Konstantin Fetisov (right) was badly beaten for his campaign against the construction of an $8 billion Moscow-St. Petersburg highway that will destroy large swathes of the Khimki forest. His recent meeting with Michael Posner and Thomas Melia from the US State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor illustrates why Russian democrats need Western support, writes Michael Bohm in The Moscow Times.
Likewise, he notes, Stanislav Dmitriyevsky, head of the Russian-Chechen Friendship Society, told The Washington Post that he only avoided a prison sentence because Western agencies, including the National Endowment for Democracy, supported his case.
The absurdity of Vladimir Putin’s conspiracy theory that Western groups interfere in Russian affairs in an effort to foment a color revolution is evident from a cursory examination of the Russian civil society groups that the US partially funds, with an average grant of about $50,000, including, Bohm notes:
- The Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers, which helps stop hazing and other abuses in the army;
- Memorial, a human rights organization;
- Perm-36, which is devoted to helping Russians learn more about the gulag;
- The Center for Journalism in Extreme Situations, which defends Russian journalists’ constitutional rights, including helping them pay for a lawyer when they are wrongly accused or otherwise persecuted for their investigative work;
- The Murmansk Association of Female Journalists.
This is hardly the stuff to make an Orange Revolution.
“If the Kremlin wants victims of human rights abuses to rely less on the West for help, there is one way to achieve this — by the Russian government helping them instead, he argues. But “as long as Russia’s democracy remains ‘sovereign,’ Russians like Konstantin Fetisov will have no other choice than to rely on the West for help.”
