On Tuesday, June 28, I spoke alongside Bill Browder at an event in the House of Commons on human rights and the forthcoming Russian elections. Browder is the CEO of Hermitage Capital and was once the largest foreign investor in Russia, until 2005, when the Kremlin declared him a “threat to national security” after he uncovered corruption in several Russian companies. After Browder liquidated most of his Russian holdings, Hermitage’s office was raided by men posing as tax officials and its corporate seals were confiscated. This led to the single largest tax fraud in Russian history, amounting to $230 million. Browder’s attorney, Sergei Magnitsky, investigated the case on Browder’s behalf. That investigation culminated in Magnitsky’s own arrest for uncovering the government source of the fraud, followed by his year-long imprisonment and agonised death owing to the state’s denial of medical treatment. (Read more about Magnitsky here.) Right now, Browder is lobbying Congress to pass the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act, which would deny visas to, and freeze the US assets of, any Russian official found guilty of “gross human rights violations.” Thanks to Browder, similar legislation is currently being considered and debated in parliaments throughout Europe.
Any talk of Russian politics these days revolves around the notion of the “tandem” — the duopoly of President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who appointed Medvedev as his successor in 2007. The Russian constitution has a two-term limit on the presidency and yet Putin was in no mood to relinquish control of the state. So instead, he appointed a fledging, said to be fond of rock bands and computers, as his best face forward to the West.
New parliamentary elections are scheduled for December, new presidential elections for March, and still Russians have no clue who will run for president on the the ruling party United Russia’s almost uncontested ticket. United Russia’s congress meets from September 3 to 4, and presumably the party will announce its candidate then. Although it’s really under no obligation to do so.
Media reports portray Putin fundamentally at odds with Medvedev are, in my view, overblown. Putin confessed to an “abstract category-comradeship” with three people in his life: Sergei Ivanov, former deputy PM, Nikolai Patrushev, the former director of the FSB, and Medvedev.
The two have had a long relationship of working closely together.
Medvedev ran Putin’s 2000 election campaign, for which he was appointed the head of Gazprom, the state-owned gas monopoly, a year later. When Mikhail Khordorkovsky, the oligarch turned political reformist, was railroaded through the Russian legal system in 2005, and his company Yukos was nationalised, Medvedev found himself one of the prime beneficiaries of this state corporatist grab.
While still a deputy PM under Putin, Medvedev was in charge of the Priority National Projects geared toward domestic reforms, including one of the Russian judiciary. That plainly didn’t work, as one of Medvedev’s signature phrases about what’s wrong with Russia would later be “legal nihilism”. Other areas he did not rehabilitate included health care, housing and education. Russians considered these reform efforts failures. According to Medvedev’s Leningrad State University advisor, the current president sees Putin as an “older brother”. In short, nothing in the tandem’s history suggests anything but a rock solid kinship. Medvedev just delivers the bad news better.
Journalists and business elite are quick to cite Medvedev’s sensible, seemingly pro-Western rhetoric as a sign that he’s the good cop to Putin’s bad, and never mind that over the past 8 months, the net capital outflow from Russia has been $55.6 billion. Such is the state of investor confidence.
In St Petersburg last week, at International Economic Forum, also known as Russia’s Davos, Medvedev wowed reporters by throwing cold water on state-ownership of big industry and hinting at increased privatization. State ownership, he said, would make “jeopardizes the country’s future. It is not my choice.” This went down well with the Citibank and Johnson & Johnson and Ernst and Young bigwigs in the attendance.
But how sincere is this pledge to undo 12 years of nationalisation?
Newsweek reported that in an early speech Putin gave in 2000, when he first elected president, had him insisting that “there would be no backsliding on any of the key political liberties won in Russia’s decade of democracy. Freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, freedom of the press, the right to private property — these basic principles of a civilized society will be protected.” All of which proved, over time, to be false.
Does Medvedev want to stay president? He wouldn’t answer this oft-asked question when the Financial Times asked him in Petersburg:
“I think that any leader who occupies such a post as president, simply must want to run, the people must provide an answer to this one. They define whether they want to see this person or not and, as an acting politician, I will be guided by that in taking my decision.”
