Moscow demonstration September 15, 2012. Photo by Sergei Kurota.
I never had a good feeling about the Russian demonstrations -- I wrote about this in December 2011. Look, I remember even bigger demonstrations from the fall of 1990, and the elements of what was to come ten years later was present even in those heady days.
I admire Leonid Parfyonov and some of the others who have come forth from the edges of their disgrace as formerly-accepted liberal journalists put out of business by Putin. But journalists and writers and such can't run the government or even a movement, they can only call to conscience or make meaning out of events.
I've been unimpressed with Navalny and some of the others, and while some may laugh, when Valeriya Novodvorskaya sounded the alarm about their illiberalism very early on, I took it seriously.
The other day I saw a tweet by Ilya Varlamov, who is one of the new revolution's golden youths. I was reminded how I was urged by friends to go and hear his talk in New York, which was at the snooty Onegin restaurant, even though he himself is a jeans-and-t-shirt sort of blogger dude.
I noticed that in response to the killing of the American ambassador and diplomats in Benghazi, he wrote some flippant, typically Russian nationalist remark to the effect that the chickens were coming home to roost. It was indistinguishable from what Putin and his ilk would say. It implied that promoting democracy abroad, you are a hypocrite, and smugly took satisfaction that it ended in a "lesson" like this. The word "ungrateful" was used, as if the ungrateful subjects of our ministrations rightfully rose up and popped us off. I've had my criticisms of State Department "liberation theology" and the "responsibility to protect" probably longer and more nuanced than Varlamov, and there's troubling aspects to the Libyan invasion, not the least of which is these American deaths; Libyan deaths preceded them. Even though Russia misused the issue for its own nefarious ideological purposes, why couldn't NATO have conducted an investigation, to de-fang the ideologues offsetting the 100 killed by NATO air strikes to the tens of thousands killed by Qadaffi or Al Quaeda or rebels?
Tweets aren't places for nuances, but I could see a lot packed into this one from Varlamov: it was about defiantly distinguishing himself from America, even as he postured as a dissident against Putin. It was for bonding with others by invoking such symbols. The fact of the matter is, some of those Libyan people are grateful for getting rid of their tyrant, don't like their country beset by militants, and held up signs of sorrow and gratitude to the US that don't appear to be contrived. That doesn't mean we can't be critical, but we can say it's more complicated than the Putin narrative of evil Hillary fomenting Orange Revolutions around the world with taxpayer dollars.
Then I saw a re-tweet in Varlamov's stream that was a bit creepy. Some guy defiantly telling the world that he was going to wear a cross on his chest, and damn those who are offended, like those wearing Wahhabi beards. Geez, "Wahhabi" is one of those things Putin always says about every Muslim with a beard, regardless of whether he's a terrorist or not. Wahhabi beard? Really guys?
I keep thinking of that demonstration a few months ago where the opposition had to arrange itself into four columns more stringent than the Alcoves at CUNY back in the day. Let's see, there were democrats, communists, nationalists and...and...what was the fourth one? anybody?
Today I see a Russian blog with a play on the name of Facebook groups, "We Were On Bolotny Square and We'll Come Again" or "We Were on Sakharov Square And We Will Come Again".
"We Were On Sakharov Square and We're Not Coming Anymore". He says flatly that if before, he felt that the freaks (extremists, oddballs, oppportunists that show up at any demonstration) were among the people, now he feels as if the people were among the freaks. It's like Occupy Wall Street, and how it started out with disgruntled middle class employees and students and organized unions showing up at marches, even if clearly organized by stealth extremists, but just got more and more and more weird until it was Marxist-Leninist ranters and street bums and the Guy Fawkes mask slipped.
The blogger -- Ivan Sukhov, I never heard of him -- writes about how the movement is too obsessed with Putin as its target, but doesn't have enough of an idea of how to make an alternative and have a coherent agenda. And the leaders are suspect:
Moreoever, there is no doubt that since the social group (or rather groups) that has a demand for political changes is real, you can be sure that inside it, real leadership is growing. It's not visible yet, but it's not taking part in masturbatory entertainments with the coordinating council. But this leader, dear comrade, is not Bykov, not Parkhomenko, and not Parfyonov. And not Alexei Leonidovich Kudrin. It is not Navalny, whose heroic hour, apparently, has passed unnoticed to himself and now looks lost. We don't know who this leader is, but he exists. It is like an embryo that is alien in the body of an astronaut. The astronaut is us, who were accustomed to going through the freezing weather with each other in the first demonstrations, to gab about this and that, and listen to old songs about how we were waiting for changes. But this alien embryo -- is a new leadership which is fated to replace the familiar team, the people who were more or less pleasant to us, who have turned out to be incompetent. "Grandfather Semyon is waiting for us in the bow of the steamship. He will crawl out and eat us all."
We don't know anything about him, but with great likelihood he will lack the mild features of Boris Akunin or Dmitry Bykov [liberal writer and poet]. With great likelihod, nature will endow this new leader with the instruments of aggression. Not necessarily, but with great likelihood, it will be an uruk-hai warrior who will say: "these smart people couldn't cope, now we will take action."
