Russians are “now observing the end of an epoch that began with Gorbachev’s perestroika,” says a prominent analyst.

“These are simply the last remnants of freedom, freedom of scholarship and freedom of information,” said Lev D. Gudkov (above), the director of the Levada Center, Russia’s leading independent polling agency, which faces the prospect of closure because of new NGO regulations.

“That’s it — it’s ending with this,” he said. “This prosecutor’s warning is not just a single isolated act, and it’s not just about us. It’s the end of a 25-year period in Russia.”

“In these circumstances, we cannot carry out independent research,” Gudkov says. “We need sources of financing. We finance our own programs and projects by redistributing money we earn in other spheres. But now under this widened interpretation [of the NGO law], any of our partnerships – even if we work with an organization represented here in Russia but which potentially has a foreign source of financing — then we ourselves fall into the category of foreign agent.”

The requirement that foreign-funded NGOs register with the Justice Ministry as a “foreign agent” puts the center in an “extremely difficult position.” Prosecutors have “brought us to the brink of sanctions on the one hand and are undermining our authority and business reputation on the other,” he said.

Other analysts echo Gudkov’s fears of a regression to pre-Gorbachev repression.

“In a sense we are returning to Soviet times, when all political information will be generated and doled out by the authorities,” says Dmitry Oreshkin, head of the Mercator Group, an independent Moscow media consultancy.

“It’s a convenient situation for the authorities, who can just write down the number of votes they need and it will be so reported. Economic indexes will grow constantly, and support for our beloved leader will be always buoyant. And it will go on that way until everything once again collapses,” he says.

“Polling is important to Russia’s leaders, who view popularity as a key stabilizing element in a system without competitive elections,” The New York Times’ Ellen Barry writes from Moscow:

The Kremlin spends lavishly on surveys of tens of thousands of Russians but often withholds the results, especially those that point to rising discontent. A division of the All-Russian Public Opinion Center, which works closely with the Kremlin, has reportedly received a similar warning that it falls under the foreign agent law.

The Levada Center’s sociologists have clashed with the Kremlin for years. The center’s founder, Yuri Levada, incurred Mr. Putin’s wrath a decade ago by publishing polls that showed waning approval of the United Russia party and the Chechen wars. When Kremlin officials tried to assert control over his organization by appointing a new board of directors in 2003, Mr. Levada resigned and formed a private company, the Levada Center. …

Levada’s data often tells a different story from that of Kremlin-affiliated pollsters. For instance, Levada has reported that around 20 percent of Muscovites support Mr. Putin, far lower than the 64 percent found by a Kremlin-affiliated pollster that included only respondents who voted.

Losing that alternative viewpoint, Mr. Gudkov said on Monday, would set Russian politics back decades, “like the Soviet time, when there was one newspaper, Pravda, and one television channel, something like that.”

“A one-sided picture, and people believed it,” he said. “That’s the way propaganda works. You can’t convince people that they are living well, but the idea that the United States has a hostile approach to Russia, that’s easy.”

The Levada Center is only one of more than 50 civil society groups targeted in the current crackdown, says a leading rights monitor.

Council of Europe Secretary General Thorbjørn Jagland should urge Russian leaders to end the crackdown on civil society groups during his visit to Moscow on May 19-22, says Human Rights Watch.

“This is a crucial time for Secretary General Jagland to stand up for Council of Europe standards in Russia,” said Hugh Williamson, the group’s Europe and Central Asia director. “The Russian government’s crackdown on civil society is unprecedented, and has created a profoundly hostile climate for human rights work.”

Jagland today told Russian President Vladimir Putin that the NGO law could have a “chilling effect” on the country’s civil society.

“I have expressed concerns about this (law), and I think it is very important … how political activity is being defined,” he said at a joint news conference with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.

“I have said to my counterparts that I am very concerned with (the term) foreign agent because it is very sensitive wording,” said Jagland, who heads the Council of Europe, which comprises 47 countries, including Russia, with the aim of promoting human rights, democracy and the rule of law.