One of the reasons that Russia’s charm offensive has succeeded in shifting the focus away from its manifold human rights abuses has been the famed “reset” policy announced by Barack Obama in 2009. Meant to thaw the frosty relations between Washington and Moscow the defined the latter years of the Bush administration, reset was a return to realpolitik over values-based foreign policy.
The top accomplishment of this policy been the ratification of the new START treaty, which will drawdown American and Russian nuclear stockpiles.
Other touted achievements include Russia’s cancelation of its sale of S-300 air-defense air to Iran and its backing of tougher US-imposed sanctions against the mullahs. Notably, Medvedev abstained from voting on the United Nations Security Council resolution on Libya, indicating privately that he endorsed military action against Gaddafi — although now Medvedev appears to have rescinded that tacit endorsement, too. Putin, meanwhile, likened a no-fly zone in Libya to a medieval “crusade”.
True, Russia has helped directly in Afghanistan by allowing easy passage through the northern supply corridor for air shipments. But Moscow is also pressuring former Soviet republics in Central Asia not to lend a hand to the US and Nato effort in Afghanistan, a sign that Putin is still not yet ready to let its “near-abroad” operate with the kind of national sovereignty he fetishes for Russia.
The Kremlin is also increasing its influence with the equally corrupt Karzai government in Kabul, particularly as US-Afghan relations deteriorate. And why not? Karzai recently expressed himself pleased with this new Kabul-Moscow rapport, where evidently a decade of Soviet occupation and mujahadeen resistance has now been forgiven and forgotten. So has $12 billion in Afghan debt owed to Russia. Karzai and Medvedev met face-to-face at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) on June 14 where they agreed to expand trade and economic ties, which makes sense given that the conflation between commercial enterprise and organized crime is a shared attribute of either country.
On Iran, Russia’s policy is more manic-depressive. Russian exports to the Islamic Republic increased from $250 million in 1995 to more than $3 billion in 2008. Despite the West’s rightful insistence that an Iranian nuclear bomb would pose the greatest challenge to international security and Mideast stability, the Russians aren’t all that bothered by it. “Iran is a mania with the Americans; it’s not our problem,” one advisor to Putin said in 2009.
There is also the simple fact that the Bushehr nuclear reactor in Iran would not have been built without Russian scientific assistance. Putin himself said there’s no evidence that Iran is seeking a nuclear weapons programme, which, at its most benign, qualifies him for a Guardian editorship but, at its most menacing, means he’s double-dealing with the Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Indeed, the decree banning Russia’s sale of the S-300 air defence system to Iran carried a clause allowing Moscow to rescind the whole thing at any point in the future. Russia is still outfitting Iran with other kinds of weaponry, and doing happy business with its oil and gas sector, despite sanctions.
Putin’s fiery polemics against Islamic terrorism and his scorched-earth campaign in Chechnya also run counter to the Kremlin’s dodgy track record in indirectly facilitating Mideast proxy groups. If there’s a profit to be made, no jihadi is too toxic to do business with.
You’ll recall that several weeks ago Hamas militants in Gaza blew up an Israeli school bus, killing one 16-year-old boy. The did this with a laser-guided Kornet anti-tank missile that Israeli intelligence says was smuggled in through Syria. The Kornet is manufactured in Russia. The Kremlin denies selling it to Syria. The Israelis maintain that it was Russian-made weaponry supplied to Hezbollah in Lebanon that made it difficult for the IDF to eliminate the fighting capability of that terrorist organization in the Second Lebanon War.
Putin’s warm relationship with tottering Arab autocrats and their proxies is common knowledge in the Middle East. This is why Russian flags are being burnt alongside Iranian and Chinese ones in Syria by pro-democracy activists, and why Putin and Medvedev are singled out by the Syrian protestors as helpmeets of Bashar al-Assad.
Meanwhile, Russia stands in violation of the European Union cease-fire that it signed at the close of its 2008 summer war with Georgia. Little do we hear from the current White House of Russia’s continued military occupation of sovereign Georgian territory or its de facto annexation of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, which the Kremlin recognises as “independent” breakaway regions. Abkhazians and South Ossetians have even been given Russian citizenship and passports — all in contravention of international law.