(That bit about Semyon is from the famous song by the Russian rocker Boris Grebenshchikov, "Changes," and I don't quite get the reference, but it seems to be about people thinking they were fortunate to live in a time of change, but then this bogey man comes out and gets them.)
That creepiness that Sukhov captures here (and I don't know him, he could be creepy himself in othr ways), sums up what I've always felt about these demonstrations. But then, I felt them about 1991, when I heard about what was happening in Rutskoy's wing in the White House, and then later, to my utter surprise, saw the delegation coming to the Russian consulate in New York to celebrate after the coup, to be headed by Rutskoy -- with his chief lieutenant the very same KGB minder who had nursed our television crew only the year before in the Soviet era. Creepy!
I really wanted to believe Masha Gessen when she was seeming to make that typical Russian intelligentsia meme -- "We awoke in a different country" -- really come alive. But then there was her book. And Maria Salye dying suddenly. And then she was fired because she wouldn't cover cranes. Cranes! And then she was going to be put back by the Crane-Nester-in-Chief himself, but declined, as that would be like getting a state appointment.
And then, at a time when America looks especially weak with its ambassador and diplomats killed, and in disarray arguing about what should be done in the Middle East, and when Putin acknowledges frankly that Romney is right, Russia is our enemy, Putin decides to pull the plug on USAID.
I personally can't shed a lot of tears for USAID. It's a big cumbersome bureaucratic and often stupid organization with the "developmental" instead of the "human rights" approach that should undergo the same reforms that Kofi Annan only partially succeeded in completing at the UN. Surely USAID could have seen this coming and should have prepared more. It's the kind of agency that does nothing about child labour in Uzbekistan and thinks that problem is a function of just needing to sell better farm equipment to the Uzbek bureaucracy. I don't think it's storming any barns in Russia, and if anything, Putin may discover that some of his regional cronies have been dinged by his expulsion of the organization.
Long ago, Ford withdrew from Russia, after its Moscow director triumphantly once told me, in renting an expensive building on Tverskaya Street, that they were there for 50 years and had to do it right. Soros was forced to leave even before that, unable to work and crossed and stymied at every turn, and its director knocked on the head. Both of these foundations should step up now and restore or do more offshore funding.
I'm sure there will be some shrieks that USAID was doing terribly important things, but it if was, they weren't working so well, were very costly and spent more on US consultants and infrastructure than on Russia, and if they *are* worthy, can be continued from abroad in other creative ways. Maybe the basics of an underground have to be made again as there was in the Cold War -- smuggling in books, or the modern equivalent of circumvention technology and support for proxy servers and iphones -- although none of those things by themselves can create civil society.
That the Russians have to do themselves. And they really need to do it. I'm all for supporting democracy from abroad because I don't see it as imperialistic or intrusive if we organize it as support for those who share our liberal and democratic values, and support for the vulnerable in society such as women, children, minorities, sick and disabled. There are lots of good Russians continuing in all the areas of civic work from human rights to the environment and education. So just as we did before, people will find their partners and help them, they may do less, but they may do better without USAID.
And I'm all for retaliatory tit-for-tat measures from the US. Pull the plug on each and every visa for RT, the propaganda station the Kremlin runs which is its way of supporting our dissidents. It's not about free media or harming press freedom because RT isn't free media, it's a government propaganda operation. If Russia can't tolerate Americans supporting those engaged in peaceful work for change in their country, then it has to work two ways, and kicking out RT is the way to do it. There isn't any fund in Russia that supports American dissidents at least that I can see -- the concept of "Moscow gold" went out in 1991.
And pass the Magnitsky Act. Good Lord, what is the hold-up. There isn't an excuse on any side of the aisle. We have to retire the application of Jackson-Vanik because it does not apply -- we have to support the rule of law and set a good example of good faith, even where the Russians have none. And we have to have some human-rights operative legislation in place, and that is the Magnitsky Act, which at least takes a stand on impunity with consistent legislative power, and not the vacilating executive branch diplomacy we've seen on Russia.
It's in our interest that the murky milieu that the blogger describes not produce a leader antithetical to our interests -- some neo-communist or neo-fascist even worse than Putin. So let's get to work on it and not shed any tears for USAID.
"And I'm all for retaliatory tit-for-tat measures from the US. Pull the plug on each and every visa for RT, the propaganda station the Kremlin runs which is its way of supporting our dissidents." So is this a back handed admission that the U.S. does indeed have leftist, libertarian or just plain anti-Big Sis (as in Glenn Greenwald's case) dissidents? How interesting.
I'd love to see Russia pass the 'Agent Brian Terry Accountability Act' and ban Eric Holder and all those ATF bastards from ever stepping foot in the Russian Federation. So yes Catherine, Magnitsky make our day. How about a 'Moscow Committee for Peace on the U.S. Mexican Border' to mirror image the American Committee for Peace in Chechnya neocon/spook front group while they're at it?
Posted by: Mr. X | September 26, 2012 at 11:01 PM