From: MSN NicknameEagle_wng  (Original Message)    Sent: 11/30/2007 7:33 PM
November 28, 2007
Advancing Freedom in Russia
by Steven Groves
Backgrounder #2088

The current Moscow power establishment is leading Russia back in time. Instead of moving forward toward a nation that cherishes and protects freedom and democracy, the establishment is creating a state and body politic dominated by a new breed of oligarchic groups composed of security officers and their business allies.

The Russian media are no longer free and unrestricted. With the exception of a few minor showcase outlets and the Internet, the media are dominated by the Kremlin and its allies. The majority of political parties are under state control, and the activities of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) with foreign ties are under severe scrutiny. Russia is no longer a free nation.

A return to authoritarianism is not in the interests of the Russian people, their European neighbors, or the world in general. Regrettably, most efforts to protest the Kremlin's political hegemony are suppressed, sometimes violently. Political opponents and media critics of the Kremlin have been censored, intimidated, and at times beaten and even killed.

The Kremlin has created and fostered the growth of scores of nationalist groups to establish "street muscle" and protect itself against an Orange Revolution scenario. These include Nashi (ours), the main pro-Putin youth movement, which works to create the public perception of massive support for the current regime and at times takes to the streets to stifle opposition to Kremlin policy.

The Moscow leadership seems impervious to America's and Europe's pleas to foster democracy. While the U.S. and its allies wait for a more opportune time to reengage, they should consider refocusing their efforts on Russia's neighbors that are willing to democratize. Ultimately, the Russians themselves need to realize that they can benefit more by integrating into the West and developing democratic institutions that will preserve and protect their freedoms.

On the other hand, Washington cannot ignore Moscow. Too many pressing issues--from Iran and nuclear proliferation to arms control treaties and the future of conventional forces in Europe--are on the table. Even during the Soviet era, Washington and Moscow at times had a robust diplomatic engagement, despite viewing the world very differently. Today, many of those differences have diminished as Russia increasingly integrates itself into the global economy.

The U.S. and its allies should make clear to the Kremlin and the Russian people that the lack of freedom in the Soviet Union was a major cause of its collapse and that nostalgia for those bygone days is severely misguided.

The Rise and Fall of Russian Democracy

In contrast to the Soviet Union, Russia took important steps during the 1990s to decentralize power and establish independent institutions that could balance the executive branch. The Russian constitution adopted in 1993 vested extraordinary authority in the president but balanced that authority somewhat by decentralizing power and placing institutional checks on the president. For example, while the president can dissolve the parliament (Duma) and call for new elections, the Duma can impeach the president and recall the government by a vote of no-confidence.[1]

Under the 1993 constitution, Russia attained a certain level of political equilibrium during the 1990s. In 1994, Communist and nationalist members in the Duma held roughly the same number of seats as reform members, leaving approximately 100 centrist members as the swing voters.[2] Parliamentary elections in 1993 and 1995 were deemed generally free and fair and resulted in Dumas in which various political viewpoints were represented. Regrettably, the political equilibrium also resulted in a total deadlock at a time when an impoverished Russia desperately needed rapid reform.

Since his election in 2000, President Vladimir Putin has systematically eroded the political balance once enjoyed by Russia's young democracy. Under Putin's watch, the Kremlin transformed a robust and often cacophonic multiparty system into an unchallenged monopoly, consolidating power under the United Russia party, which completely controls the Duma. Through a series of political maneuvers and new election laws, Putin and the Kremlin have established a new form of government that Putin's political architect Vladislav Surkov calls "sovereign democracy."

Despite the name, sovereign democracy appears to be a return to a neo-Soviet or quasi-Czarist form of government, reminiscent of the 1905-1917 era. Its characteristics include the presence of a single, dominant political party designed to hold power in perpetuity; consolidation of political power in the Kremlin at the expense of the federal legislature, federal judiciary, and regional and local governments; the lack of a clear constitutional order; and repeated violations of the constitution by the state.

