Minding Russia

Mike McFaul Steps on a Rake in Russia

McFaul speaking at the premier in 2010 of the movie "Justice for Sergei" to commemorate Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who was tortured and died in prison. Photo: US Helsinki Commission.

You would think, because I've been such a long-time human rights activist in Eurasia, working particularly on Russia for years, that I would be overjoyed that the first thing our new envoy to Moscow, Ambassador Michael McFaul, did when he got to Moscow was visit human rights activists and opposition leaders. Especially given how much I criticized his allying with the awful Kremlin gray cardinal Vladislav Surkov and even making a joint US-Russian Commission with him back in the early days of the Obama Administration's misguided "reset". You would think that after criticizing him and other American officials for being timid and disappointing human rights activist when he met with officials behind closed doors a year ago, I'd now be happy.

I'm not.

In fact, I think I'm troubled as anyone would be when they see their cause become a political token. The backlash is even worse than predicted; not only has Russian TV used its still-considerable power (or the power that never left it, in fact, in manipulating these current demonstrations) to trash him on prime time; not only have some Duma conservatives denounced the people he met with (outrageous); Zhirinovsky is now picking up the cudgel demanding that those in the Duma who met with McFaul surrender their mandates (awful):

"Deputies Leonid Kalashnikov, a Communist, and Oksana Dmitriyeva and Ilya Ponomaryov of the Fair Russia faction, joined the street opposition leaders and, one after another, walked into a foreign embassy which is preparing a war against us," Zhirinovsky said.

Even before this outburst from Zhirinovsky, the loyal oppositionist Ilya Ponomarev, head of the Duma sub-committee on innovation, seemed a bit perturbed on his blog about the hoopla involved in the two separate meetings with McFaul.

Many of the people McFaul visited are people follow or know and have worked with in the past; some are colleagues and even friends. Why wouldn't I be thrilled that our ambassador was finally showing some respect to these hard-working and long-suffering people who had been so dissed by our past ambassador (as we know from Wikileaks here and here)?

It's not just that I hate when things become a show -- quite frankly, we used to call these sorts of things "dissident-on-a-platter" in the Reagan Administration when US officials made politicized displays of the beleaguered dissidents remaining out of prison in the 1980s. And that we're going to see lots of Lavrov-in-a-lather as always but also homegrown backlash of this sort.

It's that I have a healthy respect for statecraft -- diplomats are for diplomacy, human rights activists are for in-your-face naming and shaming and demonstrations.

Here's how I'd plan a diplomatic schedule for Russia, as I said on Twitter:

Day 1 Kremlin officials

Day 2 Duma members

Day 3 Business leaders

Day 4 Russian Orthodox Church, Muslim leaders

Day 5 Cultural and musical figures

Day 6 Human Rights leaders

Day 7 Opposition leaders

You know why? Because I would put the order roughly into what is a) most powerful in Russia and really running Russia and b) what is vital to America's interests. Not because I'm such a believer in realpolitik, but because I'm a believer in human rights and opposition work not becoming politicized. If the order is reversed and they are seen first, it's not as if the US is meeting "the real" people who "really run" things; they are dissing and humiliating those who do, and putting those who don't in a very vulnerable position where they can't beat those infuriated humiliated people. At least not yet.

I wouldn't have illusions that a handful of people in Moscow, as much as I love them and share their views, have resonance throughout the country.

Oh, sure, diplomats should visit with human rights activists. They've always done that. But McFaul is completely disingenuous in claiming that his over-emphasis and prioritizing is what "we always did". Not true. No other ambassador arrived and on his first day, and ran to meet the opposition before the ink on his credentials was even dry. If Obama met with opposition or human rights leaders when he came to Moscow, it was after he was finished with his main meetings with the Medvedev and Putin and other leaders, not as a substitute. The human rights advocates and rivals to Putin in elections should get a big nod of encouragement -- but it doesn't have to be thunderous shoulder pat. That's not only condescending, it's ill-advised as they really don't have a chance in March and we're going to have to figure out what to do about all this other than hand out a lot of visas to intellectuals for US programs.

We all get it that Putin's position is seemingly weakened now -- in fact some of us were never conceding the election to Putin long before establishment liberals like Julia Ioffe suddenly decided to drop him when the intelligentsia did.

But the opposition's position isn't all the stronger for it. The large demonstrations in Moscow and a few echoes much smaller in the provinces represent the Western-leaning intelligentsia and affluent middle class chafing not only at media and business restrictions but the humiliation of being offered the tandem switcheroo with Putin again. They don't represent most of the rest of Russia who are the Putin and vertikal base -- people who have benefited from his oil deals and strong arm and who would be worse off in some places if they had even more corrupt governors that might result from local elections. That's the awfulness of it.

If people were free and the elections were fair, we'd have more votes for the communists and the Zhirinovsky nationalists and the Limonov Bolshevik extremists. Nemtsov and others might get registered and beat the 5 percent threshold

I remember the time Nemtsov told this story about his visit to Putin -- one of his rare meetings, I guess. He complained about the return of the Soviet anthem. Unabashed, Putin looked him in the eye and said: "Takoi narod, takaya pesnya," he said. It translates as something like "The song suits the people" -- with the undertone that the people deserve such a Soviet song.

There's something even more troubling about all this that points to the exploitative nature of it all.

While at first I thought McFaul's gambit with the dissidents was perhaps merely some overcalculation -- some notion that the Kremlin really was crumbling and the opposition really was coming to power and he could afford to dis Putin -- I then realized that there was a crafty caper going on.

Even as McFaul was flogging his meeting with the activists and justifying it to all critics, he was also predicting yesterday early in the day that President Obama would announce that he was repealing Jackson-Vanik in his State of the Union address.

He didn't.

Now that's a good thing, because there is no way in hell the moral victory should be handed to the Kremlin in that fashion. You can graduate Russian from having Jackson-Vanik apply without undoing the legislation itself which should stand not only as a legacy but still be available for use for countries like Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan without free travel and only very partial market economies.

But McFaul sure thought he was going to, and hoped for it! I was even puzzled at first -- how could in-your-face dissident diplomacy that gets you accused of colour-revo'ing be compatible with giving the Russians the removal of Jackson-Vanik they always sought? It makes it seem as if laws are passed not on principle, but as irritants to countries, and then they are fungible when we want to make nice to those countries again for geopolitical reasons.

Now I don't know what it means that Obama didn't mention J-V. It may be that it simply wasn't appropriate to put in the SOTU address, and maybe had to come at some other time.

I suspect there are still some congressmen who don't like the idea of repealing it, as it has long been debated -- at least I hope there are.

 

 

The Oligarch Vanishes

Oh, dear, we're going to be getting this cute-Internet story for at least a news cycle or two and it's going to appear in every little paper in America as "proof" that there is some sort of authentic change-upheaval in Russia.

Putin -- who got managers at Kommersant fired over a picture with swear words ridiculing himself -- has fought back now against the opposition by getting his minions to doctor a photo of popular anti-corruption blogger and political hero Navalny.

Given the vasty crowd-sourcing capacities of vasty Russia, soon somebody in...Vladivostok, was it?...ferretted out the fake photo.

In the FSB active-measures version, Navalny is shown in a photo with the exiled oligarch Berezovsky.

But it turns out in the original photo, he was with the domiciled oligarch Prokhorov, i.e. he lives in Russia.

Berezovsky=bad oligarch, abroad, doesn't like Putin, works with ex-FSB agents who got poisoned like Litvinenko, etc.

Prokhorov=good oligarch, owns a sports team in New Jersey, gets along with Putin.

The situation is reminiscent of the famous book The Comrade Vanishes which documents how Stalin used to airbrush out of photos his various former comrades as he had them executed or banished when they fell out of political favour.

Except in our story, it's the oligarch as a phenomenon who will vanish from the entire discussion as everyone enjoys that gleeful-gotcha feeling of having gone one-up on Putin (now, was that so hard to do!)

See, the real issue is that most Russians aren't going to make the distinction between at home/abroad, good/bad, evil/good. They will think, big filthy rich guy, not good for communism, not good for social benefits, no thanks. And that's deliberate, and that's what Prokhorov is being groomed for.