Phase two of “reset” consists mainly of the US helping Russia gain admittance to the World Trade Organization, which it appears closer to doing. Thirty-five CEOs from US and Russian companies sent a letter to Medvedev offering to help the process along; a copy of the letter was forwarded to President Obama.
It is perhaps for this reason that Medvedev told the Financial Times last week: “Let me tell you that no one wishes the re-election of Barack Obama as US president as I do.”
Nonetheless, there are problems on the horizon for US-Russian relations, pegged to the Kremlin’s human rights abuses.
The hypocrisy of “reset” is best embodied in the figure of Vladislav Surkov, coiner of the term “sovereign democracy” to describe the system that currently governs Russia. Surkov is Putin’s deputy chief of staff and the current system’s ideologist-in-chief, what Mikhail Suslov was to Leonid Brezhnev. He is also the co-chair of a US-Russian working group on civil society, opposite the newly mooted US ambassador to Russia and Obama advisor Michael McFaul.
Let’s put it simply: Having Surkov head up a group on Russian civil society is like having a wife-beater run a women’s shelter.
Surkov was in Washington, D.C. a fortnight ago to lobby against the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act now floating around the US Senate, which proposes revoking US visa privileges from Russian officials responsible for “gross violations of human rights.” Bill will no doubt tell you more about this landmark piece of legislation and his personal involvement in getting it considered in Washington. But it makes sense that Surkov wouldn’t want this bill to become law since he’d be the first to suffer from its implementation.
Surkov is the brains behind Nashi, which means “Ours” in Russian. Nashi is a pro-Kremlin youth movement that’s a hybrid of the Soviet Komsomol and a gang of football hooligans. Set up in 2005 in response to the pro-democratic color revolutions then sweeping the Caucuses, Nashi has been responsible for all manner of plausibly denial Kremlin mischief going back eight years. In 2007, there was a much-sensationalised flap over the removal of the Bronze Soldier, a Soviet World War II memorial, from a busy intersection in Tallin, Estonia. Seen as an insult to Russian pride, the memorial’s relocation was actually to the more relevant site of a nearby veterans’ cemetery. Nevertheless, Nashi intimidated and harassed ethnic Estonians in Russia. According to the New York Times, “Nashi laid siege to the Estonian Embassy in Moscow, throwing rocks, disrupting traffic and tearing down the Estonian flag. Nashi members, including the group’s leader, Vasily G. Yakemenko, accosted Estonia’s ambassador, Marina Kaljurand, at a news conference in early May. Her guards had to use pepper spray to defend her.”
The Russian Federation Council, completely dominated by Putin’s United Russia Party, called this act by an independent EU country an “attempt to legalize fascism.” In retaliation, Estonia was subjected to cyber-warfare that shut down its largely electronic government and froze its internet commerce for a full day, costing the country millions. Many of the hackers’ ISP addresses were traced to offices inside the Kremlin.
Surkov calls Nashi the “combat detachment of our political system,” and at a recent meeting with Nashi commissars (yes, they’re called commissar), he told them to “train their muscles” in advance of elections. Those elections, he made clear, would have to be won by Medvedev, Putin and United Russia. Needless to add, this is flagrantly in breach of the OSCE Copenhagen Document, which calls for “a clear separation between the State and political parties.”
Nashi hasn’t confined itself to bullying foreigners. It has also intimidated and attacked oppositionists within Russia. One of these is my friend Oleg Kozlovsky, who runs the pro-democracy youth organization, Oborona, which is a member of Gary Kasparov’s Other Russia coalition. Oleg’s been arrested several times for protesting in “illegal” street demos against the absence of civil liberties and human rights in Putin’s Russia; at one point, he was conscripted into the Russian Army as a way of shutting him up — until he proved, through medical records, that he was exempt from service due to physical disability.