Return of the One-Party State. In 1990, the Soviet Congress of People's Deputies repealed Article 6 of the Soviet Constitution, ending the Communist Party's monopoly on power[3] and one-party rule in the Soviet Union. This opened the door for other political organizations to participate in elections. However, 17 years later, a dominant "party of power" has again emerged in Russia, the largest of the 15 former Soviet republics.

After Putin was elected president in March 2000 and the pro-Kremlin Unity party made major gains in the Duma, Putin and his allies set out to ensure that future elections would be more predictable than prior contests. The ultimate goal was to secure power indefinitely for a new elite group of former KGB officers and others from Putin's inner circle.

The first step was to restrict participation in future elections by making it difficult to form political parties. Prior to Putin's presidency, a political party could register to compete in elections if it had over 100 registered members.[4] In July 2001, Putin signed a new law that raised that number to 10,000 and required that the party have at least 100 members in each of Russia's 89 regions.[5] Since 2006, the total membership requirement has increased to 50,000.

This law drastically limits the number of parties eligible to compete in Duma elections, effectively barring small single-issue parties and regional political organizations. Opposition parties, such as the Republican Party of Russia led by Vladimir Ryzhkov and Vladimir Lysenko, were completely banned, while other tiny parties loyal to the Kremlin received a break from the authorities to overcome the barrier and split the opposition.[6]

Not satisfied with stifling new political parties, the Kremlin moved to consolidate two existing parties supported mostly by loyalist politicians to create a single, dominant party. By the end of Putin's first year in office, the pro-Kremlin Unity party had successfully absorbed the Fatherland-All Russia party, its bitter opponent during the 1999 parliamentary election.[7] This merger created United Russia, a new party of power, which quickly ended the long-standing parliamentary power-sharing agreement with the Communist Party. In April 2002, the Communists were stripped of nearly all of their leadership posts in the Duma.[8]

By the 2003 parliamentary elections, Putin and his allies had prepared the ground for an election landslide. With Putin's popularity at record levels and high oil prices fueling a new prosperity, United Russia won over 300 seats in the 450-seat Duma. Many of the remaining seats were won by parties sympathetic to the Kremlin and Putin. The Kremlin also did everything in its power to keep the democrats divided. Liberal opposition parties, such as the center-left Yabloko party and center-right Union of Right Forces, failed to win 5 percent of the vote--the minimum threshold required to win proportional representation in the Duma. Indeed, evidence suggests that votes were undercounted to achieve that very result.[9] Recent Russian elections have been criticized by election monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), and the OSCE monitor group slated to observe the December 2007 Duma elections was forced to cancel its mission due to Russian noncooperation.

With two-thirds of the seats in the Duma, United Russia passed additional legislation to restrict political participation in the parliamentary elections scheduled for December 2007. The new legislation raised the minimum threshold from 5 percent to 7 percent.[10] Other provisions prohibited the common practice among smaller parties of forming electoral blocs to reach the minimum threshold and prohibited Duma members from changing their party affiliations after an election.

Another law ended the practice of allowing voters to vote "against all" as a protest vote and ended the minimum voter participation requirement, preventing an election from being declared invalid because a majority voted "against all" or because voter turnout was too low.[11]

Yet another law changed the entire Duma to proportional representation using party lists for the December election. Previously, 225 Duma members were elected from single-seat districts, and 225 were elected proportionally. Combined with the 7 percent threshold, this effectively ends the smaller opposition parties' chances of winning any seats.[12]

Furthermore, because of Russia's size--an estimated 141 million people spread across 11 time zones, 89 regions, and more than 120 ethnic groups-- eliminating all single-seat districts and electing the Duma solely by party list severely weakens the connection between voters and their representatives. Instead of Duma members being directly responsible to their voters, they will be primarily responsible to a handful of party leaders, most of whom reside inside Moscow's Garden Ring or in the prestigious gated enclaves along the Rublevka highway.

Collectively, the new election laws cement the United Russia party as the "party of power" in the Duma for the foreseeable future. Indeed, Putin has already signaled that he may run at the head of the United Russia list in the next Duma elections and thus would almost certainly become Russia's next prime minister.[13] This would pave the way for Putin to serve a third, nonconsecutive term as president, which is permitted under the constitution.