So this may be Surkov propaganda that is too clever by half. What better way to get most of the lumpen of Russia to really, really believe that Navalny, that anti-corruption guy, is actually just like the rest of those fancy Muscovites and not to be trusted?

If they showed him with an oligarch, everybody in the hinterlands would cry "photoshopped!" even if they weren't on the Internet.

But this way, it is thoroughly validated -- the photographer has come forward and even provided the previous shots.

So there we are.

Another hypothesis: sealing the relationship between a coopted Prokhorov who will be made Prime Minister or something, and the popular anti-corruption guy who is not electable but popular.

 

Police Calculator: How Many in the Moscow Demonstrations?

Alexander Plushev has a great set of photos he calls "Police Calculator" (Kalkulator GUVD -- the initials for the Chief Directorate of the Interior Ministry, which is the police).

In the top photo, you see the official police figures for a march of "Nashi," the Putin-created nationalist youth movement. The rows look sparse and it has a choreographed feel to it -- but the figure is officially "50,000" for an April 2011 march.

In the bottom photo, you see the people amassed on Andrei Sakharov Avenue in Moscow on December 24, with the official police count of "29,000" -- and it looks like three times as many as in the first picture.

So many believe then that a figure of 50,000 or 100,000 isn't too high an estimate for the Moscow march yesterday.

I remain skeptical about all of these developments, which feel manipulated to me both by the government and the new opposition. In Navalny's firey speech, I have to say I've never seen somebody speak so passionately, loudly, angrily and demagogically about...something so tame -- an election recount. It's odd...

I thought the Bolotnaya demonstration was like 20,000, not 50,000 and I feel like 29,000 might be the right number for this latest march, but others will disagree.

I do wish the Google Earth people would design some sort of ap whereby  you could take a mobile picture of a street full of demonstrators, or plug in an aerial photo, and calculate the number of people using Google Earth or Google Street View or something -- and it would become the gold standard. There's just something always so unscientific about this and it's always exploited by governments and opposition both.

Or, I know. How about a FourSquare kind of thing. Everybody gets to the demo, they are geolocated, they "check in," and FourSquare can actually count them. This might be gameable, but something has to be conceived like this. I don't know if 50,000 people checking in on FourSquare at once would make the servers fall over.

 

Anti-Gay Russian Commissar to Co-Chair US-Russian Commission

Nikolai Alexeyev, Russian gay rights leader, led away by police from gay march. Photo by Beenni, May 2009.

Arggh.

Just when it looked as if we might have a chance to retire the McFaul-Surkov Commission, a vehicle for misplaced hopes about the "Russian reset" about which I've been highly critical (they were right when they translated that term incorrectly the first time as "overload") -- our government is doing a stupid thing.

The State Department is revising and continuing the commission, now with two new co-chairs, Tom Melia, deputy assistant secretary of state for human rights, and Konstantin Dolgov, the Russian commissar for human rights.

In recent testimony before the Senate, Melia in part justifies the continuation of the commission by citing his consultations with unnamed civil society activists in Russia. But no, I don't care what Yuri Dzhibladze, the Moscow human rights establishment's emissar to foreign conferences, cares about this.

Protests are raging in Russia -- manipulated, to be sure, but still with some authentic sentiment -- and instead of ceasing our propping up of the Kremlin, we're extending it. We should not be doing this.

As the blogger Oleg Kozlovsky put it on Twitter, all Russian protesters ask of the West these days is to stop supporting Putin  -- "we'll do the rest," he says.

Indeed. So why aren't we dismantling this silly commission instead of giving it more shelf life? Worse, why are we extending it when the Russians have replaced one disreputable figure with another?

On our side, Michael McFaul is stepping down because he's been nominated by President Obama as ambassador to Russia -- although his confirmation is held up in one of those holds that so often happen to stop progress in foreign policy. Sen. Kirk, who has done this sort of hold-up before, is asking for confirmation that the US will not give sensitive technological information to Russia in the BMD talks (if I understood correctly) to ensure that they won't hand it to Iran.

Given that the Russians just found some nukes at the border they've confiscated -- although curiously, didn't detain the person taking them to Iran (?!), this isn't a trivial matter at all. I actually don't understand why Obama couldn't give Kirk the assurances, but there may be more about this I haven't heard.

In any event, McFaul is in waiting, and in his place has been appointed Tom Melia, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labour (see his recent testimony). Melia was previously a program director at Freedom House, and since joining the Obama Administration has put on a lot of frequent flyer miles taking part in unpleasant human rights bilaterals, raising cases and issues with the envoys of the world's despots. All well and good. His testimony says all the right things -- except the two-track policy (not of his making). "Two-track" means State Department officials attempt to contort themselves into pretzels to talk to both rude, outrageous Kremlin officials and sometimes accommodationist civil society leaders -- and this strikes me as increasingly unnecessary these days.

That is, the problem with the Commission as I've always aid is that it reifies a process that doesn't need to be institutionalized as a flawed, unrepresentative body that is compromised in its activities. You can arrange bilateral talks with Russia about burning human rights issues without creating a joint commission -- that's a Sovietism. You can hold a meeting without having to accept the constant constraints of commissariats. The problem with creating the commissariat is the it spawns feel-goods like technology fairs and happy speeches about using technology to build civil society, and it spawns those civil-society-for-export types speaking English that don't really represent their country.

I keep seeing before me the video clip of Alena Popova, a woman of what you might call the loyal opposition in Just Russia, warbling about tech and start-ups and contacts at one of Mike's commission meetings, and then the Facebook picture of her being beaten up by Moscow riot police despite her "candidate" badge. Are we getting beyond commissions here, and just a bit more grown-up than the "civsoc 2.0" stage would have us infantalized at?

I've been particularly critical of the selection of topics in the "civil society working group" because I think they deliberately tended, especially at first, to the non-confrontational and vegetarian, like child rights and anti-corruption. That is, sure, these topics, when done seriously, are very much a challenge to the government, but they happen to be two areas that the government has successfully coopted, and where figures like Navalny, the star anti-corruptioneer, has some suspect aspects to him (nationalism, xenophobia).

Prison conditions sounds a lot more promising, but even that topic got converted to one of those deals where we go over there with the ACLU and talk about our prison problems...then wait while they talk about theirs. It's not sincere.

So on our side, I find a certain amount to criticize, although there are things that have been done right -- the visa bans for those who participated in the murder of Magnitsky in detention; the...action...against Ramzan Kadyrov, the brutal leader of Chechnya (if I read the testimony right -- it's not clear that "denied opportunity to showcase his wealth" means the same thing as "visa ban"), and the regular statements on human rights violations -- to be sure, often exiled to the pages of the US mission to the OSCE, or humanrights.gov or some other burial ground, and not on whitehouse.gov, but still...

But now let's look closer at who we're getting on the Russian side as the new commissar -- and why this commission therefore should be disbanded or at least stalled indefinitely.

Konstantin Dolgov, the Russian Foreign Ministry’s Commissioner for Human Rights, Democracy and the Rule of Law, is to replace Surkov. At one superficial level, this is a good thing -- he's the more appropriate counterpart for the US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labour than the Kremlin's grey cardinal, Surkov. Surkov (Vladislav Yuryevich Surkov, born Aslambek Andarbekovich Dudaev), was the president's chief of staff, in a system where that job had more power even than it does in the White House.

But Dolgov is associated with two bad things -- supporting anti-gay legislation in St. Petersburg and ranting about alleged US "interference in internal affairs" for protesting against the legislation, which would discriminate against LGBT.

On the first issue, you might think that as the Kremlin's human rights commissar, Dolgov might be forced to support a piece of legislation actually consistent with the majority of conservative Russian opinion on this controversial subject.

But in fact, commissars, even in Russia, don't have to do such things. They can allow papers to get lost on their desks. They can dodge and stall and wait -- they are well-practiced at doing such things. They can just do nothing -- and that can be progress, when it comes to a bad bill like this.

