Soldiers' Mothers' Committee the day after the law went into effect. Several other NGOs including Memorial are now facing court battles. "It is the beginning," said one analyst at a U.S. nonproft that funds groups like Memorial.
The targets of the law are organizations doing everything from political polling to fighting for human rights issues like the war in Chechnya and abuse in the military. The Soldiers' Mothers' Committee, with over 300 regional offices and some 50,000 clients a year, helps families find missing sons, instructs recruits in how to avoid the draft, and lobbies the government to build a voluntary and professional military. I visited the two-room Moscow offices of the group, which are lined with files and paperwork, and was told by every volunteer in the office that they are not afraid of being shut down. The office buzzed with activity all afternoon, with volunteers answering the phone or fielding visits.
Soldiers' Mothers holds a meeting for families and recruits to ask questions about how to evade the draft every Wednesday. The meeting room, housed in a building for the political opposition group Yabloko, was packed mostly with mothers and some young men. Leaders offered advice in how to get a medical exemption during the discussion. One technique involved having the recruit drink a lot of coffee and smoke about 12 cigarettes to drive his heart rate up for the exam.
Valentina Melnikova, one of the Soldiers' Morthers' five leaders, was on hand to run the meeting. A stout older woman with fiery red dyed hair, Melnikova exemplifies just what the government is up against. Melnikova calls herself Russia's Cindy Sheehan, and says that she has spoken with the American activist about ways of working together. "When I got involved with this group in the late 1970s, it was for help in keeping my sons out of the war in Afghanistan," she told me through a translator. "At that time, they didn't even have an office. So I suppose if the government tries to close down this office, we will just go back to the streets."
An earlier draft of the law was much more severe, calling for foreign organizations to register as Russian NGOs, expatriate staff to be removed, and informal organizations to register with the government NGO agency. But NGO leaders across the country rallied to publicize the law, and the European Union and the United States weighed in with criticism. George W. Bush reportedly addressed the issue at a November meeting with Putin in South Korea. Even Ella Pamfilova, who sits on a presidentially appointed committee on NGOs, told me when I visited her in her government office in Moscow that she was opposed to the original law.
But Pamfilova says it's harder to judge whether the current law on the books is a bad one, and thinks that critics may be jumping to conclusions. "Today, the law is not worse than in any other countries," Pamfilova said through a translator. "It's not good; I cannot say that it is great or perfect. It's mediocre. But it doesn't have anything terrible in it right now. The problem is how it will be applied, because has a number of articles that are very vague."
To NGO leaders across the country, the vagueness of the law is deliberate. Not knowing who will be targeted and why has many activists anxiously waiting to see how the Kremlin will try to interfere with their work. The strategy, some leaders say, is to divide and conquer the NGO community.
Ludmilla Alexeeva is Russia's oldest and best known human rights activist. Known as the doyenne of the human rights community, the vibrant 78-year-old heads the prominent Moscow Helsinki Group, which celebrates its 30th anniversary this year. She answered phone calls throughout my Sunday afternoon visit to her apartment just off of Novy Arbat, a cobblestone promenade street known for souvenirs and tourist shops.
Alexeeva points out that activists like her managed to work under the Soviet Union, when repression was much worse. But while there aren't bread lines in Moscow or dissidents being sent off to Siberia, Alexeeva says that the law has created a very familiar atmosphere of fear among human rights activists. This fear, she says is the very intention of the measure, a tactic that will undermine the nascent foundation of connections and stability that the country's groups have managed to achieve in the 15 years since the fall of communism.
"The real danger is that the law will attack the network of connections between NGOs," she said. "This will be destroyed of course and it's very sad because in the efforts of ten years we worked hard to build such a network, and our human rights activities are successful because we are networked, not separate organizations."
The more immediate risk is the issue of funding. "[The government] will not tolerate foreign funding of individual NGOs," Yuri Dzhibladze, head of the Moscow-based Center for Democracy and Human Rights, told me. "We are extremely dependent on foreign funding, and President Putin calls it illegitimate interference into the Russia political system promoting foreign interests in Russia."
The ethnically Georgian Dzhibladze is considered one of the new generation of dissidents in Russia. A cardiologist who gave up his career in the mid-1980s during perestroika to join the civil society movement, Dzhibladze officially registered his first NGO with a group of colleagues in 1990 when former Mikhail Gorbachev signed a law allowing NGOs to register independently. The Center for Democracy and Human Rights was born in 1998. The sophistication of his organization demonstrates the progress made by the country's NGO community. A public policy and advocacy organization, the center works as a watchdog, releasing comprehensive monthly reports on legislative happenings in the Duma available in English and Russian on the Web, and a civic society motivator of sorts, facilitating public participation and working with civic leaders to get involved with human rights policy. Dzhibladze is adamant that democracy is on the decline in Russia.