Nashi also runs the Seliger Youth Camp, held annually in the Khimki Forest outside of Moscow, and sponsored by corporate giants such as Johnson & Johnson and Ernst and Young. Last July, Seliger featured an exhibition called, “You are not welcome here” – with mannequins of public figures ranging from Condoleeza Rice to Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili to Russian opposition figure Boris Nemtsov, all wearing Nazi caps. Books promoting Stalin as a war hero are on sale at the camp library. There’s a “Fifth Column” prize awarded to “liars, falsifiers, and those who blacken our homeland’s reputation.” One Moscow professor gave a lecture last year lamenting the decline of “Russianness” in the world, and the ugliness of New York women. Another creepy staple of these Lord of Flies-esque exercises in primeval nationalism: “breeding tents” for creating a new generation of Slavs.
Officially, Seliger is organized by the Federal Youth Agency, whose head is — wait for it — Vasily Yakemenko, the founder and now informal leader of Nashi. Other Seliger officials may have new business cards, but their affiliation with a fanatically pro-Kremlin outfit is undeniable.
This year, an anti-Seliger summer camp was set up right next door featuring 2,000 oppositionists and cyber-activists. Despite fears that it would be violently broken up, it was allowed to proceed — although Nashi spies were reportedly in the audience.
So what’s the state of play for the Russian opposition?
Legally, it barely exists.
The Justice Ministry denied registration to the People’s Freedom Party – a new opposition party formed by Putin’s former prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov. Eight other parties were declared non-viable this year, with the Justice Ministry citing technical mistakes in the application. For the People’s Freedom Party this apparently included signatures of dead or underaged supporters. However, Kasyanov insists that people who’d joined the party were summoned by police or security officials and interrogated as to why they joined, and also threatened with losing their jobs or spots at university for staying in.
Process for party registration is prohibitive: 2 million signatures from at least 40 of Russia’s 83 provinces.
The Russian Justice Minister said political parties and other nonprofit organizations should not be required to register with his ministry, only notify it of their existence. Fat chance of that happening any time soon.
Here’s the kind of opposition party that can emerge in Russia: On Monday, it was reported that the “new” Just Cause party would stand for the upcoming election. But there’s nothing new about it. The Just Cause Party was registered back in 2009 to succeed the Union of Right Forces. It’s headed by Mikhail Prokhorov, the third richest man in Russia (he owns the New Jersey Nets basketball team in America), who disdains the term “opposition” and who’s chums with both Putin and Medvedev. Prokhorov is a major sponsor of the Seliger Camp.
The Speaker of the Duma and a high-ranking member of United Russia, predicts that Just Cause will most likely get between 5-7% of the vote in December, which translates to one or two seats in parliament.
Predictions that exact usually signify behind-the-scenes Kremlin orchestration.
By every indication, then, the tandem is gearing up for another show election. To add to Nashi’s cultural influence, he has just concocted together another pro-Kremlin “movement” with uncanny Soviet nomenclature: the All-Russia People’s Front.
In less than a month, the All-Russia People’s Front managed to get several million supporters and 500 organizations as members. Half a million people in the Khabarovsk region support it – that’s out of a total population of 1.34 million. In a day, 39,000 employees of the Siberian Business Union joined.
How?
Simple: Signing up is so easy, you don’t even have to do it yourself.
Anyone can fill out the website form for membership and there’s no confirmation email to confirm authenticity. You don’t even have to live in Russia.
I joined the All-Russia People’s Front today as a Muscovite housewife named Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
Most supporters are signed up en masse by organizations they belong to, whose heads take an executive decision to join without their members’ consent.
In the Sverdlovsk region, the number of members of organizations that have joined the All-Russia People’s Front exceeds the entire population of the province.
Political corruption in Putin’s Russia is both enabled and exceeded by economic corruption, owing to what those euphemistic pundits call the Kremlin “power vertical.” That is, a nation-wide apparatus of civil servants who are all loyal to United Russia and its master and who stand to receive huge perks and off-the-books compensation for their loyalty. (Contrast this to the situation in the UK where the civil service is notoriously obstructive to the will of Number 10.)