“And it can have a chilling effect on the NGO community, particularly if this law is not being put into practice in the right manner.”

Earlier this month, United Nations experts on freedom of association said that the law was having “obstructive, intimidating and stigmatizing effects” on Russian civil society.

Restrictions on peaceful assembly and association are illegal under international law, which does not recognize protection of sovereignty as a basis for impeding freedom of association, said Maina Kiai, the UN’s special rapporteur.

But the regime is dismissive of foreign critics, Robert Amsterdam reports, citing the Foreign Ministry’s suggestion that the European Union refrain from ‘ideology-based’ remarks.

“Putin has portrayed the checks as a step towards bringing transparency to a shady sector,” The Moscow Times reports, “which he said took in 28.3 billion rubles ($906 million) in foreign funding in the four months after the law appeared in July, a figure human rights leaders dismissed as grossly inflated.”

“This can’t but raise questions, and our society has a right to know where this money is coming from and with what goals in mind,” Putin told reporters during a visit to Germany in April.

Cartoon: The Moscow Times

Russia’s NGO law branding overseas-funded groups as foreign agents is impeding the country’s civil society development, says a former Finance Minister.

“The law on NGOs as foreign agents that the Duma has passed is a clear restriction of civil society,” said Alexei Kudrin, the head of the Fund for Civil Initiatives. 

His statement coincides with reports that “Russia’s only independent polling agency may have to close after prosecutors targeted it for ‘political activity’ under a law spearheading President Vladimir Putin’s crackdown on civil society”:

Levada Center published a letter, dated last week, from prosecutors who said its polls and publications are “aimed at shaping public opinion on government policy” and demanded it cease publication until it registers as a “foreign agent” under a law passed last year.

Levada receives between 1.5 and 3 percent of its funding from foreign sources, including longtime bêtes noires of Putin’s foreign policy like the National Institute for Democracy [sic] and George Soros’ Open Society Institute, according to center director Lev Gudkov (right).

Gudkov said prosecutors had not only threatened the organisation with sanctions but had undermined its authority, the BBC’s Steve Rosenberg reports from Moscow.

“The warning puts the Yuri Levada Analytical Centre in an extremely difficult position, in effect forcing it to cease its activity as an independent sociological research organisation, carrying out systematic polls of public opinion in Russia,” the statement said.

Although many observers initially viewed the new NGO provisions as “a surgical attack against a few undesirable organizations, it has now become clear that the authorities are intent on completely eradicating all remnants of civil society,” says a prominent analyst.

“The Kremlin’s goal is to completely block foreign funding of all NGOs,” writes Vladimir Ryzhkov, a co-founder of the opposition RP-Party of People’s Freedom:  

Meanwhile, it has stepped up funding of Kremlin-friendly NGOs by allocating grants through the Public Chamber and money through regional budgets to create a wide network of NGOs that are completely dependent on the authorities for their existence. Since Russian businesses do not fund NGOs unless they have been directed or given approval to do so by the authorities, independent NGOs will disappear altogether, leaving only those that are loyal to the authorities.

Thus, Kremlin-friendly NGOs will be added to the Kremlin’s vertical-power arsenal, along with the courts, the siloviki, mainstream media and the State Duma.

A “huge special operation” involving the Kremlin, State Duma, Prosecutor General’s Office, Justice Ministry, other government agencies and the siloviki is underway “to eliminate all independent NGOs,” Ryzhkov (left) writes for The Moscow Times. 

“’Foreign agent’ is a term taken directly from the Stalinist era, when the authorities induced mass paranoia by claiming that the country was ‘surrounded by enemies’,” he says, noting that the authorities have not only targeted high-profile rights and democracy groups, like the Golos election-monitoring organization, the Memorial human rights foundation, Transparency International, which fights corruption; Agora, which provides legal assistance to wrongfully imprisoned protesters; and even the Levada Center polling group.