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What is the main concern driving the Kremlin's crackdown on civil society? Most observers say it's the possibility of a "color revolution," like the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, the Rose Revolution in Georgia, and the Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan. The Kremlin was particularly disturbed by Ukraine's revolution, which saw tremendous mass protests in response to allegations of corruption, voter intimidation, and direct electoral fraud during the 2004 Ukrainian presidential election.
Many political analysts believe the Orange Revolution and others were modeled after the ouster of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic in 2000. Seemingly spontaneous, each of the victories was actually built on nationwide grassroots campaigning and coalition-building among the political opposition. Each movement was also led by a highly organized network of student activists, who proved adept at developing slogans and spreading their message. The activists were funded and trained in political organization and nonviolent resistance by Western consultants and pollsters, who were in turn supported by both government and nongovernmental organizations, including the U.S. State Department, USAID, the National Endowment for Democracy, and George Soros's Open Society Institute.
The Kremlin has developed what Dzhibladze and other leaders in the NGO community call "orange paranoia" ahead of elections to be held this year and next. Many young Russians echo such sentiments. "We, of course, think that Vladimir Putin is doing a good job and we think this law [against NGOs] is a good one," Dmitry Lukichyoo, an 18-year-old economics student in Moscow told me one afternoon. "I think most NGOs are already checked in Russia but I think it should be fixed in law because not they are working in other ways -- not legal & Only we should choose our leaders, and not like in Ukraine where we all think the government was brought by the U.S."
Aside from the success of Putin's propaganda against NGOs, most Russians don't understand the relevance of NGOs. Boris Kagarlitsky is a prominent newspaper columnist and the head of the Institute for Global Affairs. He says NGOs are sometimes simply referred to as "grant eaters," in Russia -- organizations mainly focused on getting the next grant to pay staffers as opposed to doing grassroots work. "Let's be quite honest: Russian civil society is extremely weak and it's not only weak because of the government efforts but because of the NGOs themselves," Kagarlitsky said. "Quite a lot of NGOs represent clones of Western structures, which is not adequate when you look at the situation on the ground." Some NGO leaders, especially younger ones, are trying to make their organizations more relevant by using marketing techniques and strategic communications strategies to connect the Russian public with the human rights issues and the work of NGOs.
One of Putin's main accomplishments, in the eyes of many Russians, was the corralling of the country's business oligarchs, who took advantage of the transition period after the fall of communism to gobble up many state assets and propel themselves into billionaire status. Putin went after many of these businessmen, repossessing their oil companies and private television channels on charges of tax evasion. The message became especially clear when oil oligarch Khodorkovsky was imprisoned in Siberia in 2005.
So, it was logical that the first target of the government would be Khodorkovsky's Open Russia Foundation, Russia's wealthiest domestically funded NGO, which was modeled after billionaire George Soros's Open Society Institute. Open Russia, which funded dozens of NGOs in Russia, had six million dollars in bank assets frozen during my visit in March. The move was both a political attack against Khodorkovsky and a clear threat to the entire NGO community. Irina Yasina, the director of Open Russia, said that the Russian government is reverting to old style government intimidation. "This law is just very uncivilized," she said. "This is a law for a country in the time of the Soviet Union under the Iron Curtain."
Yasina said that, ironically, she is placing her hopes on the very international organizations Putin is trying to ban. "Mr. Soros is the only hope for Open Russia, and I am sure that he will help us for our regional partners," she said. "But inside, nobody will help us. Because fear is the main feature of our society now. And if you talk with young people they are too young. They have no idea of comparison, to compare with the Soviet Union. I remember. I remember. It was the same."
Not even Soros can help Open Russia now, which closed its offices in late April. "In general, of course, we view the situation in Russia quite pessimistically," Leonardo Benardo, the regional director for Russia at the Open Society Institute, said. "Open Russia is a victim of wider trends that have been going on for several years. In terms of this latest wrinkle in the wider authoritarian fabric -- the NGO law -- of course, it is a terrible development and we can only help that domestic and civil society actors will continue to make their voices heard."
In the short term, NGOs in Russia are regrouping and trying out new tactics to avoid the law. Some are even re-registering themselves as commercial, for-profit enterprises, thereby sidestepping the law entirely. Major funders in the United States are strategizing too, coming up with new plans to funnel money in. One prominent donor said that the turn of events has set democracy funders on edge. "We are assuming things will only get worse," he said.