Recentralization of Power in the Kremlin. Beginning in 1996, the Russian people directly elected their regional governors, who until then had been appointed by the Kremlin. In 1996, voters elected 48 of Russia's 89 governors for the first time in Russian history. Russian voters accepted some of the Kremlin's previous appointees, electing 20 of the 44 incumbents.[14] The elected regional governors, no longer dependent on the Kremlin for their positions, naturally became more independent and less deferential to the president and Moscow.[15] Formerly, federal bureaucracies from the tax authorities to secret services were partially accountable to regional elected governors.

This experiment with elected regional governors did not last. After his election in 2000, Putin moved quickly to restrict the relative independence that the governors had enjoyed for four years. In March 2000, the Kremlin suspended gubernatorial elections, claiming a need to improve the quality of the government and to fight graft and organized crime. Putin also pushed through legislation to remove the regional governors from their ex officio positions in the Federation Council (the upper house of the federal legislature) and to change tax policies, reducing the governors' economic power by redistributing the tax pie in favor of the central authorities in Moscow.

In addition, Putin created a new, extra-constitutional layer of bureaucracy over the regional governors by appointing seven envoys to preside over seven newly created "super-regions."[16] This would be the equivalent of a U.S. President creating proconsuls for the Northeast, the South, the Midwest, the West, and the West Coast regions of the United States without amending the U.S. Constitution.

Not surprisingly, many of the super-region envoys were KGB veterans or former generals, including Victor Cherkesov, a close Putin ally and then deputy director of the Federal Security Service (the domestic successor to the KGB); Georgy Poltavchenko, a former KGB officer and Putin ally from St. Petersburg; Konstantin Pulikovsky, an army military general who fought in Chechnya; Viktor Kazantsev, a former military commander in the North Caucasus; and Oleg Safonov, an appointed envoy to the Far East.[17]

In September 2004, the Putin Administration used the Beslan school hostage tragedy as a pretext to implement the rest of its plan to reclaim the power to appoint regional governors.[18] Sergei Mitrokhin, a Yabloko party leader, characterized Putin's plan as "the beginning of a constitutional coup d'etat" and "a step toward dictatorship."[19] Although privately wary, the regional governors had little choice but to endorse Putin's reform publicly, even though it would drastically diminish their own autonomy and authority. The Duma readily gave its full support to the Kremlin's recentralization of power.[20]

The Increasingly State-Controlled Russian Media

Television, newspapers, and radio stations in the Soviet Union were state-owned and heavily censored. During the glasnost (openness) reforms under Mikhail Gorbachev in the late 1980s and the Yeltsin administration's reforms in the 1990s, Russian mass media became freer and more independent, although not quite to the level of the press in the West. The law on the press and the 1993 constitution guarantee freedom for mass communication and, theoretically, banned censorship.[21]

In December 1994, President Yeltsin ordered the government to divest from the Ostankino Russian State Television (ORT) channel and signaled that Russia should abandon government control of the media. By 1995, over 150 independent radio and television companies (including national independent television stations NTV and TV6) were broadcasting in Russia, over 10,000 newspapers were in publication, and foreign cable and satellite channels were widely available.[22]

While the Russian government was divesting from mass media, powerful financial groups and individuals--some friendly with the Kremlin, some not--were investing in and buying up major media outlets. These groups, especially those led by businessmen Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky, competed for political power and influence over Russian public opinion. Russian media became corrupt and overpoliticized. Television channels and print media competed in airing sensationalism, gore, and kompromat (compromising materials) about politicians and businessmen.

Matters came to a head during the 1999 Duma elections when the pro-Putin Berezovsky and the ORT engaged in a fierce media war against Gusinsky, whose NTV television supported former Prime Minister Evgeny Primakov and former Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov's Fatherland-All Russia party.[23] Gusinsky lost the media war, and his Media-MOST media group suffered for its opposition to the Second Chechen War, which began in summer 1999. The Kremlin targeted Gusinsky and Media-MOST with tax raids, embezzlement charges, and arrests.[24] Gazprom, the government-controlled gas monopoly and a Media-MOST shareholder, called in a $700 million loan. As a result, Gazprom took control of NTV television in April 2001; fired the staff of Itogi, a weekly magazine owned by Media-MOST; and closed the Sevodnya newspaper. Gusinsky, who had fled the country in 2000 after being charged with fraud, was in no position to oppose the Kremlin's onslaught.