Medvedev said he wanted to tackle corruption when he began his presidency, and he’s kept on saying it since. He reiterated this noble call for reform at Petersburg, vowing this time to “strangle” the Rasputin-like beast that won’t die. However, Medvedev’s track record isn’t so robust as his rhetoric. The anti-corruption commission he set up in 2008 has been a busted flush. The Russian Supreme Court Chairman told Kommersant newspaper that defendants in 65% of the 10,000 cases the Russian Supreme Court has reviewed received suspended sentences.
Fifty two percent of Russians believe there’s more theft and corruption now than there was in the 1990s.
Nearly half of those polled who said they wanted to join the United Russia party said they were motivated by the prospect of earning money on the side. Sixty percent, meanwhile, said they wanted to solve personal problems or settle scores by using the party apparatus.
This jibes with what outside monitors have concluded about Russian corruption. According to Transparency International, Russia ranks 154 out of 178 countries as having clean business practices, a spot it shares with Cambodia, Guinea-Bissau and the Central African Republic.
The price of the average bribe in Russia has quadrupled since Medvedev was elected in 2008.
Even Medvedev admits that $33 billion disappears annually from government contracts. That’s 3% of Russia’s GDP.
To cite one characteristic instance of how money goes missing:
In 2011, Lieutenant-General Alexandr Bokov, the head of the anti-mafia investigations unit in the Commonwealth of Independent States, was arrested on suspicion of fraud amounting to $46 million. A search was conducted in his 50-room mansion, sat on five acres of land. Not bad for a law enforcement official.
Fortunately, Russians are beginning to fight back. One prominent anti-corruption crusader is Alexei Navalny. His website RosPil, which monitors and exposes bogus government contracts, in the last three months has annulled $7 million worth of them. Navalny calls United Russia the “party of crooks and thieves.”
His talent is for showing how relatives of top government officials wind up controlling big businesses. The former governor of one oil-rich province — and who spearheaded the conglomeration of companies — named his son to run the conglomerate. The governor of another region has a 22 year-old niece who owns a major stake in a multi-million dollar pipe factory. Another governor’s 18 year-old daughter owns a plywood mill and local businesses.
“How does all this wonderful entrepeneurial talent appear only in the children of United Russia members? What business schools did they attend?” asks Navalny.
A while back, Navalny noticed that Transneft, the state oil-transport monopoly (the Russian energy minister is chairman of the board), had claimed to donate $300 million to charity in 2007 — more than 10% of its profits that year. Navalny, a shareholder in Transneft, asked to see the list of philanthropies Transneft supposedly donated to that year — his request was denied. He went to the Interior Ministry and asked them to open a criminal investigation. Here’s how the New Yorker magazine described what followed:
A detective asked Transneft to give testimony regarding the charges. They didn’t, so he closed the case. (The state prosecutor’s office overruled this decision, and reopened the case.) Then the detective went to Transneft, but was unable to question anyone. When Navalny appealed to the court, the detective claimed to have lost the case materials. (The court recognized Navalny’s claim of negligent inaction.)
Navalny’s lawyer said this is par for the course. “I can understand this cop,” he told the New Yorker. “He’s some average detective in the Interior Ministry. Yesterday, he had an apartment robbery. This morning, he had a drunken brawl. And this afternoon he gets an allegation of a theft of seven billion rubles from Transneft. So he starts getting nervous. But, most likley, the case comes with a note from his superiors, saying, ‘Vasya, don’t make to much of a fuss. We’ll cover you on this. Just don’t make any sudden moves.’
That the Russian state is itself gripped by mass dysfunction is a little-grasped or reported fact in the West.
Consider the severe wild fires that burned through Russia last year. Putin had to personally fly over the woods and drop a bucket of water from a plane. This wasn’t done so much for theatrical effect as it was out of necessity because the Ministry of Emergency Situations failed in fighting the fires.
When the fires did burn out, all the destroyed houses were rebuilt quickly. But Putin watched live video feed from the construction sites on his office screens in the Kremlin so that workers wouldn’t steal the construction supplies.
As one Russian editorialist put it, “Whenever a bomb explodes, a disease breaks out, or a natural disaster occurs, the president or the prime minister visit the site in person.”