You don't see Lukin, Russia's human rights ombudsman, saying anything about this legislation -- pro or con. And that's how you do it in Russia.

As gay.ru reported (translated by africa.ilga.org), the ombudsman's human rights report contained not a single word about LGBT. That's terrible, and cowardly. But, as I said, in a situation where you have officials actively taking anti-gay positions and supporting discriminatory legislation, that's a bit of progress.

And Dolgov, even being the president's human rights commissar (as distinct from the country's ombudsman, nominated by parliament), could have done nothing, too. He didn't. Instead he took a very vocal stance.

As for the anti-Americanism and outrage at "interference" that came along with the anti-gay stance, that was also unnecessary.

Dolgov called the State Department's criticism of the law "incorrect," and then

“We are perplexed by the American side’s attempts to interfere in the legislative process in Russia, especially publicly.

“We consider these attempts inappropriate and inconsistent with the practice of interstate relations.”

The 1975 Helsinki Final Act and all the subsequent agreements of the CSCE and then OSCE established that expression of concern about human rights in another state is not interference in internal affairs, but rather upholding of the universal standards by which all are bound.

The Russians often bristle at these "interferences" and then treat it as a game -- they've even got an old perestroika stalwart installed in New York in an institute that is supposed to monitor human rights and democracy in the US and comment, much the way Freedom House and other groups comment on Russia critically. They aren't sincere in these types of efforts, so the results are predictable.

Dolgov himself, abandoning all his principles about "non-interference," was happy to bash the US this week for the alleged police crackdowns on Occupy Wall Street protesters. Of course, we missed him when the Moscow police were doing worse to orderly protesters just coming for the day to Moscow parks to protest the failure to ensure Art. 31 of the Constitution. (There's a huge difference between the arrests in Moscow for lawful peaceful assembly and New York police dispersing long-term urban campers documented as disturbing the peace, or deliberate stagers of civil disobedience actions such as closing bridges or blocking traffic who have to expect a police arrest. There's also a world of difference between the remedies available in the US in the form of independent lawyers and courts who can address actual cases of police brutality when they occur -- and get action, as they already have with OWS-related abuses -- and the Russian system. So let's be clear on that, and not look down at our shoes, please.)

Obama himself on his first time out to Russia didn't get this "no non-interference" Helsinki principle right -- the human rights community was cringing when he conceded to his Russian interlocutors at the time that the Khodorkovsky case was an internal affair -- even as he did the right thing by raising it in the first place. That took awhile to undo.

And here we all are now. At a time when the US has issued a criticism of this anti-gay legislation, and gotten a very sharp rebuff from the commissar not only regarding the law, but their criticism -- not to mention all the demonstrations in Moscow -- it's just not the time to be bilateralling.

Instead, stall. Hold side meetings and side trips without this commission. New people might be along sooner than you think.

 

 

Snowed Revolution

A resolution, not revolution -- a sedate call to "free political prisoners" (i.e. Navalny, jailed for 15 days, but it's not clear they mean Khodorkovsky or Lebedev); fire the head of the electoral commission; investigate and punish fraud; hold new elections.

Ima call it as I see it -- I find a lot of the stuff around the latest Russian "Snow Revolution"...managed. You know, like "managed" democracy. This is a "managed revolution."

We're being scolded by various knowier-than-thous not to call it a revolution -- we've heard the leaders (yes, there are leaders) of the rally tell us that this isn't a revolution, because revolutions mean bloodshed and extremism -- and they're right, and let's hope there isn't. (See above resolution -- all very managed and docile.)

We're being told scornfully that "the Western media" is calling this...resolution meeting a "revolution". Evil Western media! Well, yeah. But start with the leader of the Russian pack journalism for Western consumption, Julia Ioffe, who coined the term "Snow Revolution" by positioning her blog about it in The New Yorker. White ribbons, snowy weather -- hence "snow revolution". You know, white. Not like those awful coloured revolutions that were all instigated by westerners and bring upstarts like Ukrainians or Georgians who don't appreciate Russia into power!

I had this to say to Julia -- I'd been wanting to comment on her Foreign Policy article back in September as being way too docile and complacent about her fellow Russians' ability to reject the swap-out of the tandem:

Julia, I do have to wonder why you gave us no glimmer of your enthusiasm for anti-Putin movements a few months ago, when you seemed more to lean toward explication of realpolitik here and here on Foreign Policy.

There, you made Kolesnikov's monarchic praise of Putin sound like it had "more than a few supporters," and you hastened to tell us that "This, by the way, will also make American foreign policy easier: just one man to deal with."

You concluded quoting [former Kremlin advisor Gleb] Pavlovsky (!) cynically telling us that power will remain with those who depend on it for wealth, not indicating Just Russia -- or anybody -- might see it otherwise.

Are you opportunistic?

I'll go La Russaphobe one better -- it's too bad *you* didn't discover these people's existence before now! It's too bad *none* of you showed up to protest -- and cover in The New Yorker -- the failure to register PARNAS [the liberal opposition party with Yavlinsky, Nemtsov, etc.].

This photo from a helicopter doesn't look like 50,000 or even 35,000. It looks like perhaps 15,000-20,000. It still makes a point, without having to claim that "more people came" than those who pledged on Facebook.

Supposedly everything's managed, everything's ok, look, people are free enough to come and protest the elections and go home in time to update their Live Journals and Facebooks if they didn't already on their smart phones.

Except not everyone is doing so well -- this kid in Syktyvar is sent off to the army directly from a demonstration, [UPDATE]; he believes he is unfit for military service and should be let go; the medical commission thinks otherwise; he's awaiting a delegation of human rights defenders and parliamentarians]. Milov reports that his people were fired from their jobs for reporting on the elections.

Well, you have to break eggs to make an omelette.

Let's look at  the numbers. We were promised 30,000 or 35,000 "Facebook people" (Russians have increasingly moved to Facebook, you know? Because their Live Journals get pulled, or all of Live Journal is "down" because of...whatever. Forces that cause these things to go down.)

Then, the numbers that actually came sure didn't look like 35,000 to me, it looked more like 15,000, judging from that panoramic photograph taken by helicopter. Yet other observers argued it was indeed more like 30,000 or even 40,000. You know, crowd counting isn't exactly that much of a science. I've been in marches in Moscow that had 250,000 or more in the 1990s, and you sure could tell, streams of people going for miles. I've been in marches in New York City with 50,000 or 250,000, so I do feel the difference. The Occupy Wall Street area of Zucotti Park could hold -- packed to the gills -- say, 3,000. 4,000, if you spread out into the streets around it. So you could see what a demonstration of 5,000 looked like -- it was those city blocks. If you want to see a march of 40,000 or 50,000 -- it's what stretches from Union Square to Washington Square, like the first anti-war march when Iraq was invaded. The NYPD gives out these totals, and the New York Times does, and it really isn't so wildly disparate. Organizers always inflate, and police always under report but the media doesn't do that by and large.

In Russia, we are hearing people tell us that there were 50,000 or more, and it's clearly an exaggeration, possibly by double.

The organizers said there'd be more than 30,000, which is why they were moved from Triumfal'naya (where for a long time small "31" demonstrations have been held to insist on enjoyment of Art. 31 of the Russian Constitution to be able to assemble) -- to Bolotnaya (the word comes from the Russian word for "swamp," which is what the Moscow intelligentsia always calls people who don't have their sophisticated views). A letter from the mayor's office, which gives out the march permits, authorizes the move to Bolotnaya.

There's an interesting detail that I haven't seen western news media report: all those thousands of people streaming to Bolotnaya had to go through metal detectors as these extremely calm and collected NTV announcers tell us. Police set up a checkpoint and made people go through metal detectors to remove possible guns or knives. It was very orderly. People didn't object. These are not lefties and libertarians ranting about the TSA, for the most part, these are docile middle-class Muscovite intelligentsia, educated computer engineers and financial managers. So the police know how many people went through those metal detectors.

Some upsurge of popular sentiment, going through metal detectors!

Everyone had written each other on ZhZh or FB the night before to be excellent to each other, be nice, be peaceful, don't be extreme, don't be rigid. So they arrived trying to keep in good cheer and not yield to inevitable provocations. Funny, there don't seem to have been any. Not with those police checkpoints, anyway!