Berezovsky and his media empire fared no better than Gusinsky after Putin took office. Despite his aggressive support of Putin in the 1999 Duma elections, Berezovsky fell out of favor with the Kremlin for demanding too much political control. Berezovsky fled Russia in the face of alleged plots to murder him, and his media assets came under assault. For example, in September 2001, a Moscow court ordered the liquidation of TV6, in which Berezovsky was the majority shareholder. TV6 was ultimately closed down in connection with a suit filed by Lukoil, a massive oil company that was a minority shareholder in TV6.[25] The TV6 frequency was later awarded to a group of Kremlin insiders and renamed TVS, which was closed down in June 2003 and replaced with an all-sports channel.[26]

Since June 2003, no independent, nationwide television network has operated in Russia. Russia's networks are controlled either directly by the government or by groups who support the Kremlin. Journalists are widely practicing self-censorship. Some prominent opposition voices have been silenced, fired, or murdered. Lists of people are prohibited from appearing on national television, including prominent politicians and critics.

Government control of the radio waves is the next likely step in the Kremlin's campaign to control all Russian media. Only Echo Moskvy, a liberal station with an elite audience primarily in Moscow, is still uncensored, as are some Western radio stations such as Voice of America and the BBC, which are rebroadcast in a few locations.

However, the Kremlin has ordered most Western stations off the air. In the past year, Kremlin regulators have successfully forced over 60 local radio stations to stop broadcasting programs produced by Voice of America, Radio Liberty, and the BBC.[27]

The state-owned Channel One network recently imposed a new, pro-Kremlin management team on the Russian News Service, Russia's largest independent radio network.[28] The management team issued a series of new directives that are eerily reminiscent of Soviet-era media practices:

    * The United States is be portrayed as "the enemy" on the network's radio broadcasts,
    * Political figures opposed to the Kremlin are not to be mentioned on the air, and
    * All stations are required to adhere to a "50 percent positive rule" in which at least half of any reporting done on Russia must be "positive."[29]
    * A very few conventional media outlets and the Internet are the only remaining sources of uncensored information.

Suppression of Political Dissent

The Kremlin is clearly taking no chances in the "election" of Putin's presidential successor. Consolidating United Russia's power, ending direct elections for regional governors, and reestablishing control over Russia's major media are apparently insufficient to guarantee the Kremlin's continued dominance.

In what could be the ultimate act of suppressing political dissent, several political rivals of Russia's current power structure have been mysteriously gunned down over the past several years.

    * In April 2003, Sergei Yushenkov--a member of the Duma, a founder and co-chairman of the Liberal Russia Party supported by Berezovsky, and an advocate for democracy, free-market economic reform, and human rights--was shot and killed with a silenced weapon outside his Moscow home after registering his party for the December 2003 Duma elections.[30]
    * Vladimir Golovlev, a co-founder of Liberal Russia, was assassinated less than a year earlier.[31]
    * Yuri Shchekochikhin, a crusading journalist who investigated high-level government corruption for the independent Novaya Gazeta, died under suspicious circumstances in 2003 and is widely rumored to have been poisoned.

Nor are assassination attempts on Kremlin opponents apparently limited to Russian soil. Alexander Litvinenko, a former-KGB agent and vehement Putin critic, was murdered by polonium poisoning in London in 2006.

While these acts have never been definitively linked to the Kremlin, the pattern of dead Kremlin critics is a powerful tool in suppressing political dissent. The question is whether or not Putin's Russia has returned full circle to its authoritarian, violent past. Assassination of political rivals has a long tradition in Russian history. Stalin's agents famously murdered Leon Trotsky in Mexico City in 1940. Stepan Bandera, a Ukrainian separatist leader from World War II, was murdered in 1959 in Germany by a KGB assassin.

