Paul
Goble
Staunton, February 20 – The elastic
and expansive way in which the Russian authorities use the term “extremist” and
recent signals from President Vladimir Putin that that state must act “decisively”
against “any type of extremist structures” mean that in today’s Russia, almost
anyone critical of the Kremlin could be brought up on charges, experts say.
In an article on the “Svobodnaya
Pressa” portal today, Natalya Kalinina calls attention to this dangerous
development, focusing first on the statements of Putin and other senior
officials and then on the reaction of some of Russia’s leading rights activists
and members of several political parties (svpressa.ru/society/article/64594/).
Last
week, she points out, Putin told senior officials at the FSB that “in the
neutralization of any kind of extremist structures, it is necessary to act with
the maximum degree of decisiveness and to block the attempts of radicals to use
[new information technologies] for their propaganda (ria.ru/defense_safety/20130214/922893177.html).
If the Russian president has in mind
under the term extremists “those who are in the lits of the ministry of
internal affairs,” Kalinina says, “then he in fact was giving a signal to the
siloviki not to stand on ceremony” in their dealings with the opposition. At
least, the journalist adds, “that is the view of many experts.”
Former Russian Interior Minister
Rashid Nurgaliyev remarked a year ago that there are “about 200,000” extremists
in Russia, ranging across the political spectrum, although he said at that time
that there were a maximum of 20,000 who were prepared to act against the regime
“with arms in their hands.”
Those figures mean that most of the
people the regime classifies as extremists are “opposition politicians,” Lev
Ponomaryev, the head of the For Human Rights organization says. But both he and others say that official
understanding of the meaning of “extremist” may mean that almost any Russian
critical of the regime could fall within the regime’s definition.
Aleksandr Verkhovsky, the head of
the SOVA organization that keeps track of official actions in this area says
that in his view “the situation in this sphere is to a certain extent hopeless.”
That is because the government “does not have clearly formulated tasks” for its
“struggle with extremism.”
“Everything is too cloudy,” he
suggests, arguing that there need to be clear definitions. Unfortunately, at
present, any definition of the term is lacking in Russian law. “There are eonly
a list of signs [of extremism] and this is insufficient” to do what law must
do: delimit “the permissible and the impermissible.”
That means that no one can be sure
what actions will have what consequences and that Russian officials can, as
they often have done, change the rules from day to day with regard to this or
that action, with some taking a far more expansive view of what actions are
extremist than others do.
Thus, to give but one or many
examples of this, officials in the Komi Republic have accused election
observers from Golos and rights activists from Memorial and other groups of
extremism simply because their activities are financed by foreign grants and
thus can be assumed by extension to be “directed toward the change of the political
system of Russia.”
While
only the courts are supposed to be in a position to decide whether an
individual or group is “extremist,” in fact, officials in various executive
branch agencies do so on their own routinely, Kalinina says. And their decisions have the kind of
consequences that the courts either cannot or will not reverse.
(There are some notable exceptions. Today,
Nazzacent.ru reported that an Arkhangelsk court has dropped another charge
against Pomor activist Ivan Moseyev – he still faces one count -- because
testimony in his behalf has so clearly obliterated the claims of the
prosecution there (nazaccent.ru/content/6879-prokuratura-otkazalas-ot-obvinenij-v-vozbuzhdenii.html).)
Sergey Mitrokhin, a leader of the
Yabloko party, says that the inclusion in official discussions of the term “extremism”
of language about efforts said to block “the legal activity” of state power at
all levels can easily be used to charge “any manifestation of opposition” as a
form of “extremism.” He said it could even be applied to his party.
And finally, Vadim Solovyev, a KPRF
Duma deputy, says that “the authorities are ready to label all those who
criticize it extremists.” They have done
so against activists of his party and when the latter have complained, he adds,
they have either been given no information or “directly told that this work is
being conducted as part of the struggle with extremism.”
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