And if you saw who was on the podium, there were no excesses, so to speak. Leonid Parfenov gave an excellent speech, really normal and yet moving. It made me feel a tad bit better about the Snowed Revolution, but I didn't think Putin would be gone any time soon.

Would to God we had people like Lyonya running Occupy Wall Steet, instead of the Leninists and loons that we did get. Leonid is intelligent, experienced, and credentialed -- he was kicked out of NTV in 2004 (which was by that time no longer independent) for a number of things that culminated with management's displeasure at his interview of the Chechen leader Yandarbiyev's widow, in her burqua. The Kremlin told his bosses they couldn't run a thing like that. He insisted on running it, it was news. Then he insisted on getting a written decision. Then he published it in Kommersant. Zakonik takoi. A stickler for the law. And that got him fired for violating "corporate ethics" which is how they "explained" it.

Lyona is wonderful, I remember him from the 1990s and subsequently and watching him on TV. But Lyonya didn't exactly sell matches and cucumbers on the corner after being expelled from NTV. He kept writing articles and books and I think he succeeded in making a living. He wasn't forced into exile. He describes himself as a journalist, not a professional revolutionary.

(Russians hate professional revolutionaries -- the other day I was giving an interview to RFE/RL about the late Andrei Tverdokhlebov and his important contributions as a colleague of Sakharov's in the Committee of Human Rights, the first Russian NGO to be recognized by a Western international organization, the International League for Human Rights -- and when I kept saying that Tverdokhlebov did his civic duty in Russia, and did what he could for awhile after before forced to emigrate after serving a term of exile, but then he retreated to private life as a professor and didn't keep up with the dissidents -- the reporter was relieved -- "oh, in other words, he wasn't a professional revolutionary.")

Russians hate professional revolutionaries because they remind them of the cunning and manipulative Bolsheviks and all Soviet leaders and post-Soviet red directors transformed into oligarchs. But professional revolutionaries are in fact what we're getting here.

So on that platform at the Snow Revolution, we had Yavlinsky (who couldn't get enough votes to get into the 7 percent needed for parliament, but I maintain that's in part due to being smeared or ignored on state-controlled TV). We had various other folks of impeccable liberal credentials. I didn't see the communists but then I didn't watch all the Youtubes out there. Certainly the communists were there, in full force, waving their hammer-and-sickle red flags. CBS discretely called this "a symbol of revolution," as if Russians, getting active and demonstrating again after 10 years, couldn't find any other "symbols." No, CBS, this is a symbol first and foremost of *communism* and *communism* is in fact what is represented at the Snow Revolution in full force. You know, like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. We were all told that the revo is going to be all international civil servant liberals like ElBaradei or Google engineers like Wael Ghonim -- but stay tuned, it's more complicated.

This protest was about the co-opted Just Russia, the communists and the fascist "libertarians" not getting their vote, so make of it what you will.

So...about Just Russia. Now, what did they do on the eve of this huge march? You may not have noticed, in between Alena Popova's tweets about earning a badge on Four Square! before heading into a party meeting. They changed their leaders at Saturday's convention, as Moscow News reports, Duma deputy and well-known St. Petersburg politician Oksana Dmitriyeva was passed over to bring on Sergei Mironov, a Kremlin loyalist amicable enough to United Russia. I imagine these parties will merge, or form a "tandem" or create some kind of condominium. Everyone will get to feel like a revolutionary -- they won't really be.

The New York Times and others were startled that official TV reported on the demonstrations. No accident, comrades. They were allowed to. Duh! You don't transform *those* people -- the kind of people who fired Parfenov and never cover anything about human rights activists until they are dead -- overnight. Of course they had permission.

Of course it was "letting off steam." This technique is so well-rehearsed from the Soviet era, and so well known in this region to the point of making people's teeth hurt, that I wonder why Western reporters don't get it. Partly, some of them are younger and didn't live through the Soviet era and don't get. Some like Ellen Barry who covered the coup collapse for CNN in 1991 does know better, but she's caught up in the moment, and as I know from experience, she has the fervent expectations of her editors back in New York for it to look a certain way and they edit news copy in a certain way.

I didn't see a single speech or news coverage or sign complaining about Surkov. And that wasn't an accident either. They complained only about the head of the electoral commission -- as if another Kremlin-compliant figure wouldn't be found if you got rid of him.

This non-system opposition didn't attack the system itself. They said they had a wide variety of people at their march -- vegetarians, leftists, communists, greens, pagans, whatever. The reality is, they didn't go *too* far. The New Age loony Svetlana Peunova was there demanding to be let on the platform. Some beefy men in ski masks firmly and forcefully told her to get lost. She made a youtube about this horrible censorship of the democratic opposition. And in essence, she's right. The entire thing is very well-manicured and very well scripted. Navalny was helpfully in jail for 15 days.

If I were running the meeting, I'd have led off with a demand for Surkov to go -- not that he couldn't be replaced with another Kremlin-compliant but because he is now so wired up with the levers of repression and so integrated with "managed democracy" that he really has to go as a symbol of all that. But of course, he'll likely stay on to run the "managed revolution" as well.

And if I were carrying a sign about Surkov, I'd likely be shivering with Navalny on a splintered wood bench staring at a pail of other people's shit.

The nice managed people wore nice white ribbons. It shows you just how far we've come (or have we) from the days of severe allergic reactions to the colour "white" because of its association with the White anti-Bolshevik movement, the anti-communist armies led by Danikin, Kolchak, etc.

Here's another very funny thing. Evgeny Morozov -- you would think -- coming from this part of the world (Belarus and Bulgaria) and a native Russian speaker -- would have something to say. Either in praise, or to condemn Hillary Clinton for meddling with circumvention technology and funding Golos, the independent monitoring agency. But...crickets.

Here's what Zhenya is reading and tweeting about: A New Algorithmic Identity: Soft Biopolitics and the Modulation of Control.

Surkov, call your office!

Hilarious, eh? You would think this would be Evgeny's moment. Finally, a Facebook revolution (Facebook more than Twitter seems to have led it) that you could say is perfectly attuned -- not too Westernized (despite Hillary--Golos seems to have retired from view during the big demonstration), not *too* rooted in technology (it's about the organic-world issue of voting), and perfectly well-behaved. So...no comment? Or is the comment, "Everything's going according to plan, so I'm not needed."

I read Vyacheslav Igrunov -- a huge wall o'text on Facebook that I think doesn't know how to cut off status updates in Cyrillic or make paragraphs or even make the typeface legible. But it's worth pasting into Word, reformatting, and reading (here Download Igrunov).

And interestingly, my old friend Vyachik says that the thing *was* managed -- TV couldn't have covered it without permission, so it was indeed letting off steam.

Even so, he says that it will gain momentum and will become more real.

He blamed the regime for not creating opportunities for upward mobility by energetic, creative people. By that he meant not the society at large, which may or may not do that, depending on which place you look (generally not). He meant the ruling class around the Kremlin itself. Instead of marginalizing or even jailing people like Nemtsov or Khodorkovsky, Putin couldn't find a place for them where they'd have at least "power over 2 percent" or something as Igrunov puts it. Indeed. And that's because such people are like water -- I guess there's fear that all their beautiful wickedness will melt.

And just as we had to do with the Egyptian revolution, enduring all kinds of sneers and catcalls, so we have to look at Russia the same way. Russians, even good, liberal Russians, have this strain of nationalism and xenophobia in them that is hard to take (Navalny).

Or even this example: Oleg Kashin, who I perfectly well admire, and have defended against the likes of A Good Treaty who was bashing him last summer for flip-flopping and being "bi-polar," posts a Youtube that is a perfect example of anti-Western propaganda combined with anti-Putin propaganda. If you want a flavour for how nationalists can be anti-Western *and* anti-Putin, have a look.

