[CivilSoc] "Civic Forum" and Kremlin Efforts to Co-Opt Russian Civil Society

Mon, 19 Nov 2001 22:40:20 -0800 (PST)

Thanks to a CivilSoc list member for forwarding this item, from...
Johnson's Russia List
#5551
17 November 2001
_______________________________
#8
The Russia Journal
November 16-22, 2001
Kremlin tames civil society
By DMITRY PINSKER
A pompous gathering, pretentiously called the "Civic Forum," will
take place in the Kremlin on Nov. 21. The forum's aim is
two-fold--for Russian civil society to demonstrate its existence to
the world and show its loyalty to the president.
This undertaking began back in May, when, with military precision,
President Vladimir Putin ordered court spin doctor and director of
the Effective Politics Foundation, Gleb Pavlovsky, to come up with a
concept for Russian civil society within two weeks and begin its
immediate implementation.
The Kremlin spin doctors paid no heed to Narodnaya Assambleya
(People's Assembly), an independent association of Russia's largest
civil society organizations, [which] warned that it's impossible to
"build civil society from above." The association has now found
itself also roped into organizing the forum with the Kremlin. True,
the Kremlin would have liked to and even tried to ignore these
independent organizations, but that strategy didn't work.
Civil-society organizations today are the last area of public
political life not to have been integrated into the "vertical of
power." The Kremlin has brought the Federation Council to heel,
established a firm pro-presidential majority in the Duma and tamed
the regional governors. It has used the Russian Union of
Industrialists and Entrepreneurs to rein in businessmen and has
brought most of the media under its control.
Russian NGOs provide 1.5 million jobs, and another 10 million are
involved with them or concerned by them in some way. This represents
10 percent of voters--on the whole particularly active voters. As
Pavlovsky pointed out quite openly, this is a political resource the
authorities can't afford to overlook.
The authorities have at least three other reasons for wanting to get
involved in building civil society: First, they are concerned by the
interest that exiled oligarch Boris Berezovsky has been showing in
the issue. Berezovsky and his money are behind the Foundation for
Civic Freedoms, which allocates grants to various social and
human-rights programs such as the Sakharov Museum and the Alexander
Yakovlev Foundation, which is collecting archive material on
Soviet-era repressions.
The second reason is financial. The Kremlin is worried by the fact
that almost all Russian public organizations survive on foreign
money. For Russian officials with their paranoia--whether real or
merely tribute to current fashion in the Kremlin--and visions of
plots by foreign secret services at every turn, the fact that money
is coming in from abroad and isn't controlled by the state is obvious
cause for concern.
"Most of this money is normal, 'clean' money, of course," said one
highly placed Kremlin official. "But we know full well that some of
it, especially coming through Islamic organizations, is sent by
extremists to fund terrorism and anti-state activities. And some of
it comes from foreign intelligence services." This is about the most
liberal opinion coming from the Kremlin.
Finally, the third reason for the state's interest--though it won't
admit it--is that these public organizations have become a serious
force that is ever harder to ignore. The state became particularly
aware of this when environmental organizations took only three months
to collect 2.5 million signatures for a demand that a referendum be
held on bringing foreign nuclear waste into Russia.
The Kremlin's initial strategy was to build up loyal organizations in
parallel with the "awkward" ones, which would gradually push genuine
opponents of the authorities to the sidelines, take their place at
negotiations with government officials and act as representatives on
the international scene.
Pavlovsky later tried to explain the fact that major
organizations--such as Memorial or the Committee of Soldiers'
Mothers--weren't invited to take part in a forum held in June by
saying that the organizers didn't want to frighten the authorities
right away. In fact, the organizers tried to invite Alexander Auzan,
the head of the Consumers Confederation, without inviting other
members of Narodnaya Assambleya. As a result, Auzan refused to take
part.
"The Kremlin's mistake is that civil society isn't the field in which
the authorities can be virtually the sole player," Auzan said. "The
consolidation process that Pavlovsky calls for is already under way.
After what happened in June, it has been moving even faster. They've
only made us stronger."
The June attempt to build a loyal civil society didn't work, and the
Kremlin found itself having to agree to cooperate with the "awkward"
organizations. But, having agreed to play by rules not of their own
making, the civil-society organizations find themselves always one
step behind. It's entirely possible that next week's forum could make
what many NGO leaders have feared a reality, even though they
continue working in the forum's organizing committee--namely, that
the authorities will find a way to go back on their agreements and
will simply use the independent organizations' names and authority to
pursue their own aims.
The first of these aims is purely organizational--to create an
administrative structure to represent Russian civil society at the
international level and to engage in dialogue with the president.
Obviously, this structure has to be a "comfortable" one for Putin.
Most unpleasant for the NGO leaders is that the Kremlin has already
begun creating this structure, only not from above, but from below,
by turning to regional associations with little knowledge of Moscow
politics but with an intuitive, Soviet-style attraction to power.
The second aim is ideological and propagandistic. Pavlovsky has been
busy repeating it the last few weeks. After the events of Sept. 11,
the idea goes, society's main task today is to help the state ensure
national security and help broaden the president's powers.
As for any idea of debate, Kremlin officials say that if anyone wants
to raise controversial issues at the forum, they're free to do so and
can speak their minds. The main thing is that by the end of the
forum, the president should have a loyal, organized civil society
ready to give all his policies its full support.
(The writer is a political correspondent for Yezhenedelny Zhurnal.)
-------
David Johnson
home phone: 301-942-9281
work phone: 202-797-5277
email: [email protected]
fax: 1-202-478-1701 (Jfax; comes direct to email)
home address:
1647 Winding Waye Lane
Silver Spring MD 20902
Web page for CDI Russia Weekly:
http://www.cdi.org/russia
Archive for JRL:
http://www.cdi.org/russia/johnson
A project of the Center for Defense Information (CDI)
1779 Massachusetts Ave. NW
Washington DC 20036