The Kremlin is also using intimidation to suppress political dissent. For example, the Yabloko Party came under attack in October 2003 when the office of one of its consultants was raided by Russian authorities. Yabloko was one of several liberal organizations and political parties supported by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a Kremlin critic and former owner of Yukos oil company, who was arrested two days after the raid.[32] Khodorkovsky, who advocated political reform and supported the creation of a parliamentary republic, has since been sentenced to eight years in a Siberian prison for tax evasion in what many Russian legal experts and human rights activists believe is a case of selective prosecution of a regime foe. Khodorkovsky's case is on appeal to the European Court of Human Rights.

In addition to the wholesale intimidation and assassination of political opponents, the Kremlin has systematically suppressed mass dissent, cracking down on pro-democracy civil society organizations and creating nationalist groups and movements such as Nashi, the pro-Kremlin "youth group" designed to provide public support for the current government and counter pro-democracy street demonstrations.

The "Putin Youth." Arguably one of the most disturbing aspects of the Kremlin's determination to suppress political dissent is its creation in 2005 of a veritable army of nationalist organizations, including Nashi. Nashi boasts over 100,000 members and operates in a manner that some have compared to the violent, paramilitary, heavily ideological youth movements formed in 1920s Germany prior to the Nazi takeover in 1933.

Nashi's manifesto is based on the writings of Vladislav Surkov, Putin's chief political adviser, and is defined by unwavering devotion to Putin, anti-Americanism, and anti-Western sentiment. New recruits watch propaganda films and receive basic military-style training, including learning how to field-strip AK-47s and Makarov pistols. In its formative stage, Nashi even conducted a book burning of "unpatriotic" publications.[33] Russian politicians or activists who disagree with Putin or his policies are immediately branded as "traitors" or "fascists" by Nashi. At Nashi functions, Putin's political opponents (e.g., world chess champion grandmaster Garry Kasparov) have been depicted as lingerie-wearing prostitutes.[34]

Nashi's modus operandi is quick-reaction demonstrations in force, sometimes violent, to prevent political threats to the Kremlin, especially when the supposed threat comes from abroad. When the Estonian government relocated a Soviet war memorial from the center of Tallinn to a nearby war cemetery over Russia's objections, hundreds of Nashi members laid siege to the Estonian embassy in Moscow, spray painting its walls with graffiti, pelting the building with rocks, and blocking traffic without any interference from the Moscow police.[35] When Estonian Ambassador Marina Kaljurand called a press conference to demand more security at the embassy, Nashi members violently stormed the meeting.

Similarly, for six months after daring to appear at a conference organized by the opposition movement Other Russia, British Ambassador to Russia Anthony Brenton was hounded by Nashi members who blocked his car, harassed him while he was shopping, and posted his daily schedule on the Internet.[36]

The Kremlin's intent in creating Nashi is clear: preventing formation of a democratic movement in Russia like those that led to the Orange Revolution in Ukraine and the Rose Revolution in Georgia-- revolutions that many in the Russian government and media believe were inspired and supported by the United States. With parliamentary elections in December 2007 and the presidential election in March 2008, the Kremlin is taking no chances that a grassroots democratic (or ultranationalist) movement will take hold and gain momentum.

To that end, Nashi was established in towns close to Moscow so that its members could quickly assemble in Red Square (or elsewhere) to support Putin and the Kremlin. Indeed, Nashi recently distributed 10,000 specially made SIM cards[37] to its members so that they could promptly report any democratic rally to the Kremlin and swiftly organize to put it down.[38]

Nashi's sometimes violent activities are neither hindered by the Russian police nor renounced by Putin or the Kremlin. To the contrary, Putin has embraced Nashi as "part of his team" and meets with its leadership at his summer residence in Zavidovo.[39] If the Russian people take to the streets in connection with the upcoming Duma and presidential elections, Nashi will surely be there.

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http://www.heritage.org/Research/WorldwideFreedom/bg2088.cfm