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 alliance with the awful Kremlin gray cardinal Vladislav Surkov, 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 for disappointing Russian human rights activists 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 I 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 an ambassador to 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, ran demonstratively 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 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 -- but the liberals/hipsters/social media coders and users wouldn't move the rest of the country. Not with only 30 percent Internet penetration.
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. I continue to maintain that we can permanently graduate Russia -- as we did Ukraine -- but keep the legislation in place.
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