But...you get the feeling that Kashin posted that not because he wanted to say "here's an example of hysterical anti-Western propaganda," but because the propaganda was sort of acceptible to him. Consciously or unconsciously, out of ignorance or out of lack of exposure. The agitprop has scene after scene of evil lurid US and European planes and bombs bringing "democracy" to Libya and Afghanistan, getting rid of leaders like Qadaffi, and concludes very pragmatically: you watch out, Putin, they'll get you next. You sense that Oleg both wants that ending -- getting rid of Putin -- and might actually think that "the US" or "the West" could deliver that result as it did with bin Laden and Qaddafi -- or perhaps he means to say "go quietly, Putin, so that the evil West doesn't do to you what they did to Qaddafi"). Of course, many Internet-bred forums freaks think the same thing, evil West, evil tyrants now supported, now toppled by said West. Of course it's more complicated than that.

Parfenov took care to say scornfully that Hillary had not inspired his protest or pulled his strings. Lavrov thinks otherwise...

The blogger Oleg Kozlovsky said the West should just stop supporting Putin and "we'll do the rest." All well and good and sound advice. Except...Which "we"?  Coopted Just Russia? Zyuganov or Zhirinovsky?

And guess what, it turns out that all we had to do to get rid of nasty Putin was for Julia Ioffe to essentially flip-flop on cue, and to help create a Snow Revolution...

 

 

 

 

The Colourless Revolution or What Happened to 20,000 Internet People in Russia?

I'm glad some of my qualms about the high potential for police violence in Moscow haven't come to pass (yet, at least not today -- they plan to come back December 24 to rally) -- but I remain skeptical and curious about the current Internet-driven Russian Revo. What should we call it, the Netizen Revolution? The Colourless Revolution? (they're all wearing white ribbons which were suggested and virally-spread by Live Journal bloggers).

It's funny the Sublime Oblivion has voted my post of yesterday "the most reality-disconnected". I'm not afraid to be out of touch, different, contrary, etc. I'm not an official or paid Russia-watcher, although in the past I've had jobs directly related to translating Russia or writing news or reports about Russia and I've translated quite a few books, including the works of Putin and Yeltsin. I'm just someone whose fate has been intertwined with Russia so I follow it when I can.

1. While 35,000 pledged on Facebook and related groups to turn out to the street, only 15,000 to 20,000 came. So what happened to 10-20,000 people? I'm sure it will be churlish to ask this question but I don't fear labels -- the reality is we have to ask why, if the Internet is supposed to be this great boon and amplifier of social movements and protest, 10,000 or more people chicken out. Either those numbers were inflated to begin with, or people just found lots more interesting or compelling things to do Saturday morning like watch the Arsenals' game or sleep off a hangover.

2. The media is reporting (lenta.ru) that there were no major police brutality incidents and only a few hundred arrested in the provinces. Well, just because it wasn't the Moscow beau-monde, let's care what happened to those people in the provinces, they may be looking at more than the usual 15-sutok (15-day arrest) punishment.

3. We're also hearing that official media broke out of character and covered the demonstrations. Everyone finds that a marvel and somehow a tremendously encouraging thing. I turn a weather eye on it. TV doesn't change overnight. That they are covering largely Just Russia and Communist Party rallies in the streets lets me know that there could be a long-term plan here by Kremlin social-controller Surkov and others to co-opt Just Russia and let Nature take its course with the CP and LDPR (they will self-discredit or cross over or will be junior partners for the right price).

If you're Putin, a KGB master manipulator and hands-on thug, what do you do if you see that public opinion about your actual nastiness is getting stronger? You could use brute, unrelenting force (and we may still see that) or you could do another thing: let people let off steam, manage it, control it (by seeming to embrace it on state TV, and ultimately co-opt it.

Things are seldom what they seem in Russia, it has such a long history of manipulation. I remember when everybody thought Yeltsin, democracy, the liberals had triumphed and taken over the White House in 1991. But there was a wing of the White House where soon, Yeltsin's people complained they couldn't go to. If you peered down that corridor you would see men with guns. These were Alexander Rutskoy's people and perhaps he was busy praying to the Virgin Mary. In any event, it wasn't too long before Rutskoy was taking over the White House with what you could describe as the reactionaries, the communists (people seldom understand that's what communists are.) But before that, a delegation of triumphant anti-coup Russian leaders came to New York City for meetings. There was a reception at the Russian mission to the UN I was invited to. To my surprise, along with Rutskoy, head of delegation, there was the same KGB minder I had met some years previously who was assigned to us from APN to dog our camera crew. No accident, comrade. That time was the first I saw the Russian Cossacks welcomed back to the mission -- and they haven't left.

4. We're hearing calls for release of political prisoners. Good! What do they mean, though? Navalny? Navalny *and* Nemtsov? Or will they include Khodorkovsky and Lebedev? That's the test.

5. What is the nature of this revolution? We still don't know, fully. Let's remember it's about justice, not democracy and freedom and human rights, which are all different things. Example from the Times:

Leonid Gigen, 26, an artist, said frustration has boiled over because of violations in the parliamentary campaign. During the parliamentary campaign, young Russians filmed authority figures cajoling, bribing or offering money to their subordinates to get out the vote for United Russia and posted the video online. More video circulated on Election Day, when many Russians in their teens and 20s camped out in polling stations as amateur observers.

These are people who want the elections to be fair and clean and less baldly manipulated than they were, but if the elections were cleaned up, might vote for Communists, Just Russia (which is...whatever it is), and even the ill-named Libertarians. Or they might in fact vote for United Russia in many places. Will we ever know?

The sense of justice in Russia is strong. It's what propels people to go up against the state monolith. But let's not forget that it's what compels them to put state monoliths in place in the first place. Russians have a deep sense of hatred and vengeance for each other and they actually look to the state to keep down their fellow man, whom they view as untrustworthy and unruly.

Overcoming that sense of vicious suspicion for people outside one's circle -- deliberately fostered by the KGB and its predecessors and successors all these years but also culturally inherent -- is not going to be easy. Having some kind of sense of solidarity with other people even if you don't like their views or don't like them, for reasons of higher principle -- that would be a nice thing to see emerge in Russia, and it will have to emerge to make any revolution succeed. But revolutions aren't about being nice. They're about kicking out people you don't like and taking power.

If the crowd cries "Putina na nary" (i.e. send Putin to labour camp to sleep on wooden planks like they have in the camp cells), but not "Putina v sud" (to court), then you get the idea. Justice isn't about due process and the rule of law and the law of discovery and adversarial defense. It's about bypassing all of that and putting the person right into jail, do not pass "go", do not collect $200 dollars.

I'm sure there are plenty of things one could arrest Putin for. Let's start with Chechnya? Wrongful imprisonment of Khodorkovsky and Magnitsky? And then sure, ballot-box stuffing. But if you were to jail Putin for these things, there would be literally thousands of lieutenants -- Kremlin officials, regional governors, enforcers -- that would all have to go to jail, too. That's what gave them all pause when they should have tried the Communist Party in 1991 for crimes against humanity -- they'd have to send more than half the parliament to jail. And anyone at the level of a regional party secretary would be implicated in such crimes -- and more. In fact, it would be very hard to have a de-Nazification type of operation as you would literally be left without the red directors who kept the factories running...

BTW, when we first filmed Nemtsov back in 1991-1992, he was clearly supported by the KGB and red directors of the military-industrial complex of Gorky/Nizhny Novgorod. Yes, a Jewish liberal, a scientist, a supporter of Andrei Sakharov's who ensured that his apartment in exile was made a museum immediately. But also supported by those siloviki in the regions, some of whom later went on to become successful businessmen. Is that what the Kremlin was always afraid of, other people's regional siloviki?

Some posters in a slideshow by Slon.

6. Navalny. Says Ellen Barry ofthe Times, who first wonderfully describes Navalny's "paint-stripping contempt":

MR. NAVALNY has Nordic good looks, a caustic sense of humor and no political organization.

Five years ago, he quit the liberal party Yabloko, frustrated with the liberals’ infighting and isolation from mainstream Russian opinion. Liberals, meanwhile, have deep reservations about him, because he espouses Russian nationalist views. He has appeared as a speaker alongside neo-Nazis and skinheads, and once starred in a video that compares dark-skinned Caucasus militants to cockroaches. While cockroaches can be killed with a slipper, he says that in the case of humans, “I recommend a pistol.”

