Paul
Goble
Staunton, October 16 – The Kremlin’s
moves against the principles of the Russian Constitution and basic human rights
are currentl coming at such a rapid pace that it is difficult to keep up with
its assault on what remains of democracy in that country.
This week alone featured three initiatives
that are particularly worrisome: a government-backed bill allowing the confiscation
of property of relatives of those who engage in terrorism, another bill that
shifts responsibility for maintaining ethnic peace away from Moscow and to
governors and mayors, and new moves to increase the government’s censorship
powers.
What makes each of these
developments so disturbing is that they have been clothed in superficially
noble terms, something that makes it more difficult to criticism them, but that
they all too clearly open the way to further abuses of power. Indeed, one Tuvan
commentator has suggested that they are removing the last vestiges of democracy
from the Russian scene.
Yesterday, the Duma passed
overwhelmingly on first reading, 430 to one, with one abstention, a bill that would
allow the government to confiscate the property of relatives of those who
engage in terrorist acts to compensate the victims, make it easier for the
state to classify an organization as terrorist, and increase criminal
responsibilities for those providing instruction leading to such acts (lenta.ru/news/2013/10/15/damage/).
Fighting terrorism, like the Soviet
victory in World War II, is rapidly becoming a universal moral solvent that
blocks any steps taken in its name. Confiscating
the property of those who engage in terrorism is one thing; confiscating that
of their relatives is quite another and undoubtedly will be used to intimidate
extended families in the Caucasus.
Given how willing the Russian
authorities have been to classify groups as terrorist, it is hard not to see
that this new measure will mean that even more groups will be categorized as
such and thus banned. And the third provision about instruction can also be
extended to include anyone who sends a relative to study in a school where
anyone has ever talked about terrorism.
Indeed,
in each of these cases, the discredited Stalinist legal theory of extension by
analogy threatens to make a further comeback in Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
Also yesterday, the Duma passedon
first and second readings a bill that would place primary responsibility on
governors and mayors for the struggle against xenophobia and ethnic conflicts
and put the latter at risk of losing their positions if any violence of that
kind breaks out (novayagazeta.ru/politics/60477.html).
On the one hand,
this is a clever way for the Kremlin to avoid taking responsibility for the
situation in the country by saying that the governors and mayors bear it. As
many Russians have complained, Vladimir Putin has not spoken out or taken
actions that they believe he should as “guarantor of the Russian constitution.”
And on the
other, this measure will entail the additional consequence of meaning that
governors and mayors will become more repressive in order to keep their jobs,
although the bill does not specify how they could lose their positions and thus
opens the way to more abuses. And these leaders will do that because mos will
be operating beyond intense Moscow media scrutiny.
Thus, and without it ever being
specified in the law or discussed in the Russian media, Russian citizens will
find themselves under the thumb of an ever more authoritarian state, and Putin
will present himself to many credulous Westerners as being above such things
and thus their best hope for democracy and free markets.
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And third, as “Novyye izvestiya”
reported today, the Russian government is using its anti-piracy laws to tighten
government control over the Internet, actions that yesterday experts the Open
Government group said exceeded the provisions of those laws and threatened
public debate (newizv.ru/politics/2013-10-16/190780-shagrenevaja-kozha-svobody.html).
Again, as the experts cited in
this extensive article argue, the Kremlin is using a nominally worthy cause
for its own political purposes, winning support only from those who have not
paid attention to what is going on or who are prepared to accept the
assurances of the Russian government that what it is doing is all for the
best.
One who does not accept that view
is Sayana Mongush, a distinguished Tuvan journalist, who told RFE/RL
yesterday that tragically, in Russia today, “there do not remain any signs of
a democratic state” and that equally tragically, the Russian state is setting
in train an even larger disaster ahead (rus.azattyk.org/content/kyrgyzstan_interview_mongush/25135962.html).
Commenting on the Biryulevo
pogrom, she said that there was nothing “spontaneous” about it. “Without a
union with the representatives of the authorities, at least deputies on the
extreme right, the business community and others” who are part of the state
system, the events of last weekend would have been “impossible.”
Mongush argued that “the
clericalization of the country, which is taking place under the noble pretext
of ‘strengthening morality’ and the legitimation of quasi-police forces in
the form of all kinds of ‘popular druzhinniki’ who are in essence punitive
squads of pogromshchik cast doubt that what is taking place now in Russia is “either
‘spontaneous’ or ‘popular anger.’”
In fact, she suggested, the
recent violence in the Russian capital may be only “a training exercise” for
more violence in order to crush the opposition. But Mongush added that such efforts will
backfire, first and foremost in the non-Russian portions of the country like
her native Tuva.
“Russia is always accusing the national regions of separatism and even
of ethnocide while it with its own hands is leading the country to collapse
and disintegration,” she said. “Skinhead who kill people on a racial basis in
the streets of Moscow and St. Petersburg and remain unpunished do not
completely recognize that hundreds of thousands of ethnic Russians living
outside the major mono-national cities of central Russia may become hostages
as a result of these actions.”
If Russians attack non-Russians in Moscow, then they are sending a
message to non-Russians elsewhere that it is possible to attack Russians with
impunity as well, she argued. That
risk will be exploited by Moscow to increase repression of both Russians and
non-Russian groups.
Mongush concluded by suggesting that everyone should remember where
this tactic first arose in Russia and why Moscow may be trying it again: Does
one need to be reminded “with what enthusiasm and over-fulfilling of the plan
all the republics conducted the Stalinist purges and repressions in their own
areas, doubling all the undertakings of the Elder Brother?”
That tragic history, she said, “has every chance to repeat itself”
because it is not only in Moscow that there are “unhealthy and ambitious
people.”
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