The Kremlin attacked McFaul's meeting with democracy and civil society activists like Lev Ponomarev
Russian state television has launched a fierce political offensive against new U.S. Ambassador Mike McFaul. The attack coincides with a prominent oligarch’s warning that Russia faces violent revolution if it fails to embrace democracy and with fresh attempts by premier Vladimir Putin to portray the democratic opposition as a Western-backed conspiracy to secure regime change.
TV news reported a meeting between McFaul and civil society activists under the caption: “Receiving instructions from the new ambassador”.
The Kremlin’s response to a newly robust opposition indicates that the regime feels vulnerable, observers suggest, and reflects growing suspicion of – if not hostility towards – the United States.
“Sometimes it seems that everywhere the Russian Foreign Ministry looks, it finds a problem with a ‘Made in America’ label on it,” notes one observer:
…. after a year of Arab popular uprisings that Russia views with suspicion, Moscow has become especially sensitive to American support for civil society, an unfettered Internet and what Putin calls “exporting democracy.” Some Russian officials have suggested that the United States helped to sponsor the protests that Russia experienced in December.
Former Duma deputy Vladimir Ryzhkov, a leading organizer of recent protests against Russia’s disputed parliamentary elections, today claimed to be the victim of a video smear campaign.
Putin went on the offensive this week in a personal manifesto published in Izvestia, in which he hinted that the politically diverse opposition lacked a coherent program or strategy.
“Today people are talking about various forms of renewal of the political process,” he wrote. “But what are we supposed to be negotiating about? About how our power should be structured? Whether it should be given to ‘better people’? And after that — what? What will we do?”
Russia’s ills were the product of a global recession caused by the West, insisting that he is the best-qualified politician to lead the country through an externally-induced “zone of turbulence.”
“In a number of regions, we hear the declarations of aggressively destructive forces, ultimately threatening the stability of all the peoples of the earth,” he wrote. “Objectively, their allies turn out to be those states that are trying to ‘export democracy’ with the assistance of forceful, military means.”
The TV attack on McFaul appears to have been prompted by his hosting of a forum of opposition and civil society leaders – including human rights and anti-corruption activists, and representatives of the Communist, Just Russia, Yabloko and People’s Freedom parties – prior to meeting with senior government officials.
“The fact is that McFaul is not an expert on Russia,” said Channel One analyst Mikhail Leontev. “He is a specialist purely in the promotion of democracy,” he said in a report published on Russia 1, a channel controlled by the All-Russia State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company (VGTRK).
The Russian government was evidently displeased that McFaul met with human rights activists in his first official function at the Moscow embassy, where he was joined by visiting Deputy Secretary of State Bill Burns. The Russian media’s public smear campaign against McFaul accused him of working on behalf of the “so-called democratic movement” in the country during the early 1990s, when he visited there on behalf of the National Democratic Institute – an organization “known for its proximity to the U.S. intelligence services,” according to the TV report. ….The hostile welcome represents a sharp rebuke to McFaul’s message of openness and cooperation that he brought with him upon arriving in Moscow last week.
“We had an informal conversation about the state of civil society in our country, about human rights violations and the problems that we have,” said Lev Ponomarev (above), the head of For Human Rights. The discussions addressed elections, the jailing of business figures and the revival of political activism, he said. (In 2009, McFaul reportedly prompted President Barack Obama to raise Ponomarev’s case with Russian President Dmitri Medvedev, after the Solidarity opposition activist was badly beaten by unknown assailants.)
Credit: RFE/RL
The decision to meet opposition leaders first reflected favorably on McFaul, said environmental activist Yevgeniya Chirikova (right).
But the state-controlled media put a more contentious slant on the meeting, the BBC reports:
The ambassador’s reception on Tuesday was reported at length by Channel One, under the screen caption “US embassy: Receiving instructions from the new ambassador”.
Names of opposition politicians were read out, including Oxana Dmitriyeva, Ilya Ponomaryov, Sergei Mitrokhin, Boris Nemtsov, Vladimir Ryzhkov and Yevgenia Chirikova.
McFaul also paid visits to the Kremlin and Russian government. In a message on Twitter, Ambassador McFaul commented: “Saw old friends at… Kremlin and new friends at embassy. This is going to be fun.”
McFaul responded to the report on Twitter, RFE-RL reports, noting that the broadcast included “no word about the three years of ‘reset’” and adding that his meetings with Kremlin and government officials “could not have been warmer. Pluralism!”
“As President Obama’s representative in Russia, I believe my most important mission is to continue to help Russians understand who Americans are, what we stand for, and what we seek in our relationship with Russia and the Russian people,” McFaul said in his video message to Russia’s people.
“The most important part of my job will be to foster more contact between the people of the United States and the people of Russia. I’m interested in not only meeting government officials, but people from other political parties and movements, businessmen and women, civil society activists, and regular Russians just like you.”
The state TV report accused McFaul of criticizing Vladimir Putin, and attacked McFaul’s book, Russia’s Unfinished Revolution.
“Has Mr. McFaul arrived in Russia to work on his specialty? That is, to finish the revolution?” the report asked.
Russia risks a violent upheaval if it fails to adopt democratic reform, according to Mikhail Prokhorov, the oligarch and former Kremlin insider, who today submitted the two million signatures required to contest the March presidential poll against Putin.
Grigory Yavlinsky of the liberal Yabloko party, and Dmitry Mezentsev, the pro-Putin governor of Siberia’s Irkutsk region, also submitted the necessary number of signatures, a commission spokesman told AFP.
“What worked before does not work now. Look in the streets. People are not happy,” he told The Freeland File on reuters.com. “It is time to change…. Stability at any price is no longer acceptable for Russians.”
Opinion remains divided as to whether Prokhorov is a white knight or Putin pawn but he rejected claims that his candidacy was a Kremlin ploy to confer a spurious democratic legitimacy on a flawed electoral process.
“We now have all the pieces in place to move very fast to being a real democracy,” he said, calling for “very fast evolution” to avert a revolution.
The demographic growth of an urban middle class was enhancing prospects for democratic reform, but modernizers like himself were being stifled by the hard-line siloviki at the core of Putin’s rule who were “ready to pay any price” to maintain the status quo, even at the risk of a violent upheaval.
“If there are no changes in Russia, from day to day this risk will increase,” Prokhorov said. “Because 15, 20 percent of the population, the most active ones living in the big cities, want to live in a democratic country.”
For Human Rights is a grantee of the National Endowment for Democracy, the Washington-based democracy assistance group. The National Democratic Institute is one of the NED’s core institutes.