Well, wait. Is this the Norwegian terrorist Breitbart we're talking about, or the hope of Russian democracy? To be sure, the Times hasn't always gotten it right over the years about dissidents (Clifford Levy is a notable exception) -- there's some decided diffidence about dissidents there in fact which sometimes makes the Washington Post a better read on the subject (and certainly the Wall Street Journal).

Still, it's not just the Times ringing these warning bells.

When the Egyptian revolution got started, everybody said that ElBaradei, of the atomic agency, would lead the scientists and liberals and we didn't have to worry. When that become obviously a non-starter, everybody said Wael Ghonim, the Google engineer who had worked outside of Egypt and run a Facebook page under a pseudonym, would save the day by rallying Internet people, hipsters, young kids, etc. No matter that Wael was soon spouting that weird amalgam of Leninism and Islamism that you see in movements in the region where Islamism *is* literally inspired and shaped by Leninism. We were supposed to look past crude calls for collectivism and see all the beauty. Today, we have a choice between the brutal military, and the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood -- or worse, the Salafis.

In Russia, we'll have a choice that will look superficially similar -- the brutal KGB and siloviki that Putin can muster, and the...whatever we're supposed to call the amalgam of old-line Communists, fascistic red/brown "libertarians," and nationalist Navalny youth. Not pretty! I wish better for Russia, and maybe if Leonid Gozman has his way, it will be better.

 

 

These Two Tweets Sort of Sum Up the Whole Russian Internet Revo For Me Right Now

These two tweets from candidate Alena Popova sort of sum up the whole Russian Internet Revo thing for me right now -- and captures what I find an exasperating combination of superficiality and earnestness.

First, she "unlocks the Campus Explorer Badge" on Foursquare. Priorities, priorities!

Then, she goes to the Congress of Just Russia, the party where she is on the list.

Well, isn't it grand that Just Russia is on Foursquare!

Now, is it going to be out on the streets?

I Don't Have a Good Feeling About Tomorrow's Demonstration in Moscow

I know I'm out of step with the cool kids on this one, but I don't have a good feeling about tomorrow's demonstration in Moscow.

Here's why.

1. It feels like Minsk almost exactly a year ago. Back then, with the fraudulent Belarusian presidential elections, the alternative candidates called on everyone to go to the square, some 40,000 people showed up and behaved in orderly fashion, but Lukashenka's goons staged provocations and hundreds of people were brutally beaten and arrested, some 40 or more got serious sentences, and today, a year later, several dozen leaders of the opposition and civic movements, notably Andrei Sannikov of charter97.org, are sitting in a cold jail stills. Sannikov and others wer4e sentenced to 2-4 years for supposedly inciting public unrest -- although of course it is Lukashenka who has been inciting unrest since 1996.

The day started out lovely and exciting with Andrei and his wife, the journalist Irina Khalip and their young son Danik all going off to the ballot box. I thought there'd be some 15-day jail sentences perhaps; I thought there'd be some office raids, but even I wasn't prepared for seeing Andrei lying, injured, in the snow, after riot troops put a shield on him and jumped up and down.

Belarus has long been a polygon or testing ground for policies in Russia. Dissidents in Russia have always had an almost superstitious view of this, but they're right. The whole concept of the vertikal was tried and tested and perfected by Lukashenka before Putin perfected it. The two countries are in a union of sorts; you feel as if the bad guys have weekend seminars to trade tips just like the democrats. It worked perfectly. The Belarusian KGB (still named that) was able to get many authoritative people at first to believe that it really was the opposition that provoked violence. It took enormous amount of independent youtubing, reporting, lobbying, etc. to try to wrest the narrative back.

Russian organizers like Bocharsky seem perfectly aware of this, but it's one thing to theorize, it's another when there's a steel-toed OMON boot in your face, as the ubiquitous Ray F. writes on A Good Treaty's comments.

2. And speaking of a Good Treaty, that's another red flag for me. These curiously pro-Putin and plus-Kremlin bloggers like A Good Treaty who -- out of nowhere, seemingly -- began ankle-biting me and harassing me on Twitter and their blogs last year for criticizing Russia even occasionally and not particularly strenuously -- are all excited about the demonstrations. That makes me wonder "why". Perhaps they believe in the Surkov agitprop about pluralism and democracy (we're going to reduce down from "managed democracy" to "managed pluralism")? It's awfully creepy reading Surkov blandly talking about dialogue and increased participation in parliament when you know he doesn't mean anything normal by that. What sort of contorted, co-opted thing are we going to be talking about? As the Power Vertical quoted him:

We believe that once a system has settled, there should be more degrees of freedom inside it. One should be flexible, one should learn to enter into coalitions. Democracy is a compromise. Democracy is a procedure. It's a tedious one, but it's a procedure.

Of course, what he's talking about is controlling the entire framework within which this pluralism is supposed to take place -- and he gets to do that, as the Kremlin's siloviki can get the Internet and mobile phones and transportation shut down in a heartbeat if they like.

3. This isn't exactly Sakharov, Orlov, and Sharansky. There, I've said it. These new democratic leaders don't impress me as much as the old Soviet-era dissidents. Yeah, I get it that I'm old and out of touch. But the morals of SOS were indisputable and impeccable, and Navalny, well... Perhaps it's going too far, as Valeriya Ilyinichna has done, in denouncing Navalny as a "fascist." But it doesn't sit well with me that he has gone to demonstrations with names like "Let's cut off the Caucasus," i.e. end financial subsidies to the North Caucasus or to the Russian March, which seems to be, oh, the thinking-man's nationalists...or something.

I asked a recent Moscow visitor who follows these issues if he had concerns about Navalny, and he didn't, because he said he's an open book, everything he thinks is on his blog. Or in his leaked emails, for that matter. He's a nationalist, but not Putin's style of nationalist and of course not like Zhirinovsky (who has always seemed to be a complete and utter KGB concoction from start to finish, an entire elaborate act put on as a lightning rod to siphon off and make visible certain movements in society.)

So, a nationalist, but not like Putin -- well, I don't know if that's an improvement, frankly. Putin's bad enough, but he still has to function within a certain legal framework, if you will, of twisted state-law, but still, a kind of procedure. He has to explain himself on TV, staged though it is.

What do nationalists who have lived largely on the Internet turn out to be like?

To be sure, perhaps the world never got to see what Sakharov, Orlov, and Sharansky and many lesser known political prisoners might have been like had they had 20 years to function in a social movement in Russia. Sure, the world got to see how Sharansky functioned in various ministerial jobs in Israel. Sakharov was a deputy in the Supreme Soviet for a time before his death. But would they have all remained as liberal and thoughtful, confronted with the complexities of modern life? Perhaps it's easy to idealize them, but the main thing about those men is that they were able to suffer really severely for their beliefs -- years of exile, years of imprisonment. They were really grounded in human rights, in the idea of fighting for your own rights, and other people's rights, for "our freedom, and yours." Fighting against corruption of people in high places, sometimes tacitly egged on or paid for by this or that force in society looking to run kompromat on their enemies, well, it's not quite the same thing. In fact, it's quite different than a human rights movement. And I think we'll be seeing more of why that's the case.

I'm not sure Internet people will be willing to do that.

4. Can you trust people on the Internet who pledge to show up? We'll see! Maybe so. 30,000 are planned in the permit, and I wonder what authorities will do if 40,000 or 50,000 show (I doubt it will be more). But more to the point, what if it's only 15,000? That's still a lot, given that a year ago or so, we were talking about the several dozen or a few hundred at the most who would show up for the monthly "31" demonstrations.

More to the point, show up to do...what, exactly? Dude, where's my vote? My vote for what? Just Russia? Or...what? PARNAS, that was never even registered? (And we had to hear A Good Treaty endlessly snark on that question, as if they really had no right to register.)

I'm not so sure Just Russia is a terribly big improvement over Putin, but surprise me.