Medvedev’s made such trips to Moscow train stations and municipal apartment buildings like some podunk safety inspector, prompting Russian bloggers on LiveJournal to joke, “What’s next? Will he come to clean my toilet?”
According to a nationwide survey conducted in May by the Levada Center, only 26 percent of respondents think the current government can significantly improve the situation in the near future, while 36 percent are convinced it can’t.
If elections were held today, only 24 percent of respondents said they would vote for Putin and just 21 percent would support Medvedev.
Under such conditions, the only way Putin can obtain his desired 65 percent to 70 percent of the vote is through massive electoral fraud.
By all indications, he created the All-Russia People’s Front in preparation for just such a scenario – to apply the relevant pressure on factories, businesses and unions to get their employees or members to vote for United Russia.
Putin and Medvedev’s sinking popularity would also explain why the Central Elections Commission has already announced that international observers will have limited access during the election.
Wide-scale electoral fraud is exactly what happened the last time.
The OSCE and Council of Europe found that the 2007 parliamentary elections in Russia was characterised by “extensive use of administrative resources… on behalf of United Russia”, making the state guilty of an “abuse of power and a clear violation of international commitments and standards.”
United Russia didn’t participate in a single debate. None of its opponents were allowed on television, which is mainly state-owned. The Russian Union of Journalists found that three state-owned TV stations as well as two privately owned ones gave 90% of their prime time coverage to direct campaigning by United Russia and Putin between Oct 1 and Nov 22. 2007, 75% of those channels’ news coverage went to them, too. The entire campaign began and end with the slogan, “Putin’s Plan is Russia’s Victory.”
Some were shoved into riot vans; a candidate from the liberal Yabloko Party was shot on November 21 in Dagestan; he died from his wounds three days later.
TV reporters and a human rights activist from the group Memorial were kidnapped and beaten, their bodies dumped by the side of the road in Ingushetia, where voter turnout was, by the way, 98.3%.
Absentee ballots in 2007 were 1,350,000 – ridiculously high by any standard. Forty percent of voters in one Moscow district used absentee ballots, with a United Russia official administering to that entire group. Multiple voting was also rampant. One call to a hotline for electoral fraud found that a high-ranking employees of the Regional Electoral Commission in Krasnoyarsk came to the polling station, took two ballots, walked into the voting booth. Observers stopped her from voting twice, but the Commission took no action and didn’t suspend her from her duties.
The Economist’s Moscow correspondent reported at the time that several “tourist” buses were stuffed with people from far-flung regions. They voted early and often. They’d go from polling station to polling station, stuffing ballots for United Russia. Some of these multiple voters had been sent from as far as 3,500 kilometers away and offered money to commit electoral fraud.
The Russian security forces were in complete control of law enforcement during the election as well: 450,000 FSB agents were posted to active duty in 2007, with 20,000 stationed in Moscow alone.
The pro-market Union of Right Forces had their campaign literature confiscated by police in multiple cities, the police claiming their pamphlets were “laced” with narcotics or contained hidden extremist messages.
Plenty of well-regarded historians have argued that a toleration for authoritarianism and corruption is built into the Russian DNA and that any chance for liberal democracy in the steppes was snuffed out when the Mongols, instead of the Romans, conquered the Kievan Rus. But national patrimony needn’t be deterministic. The human rights movement was created in the 20th-century, largely in response to Soviet abuses which the West had no intention of ignoring. And moral imperative to hold human rights abusers to account is even greater in the digital age, when exposing them has become easier. A blog post can chivvy a minister or oligarch. Travel bans have been avoided because of Twitter campaigns. Even Kasparov can fly from Moscow to Washington to denounce the tandem, and return home without incident. Although Russia remains one of the deadliest countries on earth for independent journalists, the fact that 19 journalists were killed since the reign of Putin began at least testifies to an ongoing desire for truth amidst of a climate of cover-ups and conspiracies.
It should not be the policy of the United States or Great Britain to abandon the truth-seekers for the sake of a will-o-the-wisp called “reset.”