I can't help thinking of that story found by the Englishman who covered the revolution in 1917. He went to the countryside and asked the peasants what they thought about the "Revolutsiya". It was a strange Latin word. Perevorot ("the turnover") was the usual Russian word. The peasant thought awhile, and then asked about this "Revolutsiya": "Is that when the pig turns from one side over to the other?"

5. OK, so they get 30,000 really active people who all pledge to reform and revivify political life, then what? Well, they they have that Russian boloto, the swamp, the people who are uninvolved and don't want to become involved, or find it easier to say "against all" than to identify what they are for. I see all kinds of people on Facebook and Live Journal trying to instruct each other to be positive and flexible and creative and prepared for the worst and make it different "this time" than it always is. But, well...it's Russia.

Having watched how awful the Occupy Wall Street movement has been, both in its initial cunning manipulation and extremism of the seasoned cadres, then the glomming on of the clueless, then the loons who helped split the camps up into drummers and negotiators, then all the posing and martyrs inciting police brutality, well, I wouldn't wish it on Russia and I certainly don't wish it on my own country. OWS has absolutely nothing about it that I would follow -- it is the less than one percent. It is not raising an interesting national conversation, it's inciting class hatred and can't even explain why we have to hate a class that pays 40 percent of the taxes.

The Russian revolt now isn't related to OWS and has different concerns. Perhaps it is more like Tiananmen Square or Tahrir Square in that people want justice, not democracy, order, not freedom. They want fairness, in that they want the vote to be honest. Some of the people are communists who wanted their votes to count for the communists, not for United Russia; some of them are the extreme nationalists of the LDPR that wanted their vote to count for that extremism, not United Russia which is moderate by contrast.  And so on. While there isn't a Muslim Brotherhood or Westernized intelligentsia equivalent as in Egypt, exactly, those same types of divisions exist. What happens when Navalny and Nemtsov and Limonov and Kasparov have to plan something together? Won't it be the usual kasha?

6. The US is too over-eager to see social-media induced change they can believe in. I'm enthusiasic about social media and I think you just go on opposing authoritarians' misuse of it, but I also think there's too much reliance on it and not enough organic face-to-face persuasion of people who don't think as you do -- which is what a social movement needs. On the Internet, the arrogant wired youth get away with dismissing people they don't like as trolls, as Tea Party, as out of touch as 1999, as whatever -- they mute and ban or delete or ignore. In real life, when you have someone who didn't vote for your party, you can't get away with doing those sorts of things, you have to find out why, you have to really listen to their issues, and you have to persuade them.

I am made uneasy by the whole Hillary Clinton Internet freedom thing and Lavrov's vehement response to it. That is, I'm not upset at Hillary for having the policy, as Evgeny Morozov might be, but I think there were probably ways to pre-anticipate some of the static and backlash and work in the answers for it -- in the way the LGBT speech pre-anticipates all the "Western invention stuff" and knocks it out, right within the speech, by pointing to all the African countries that accept gay rights.

In fact, another red flag for me about this whole new Russian social-media revo thing is that Evgeny Morozov is strangely silent. He isn't denouncing Hillary. He's not denoucing Navalny. He's not doing anything. So perhaps these are the droids he was looking for. And I'm very certain that any droids Zhenya is looking for, especially if he is 30 kilometers from the action, are ultimately anything like the sort of truly open and liberal society I'd want to live in. Why isn't there a huge Foreign Policy article denouncing Golos' Ushahidi clone, like Haystack, or denouncing fake Twitter or Live Journal revolutions? Or why isn't there even a tweet saying that it's all ephemeral because the Kremlin will prevail? Answer: because what's coming, is something that Morozov will embrace as authentic -- and that's why we have to worry.

The entire McFaul (Malia)-Surkov thing really becomes absurd, doesn't it? When you think that either it is entirely OBE'd by in fact Russians taking their "civsoc 2.0" technology really seriously, going beyond their American patrons, or in fact Surkov is cunningly waiting in the wings just to co-opt the entire thing.

And I do believe that is what we will be seeing -- a massive and successful cooptation effort. There may be brutal force used on some, to isolate them and scare those who might become radical -- much the way as it was done in Belarus. There will be just letting off steam judiciously, perhaps letting the march proceed and then blaming some extremists for some excesses, but then expecting it all to eventually dissipate as people go back to their (now back online) blogs.

There *might* be a massive show of force with an Internet black-out (in Belarus, the government hijacked all the opposition sites and made them refer to state sites, or shut them off) but the safest thing to do with Internet people is ignore them. A majority of Russian people are not online.

It's been interesting to follow the campaign of Alena Popova -- the Silicon Valley girl who held the tech start-up meetings, went with Michael McFaul on a faith trip to Skolkovo with leading US tech people; friend even of the spy Anna Chapman. Yesterday, she was going to the McFaul-Surkov meetings and babbling about technology platforms and connections and empowerment and blah blah. Then she decided to run for election, and had to go out to the hinterlands to talk to people. Then she got in a demonstration and an OMONevts knocked her to the ground and kicked her, and showing her candidate's badge had no effect on him.

In short, the lovely Alena got a taste of what Russia has been like for people in the small opposition or human rights movements or national rights movements for the last 50 years (and of course, the Stalin/Lenin terror before that). And it was interesting to me to see if this would become a new generation of dissidents radicalized by Putin's thuggery. Maybe so.

7. I don't think Vkontakte will hold. I'd love to believe in @durov. I'd love to believe that he will go on defying the povestki  from the prokuratura, and tell his fans that he will not shut down their groups that are critical of United Russia.

But Vkontakte shut down Andrei Sannikov's group of 8,000 supporters within a day of his arrest. It was shameful and disgusting. I wrote to them -- others did. They felt no shame. They made no announcement. They didn't explain themselves. Keeping their service and their revenue was more important. That shows me what they are made of, quite frankly.

Maybe for his own Russians, "svoi," Durov might keep the servers from being shut down. How? DDOS attacks seem as common as the cold in Russia. Good luck. And I'm not sure they won't really knuckle him and he will tell himself, better to keep the service open at least for some things, some communications and connections, than risk the whole thing over a few anti-government groups. That's how the line will go.

Again, I'd like to be surprised about this -- I don't think I will be.

Here's the thing. A Russia run by people like Alena Popova or even Navalny would be a Russia better than one run by Putin or even Medvedev (Gazprom). But it won't be a Russia that changes its position on Kosovo or Iran one iota. It won't be a Russia that suddenly loses its ambivalence about America and changes its nuclear policies drastically. It won't be a Russia that will wince at the thought of kicking out 10,000 Tajik guest workers or rounding up and disappearing Chechens. The new Internet Russians don't seem to care about these things. Yes, it will be a Russia (a Moscow) where maybe big-wigs can't race by in fancy cars; yes it will be a place where your blog server can't be shut down; yes it will be a place where maybe forests instead of highways run through Khimki. All to the good. But it won't really be about changing the imperial assholery that led to most of Russia's past and present problems -- at least, not over night.

Masha Gessen looks at it pragmatically as being the first of an event that eventually, in a few years, who knows how many, maybe 2 or 3 or more, will lead to the demise of Putin. That's a good (and safer) prediction because it does get at the problem of how entrenched Putin is, with not only his own poor people in the sticks, but with Western leaders.

I marvelled how, when Putin first made his announcement, the entire pack of Russianologists and Russian watchers, fell into line -- first led by Julia Ioffe, who pointed out sagely that the US would like having Putin because it would be "stability" -- and then all kinds of Western government figures and senior analysts fell into line. Sam Charap, call your office. NOBODY credited the Russian people themselves with saying "khvatit!," that's enough. No one will admit that now!

Truly, it was a marvel. It seems to have taken just one sports event where people booed Vova to get the ball rolling. But did it really roll very far?

 

 

No, Don't Hand Russia the Undeserved Moral Victory of Abolishing Jackson-Vanik, Simply Graduate Russia

Soviet refuseniks demonstrate in Moscow in 1973 in front of the Interior Ministry.

President Barack Obama is calling on Congress to "abolish" the Jackson-Vanik amendment as Russia is set to join the World Trade Organization (WTO) next summer.

Congress should not do that, but should stand firm, and refuse to abolish the Jackson-Vanik amendment per se, which is a perfectly fine piece of legislation that must remain in place.

Instead, Congress should *graduate* Russia from Jackson-Vanik, permanently, because Jackson-Vanik no longer applies to Russia.

I don't know why this has become so hard to understand -- that you don't need to abolish Jackson-Vanik in order to do the job of having it permanently no longer apply to Russia. As I wrote last year:

This simple construct -- graduate don't repeal -- seemed to be hard to get across, so avid is the desire of some to remove any "legacy of the Cold War," so heavy is the Russian pressure, and so eager are some who remain very, very concerned about human rights in Russia to appear fair and not be appearing to move the goalposts. I quite appreciate the creative ideas for continuing to keep the spotlight on Russian abuses, using all kinds of existing mechanisms, whether hearings at CSCE or reports from the US CIRF. But these activities, while merited, have no legislative action component.

This sort of graduation was done with Ukraine in 2006 -- there was never any talk about how we had to abolish Jackson-Vanik then.

Why is it always put in terms now -- by the Russians mainly, and by our latter-day detente-niks -- of "abolition"? Because the Russians want the entire thing to go away, to be undone, and to be handed the moral victory over Cold Warriors. They want to be able to undo the record of the human rights struggle of the 1970s and 1980s and have the last word, and win. And they shouldn't be allowed to do that, not only because the record should be allowed to stand, but  because their human rights record remains highly troublesome -- everything from the case of the lawyer Sergei Magnitsky permitted to die in prison to the assassination of human rights advocate Natalia Estemirova to restrictions of the rights of the media and free assembly, as well as the failure to prosecute the assaults and murders of guest workers and other ethnic minorities.

No one should be handing the Kremlin this victory, the Cold War was a good thing (a perfectly legitimate response to Soviet mass murder and annexation of territories) and given the persistence of some of the legacy of Stalin (never prosecuted) even today, this morally-dictated legislation should remain in place. P.S. It's useful still to apply to Turkmenistan, which maintains blacklists of people not able to travel or emigrate from the country, and some other countries in the world like North Korea.

Yes, we get it that Jackson-Vanik's "day is over," in the sense that it was put in place largely in response to the Soviet Union's refusal to permit freedom of movement as a basic human right, and now people can leave Russia at will. It is not a piece of legislation meant to deal with all human rights problems --we get that. Read the language of the bill; it is limited to apply to countries with non-market economies that did not permit people to emigrate. Yet the moral imperative it served -- preventing the Soviet Union from getting most-favoured-nation trade status because of its bad behaviour -- doesn't somehow get cancelled out retroactively -- and stands as an important check on future bad behaviour.

So: rule that it no longer applies to Russia -- it doesn't -- and leave it in place.

There really is no reason on earth that Congress cannot pass a resolution that ways that Russia is permanently waived -- graduated is the word used for Ukraine -- from Jackson-Vanik. It should be a simple matter. That is hasn't become a simple matter lets me know this: the Russians are putting enormous heat personally on Obama and his aides trying to claim what they say was a "promise" to "abolish" Jackson-Vanik. It's not a promise that the president could give; if he used this language it was part of his terrible fumbling on Russia and human rights politics in the early days of his administration (the policy has improved but there is still an overall reticence to condemn human rights problems forthrightly).

Why are the Russians doing this? Because they want to permanently send a message to the US that they cannot have moral legislation passed that addresses Russia's immorality. They don't want to legislate morality; they don't want foreigners legislating human rights, either. They want to be able to roll back history and come out looking as if they are the victors, with their legal nihilism -- that not law, not legislation but peace pacts make things happen. Preserving Jackson-Vanik intact, as is, is an important check against Russian legal nihilism -- symbolic, yet literal, too.

The Obama Administration should not be pursuing this "abolition" when it has no need to do so (another option is to have the president issue the permanent waiver, while keeping the legislation in place, although it's better if Congress does it so as not to create yet another executive edict.)

Why doesn't Obama do this? I believe it's because his old DSA-style "progressive" politics, the politics of the organized socialist movement dictate that you do not cross Russia and its allies ((regardless of whether Obama can now be technically defined as a "socialist" on this or that grounds). It's a very old hangover from the old "new" left, and it's a shameful one. It comes from a hugely mistaken belief that there was something "progressive" about Moscow then, or that even today, as a counter-weight to US power, there is something "progressive" about Moscow today. Um, there isn't anything "progressive" about Moscow. It's brutal and cynical. Therefore, it should not get a pass.

Remember when Obama went to Russia and -- horribly -- talked about how the Khodorkovsky case was "an internal affair" of Russia's? What a bungle! That set back progress with the Helsinki accords and Helsinki talks 30 years -- where human rights was recognized finally even by Russia as *not* an internal affair. That this bungle came even in the act of raising the Khodorkovsky case was even more regrettable.

Khodorkovsky doesn't have to be a perfect democrat nor does his case have to be a pristine prisoner-of-conscience case to "get it" about how and why you need to raise this case as a human rights case. It's about officially-sanctioned revenge, it's about vindictive policies that curb freedom and prevent challenges to the Kremlin's power. It's about the absence of the rule of law. If universally-recognized legal procedures were in place and practiced, there would be no Khodorkovsky case, especially the second sentence. So you get to raise it, regardless of gingerly feelings about "internal affairs" -- because universality applies...universally.

When the Russians claim that the president "can't interfere" in the justice system because it's independent -- snort -- you call their bluff. They do, of course anyway. But the answer is to say that invocation of universal norms, invocation of the values of Helsinki (that such invocations *isn't* encroachment on "internal affairs") is not compromising of the judiciary's independence.

Human rights law is really hard to get passed. You would never get Jackson-Vanik passed again if you had to, today, for any other issue perhaps more burning that emigration was in the 1970s, i.e. torture.

So leave it in place, do not cede a moral victory to the Kremlin that is entirely unnecessary, and work up the right sort of bill for a resolution or act of the appropriate sort that will accomplish this deed.

It's important to remember the context last year when this was debated at the Kennan Institute: people thought President Dmitry Medvedev was some sort of liberal and reformer and that he should be "rewarded" by having his liberalism met with liberalism on the American side, via repeal of Jackson-Vanik.

Well, I hope we've all gotten over that silly stuff by now, and we can focus on the real problem: the sheer, unrelenting brutality that the Putin regime means (and the recognition that Medvedev's rule was merely a peredyshka or breather of sorts with inevitable re-Putinization). Keep Jackson-Vanik in place; graduate Russia.

Memorial Event for Elena Bonner, Russian Human Rights Leader Tonight

We are holding a memorial meeting for Elena Bonner, the veteran Russian human rights advocate and widow of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Dr. Andrei Sakharov, who died at the age of 88 on June 18 of this year.

Please join Elena Georgievna's family and friends at NYU Law School, the meeting is open to the public.

Speakers include Elena's children Tatiana Yankelevich and Alexey Semyonov; Robert L. Bernstein, president of Random House for 25 years, founder of Human Rights Watch and currently chair of a new organization, Advancing Human Rights; David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker; Carl Gershman, director of National Endowment for Democracy; Felice Gaer, director of the Jacob Blaustein Institute for the Advancement of Human Rights and many more.

Natan Sharansky, a colleague of Elena's and former Soviet political prisoner and Israeli government minister, has sent a 3-minute video which will be shown, along with a slide presentation about Elena's life.

The service will take place TONIGHT, Friday, September 16, 2011, from 7:00-9:00 pm, in the Tishman Auditorium of Vanderbilt Hall of NYU School of Law, which is located at  40 Washington Square South, between MacDougal and Sullivan Streets.

 Please feel free to share this with those you feel might wish to attend.

For more detailed parking and transportation information, please visit http://www.law.nyu.edu/specialevents/locationguide/vanderbilthall/index.htm

If you can't make it, email me at catfitzny@yahoo.com to get a copy of the program and a special publication prepared by Edward Kline, editor of Khronika Press, Elena Bonner In Her Own Words and Andrei's.