The law “has also been applied to harass organizations that protect children and used against groups that work in the fields of education, health care and environmental protection,” says Ryzhkov, a State Duma deputy from 1993 to 2007, and an executive member of the World Movement for Democracy:  

Civil society is beginning to realize the scale of the unfolding disaster. The Presidential Council on Human Rights has appealed to Putin to repeal the law or to urgently introduce mitigating amendments to it.

But there is little hope. The Russian state cynically speaks about the need for modernization and a strong civil society, while it works methodically to destroy its very foundation.

RTWT

Former finance minister Kudrin has previously warned that crackdowns on independent voices highlight the ascendancy of hardline elements in the Kremlin.

Russia should revise a law that is having “obstructive, intimidating and stigmatizing effects” on the country’s non-governmental organizations, three United Nations experts said today. The report coincides with growing concern that a former Kremlin ideologue’s resignation signals that the regime is “relying less on subtle political imagination and more on arbitrary police power.”  

In July, the experts had cautioned against the adoption of new regulations requiring foreign-funded NGOs engaged in “political activities” to register as “foreign agents,” warning that such provisions would subject civil society groups to close government monitoring and harsh penalties.

“Unfortunately, our fears seem to have been confirmed,” said Maina Kiai, the Special Rapporteur on the rights to peaceful assembly and of association (right). “Since the law was passed, we now witness an unprecedented wave of inspections some of which have led to administrative cases against NCOs [non-commercial organizations], including severe penalties.”

Such close official monitoring lacks legal justification in international human rights law since the defense of sovereignty is not considered a legitimate basis for the restriction of citizens’ freedom of association, the experts said.

“We already warned against the extensive requirements contained in this law for NCOs allegedly ‘engaging in political activities,’ which could infringe on the right of human rights defenders to publically raise human rights issues and conduct advocacy work,” said Margaret Sekaggya, the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders.  

It’s unlikely that the UN experts’ suggestions will be acted upon given the Kremlin’s pronounced authoritarian shift evident in the departure of former ‘grey cardinal’ Vladislav Surkov, say analysts.

“Today there is no demand for a grey cardinal, no need for some great manipulations,” according to internet entrepreneur Anton Nossik, one of Russia’s leading bloggers. “No one is thinking three moves ahead. Why bother when you can imprison your opponent in the first move?”

As the FT’s Charles Clover notes: Surkov is the latest victim of the arbitrary regime he helped create, forced out after he publicly attacked prosecutors for their handling of a highly politicized corruption case. But he has left his imprint on the Putin era through deft use of what is known in Russia as “political technology” – a combination of western-style communications with an authoritarian twist to create a simulacrum of an open political system, which he famously referred to as “sovereign democracy”, better known in the west as “managed” or “virtual” democracy.

“Under Surkov (left) political parties stopped being referred to as parties and started being referred to as projects,” says Masha Lipman, a political analyst at the Carnegie Moscow Center, a think-tank.

Surkov’s departure also indicates a degree of Kremlin anxiety at Putin’s declining popularity, say observers.

“I won’t say that power is slipping from his hands but he is not as strong as he was,” said a source once close to the Kremlin and the government. “At the start of the 2000s, he was a unifying figure. He is no longer that.”

Putin’s ratings are much lower than at their peak before the 2008-09 financial crash, said Lev Gudkov, head of the Levada Center, an independent polling group. In a recent Levada poll, 41 percent did not want Putin to contest the presidency in 2018, against 28 percent who did.

The regime is likely to miss Surkov’s political smarts, says Alexander Dugin, a rightwing nationalist who collaborated with him on several Kremlin initiatives.

“Any project sent to Putin that dealt with politics, ideology, information or culture either went to Surkov or it went into the wastebasket,” he said.

“Surkov proved his effectiveness,” says Mr Dugin. “He guaranteed Putin three terms in power and a return to the presidency in March 2012. That is why Putin had patience with him all this time and gave him practically whatever he wanted.”

Mr Surkov’s political system “worked like a Swiss watch”, according to Mr Dugin, until it began to malfunction in late 2011, when anti-Kremlin protests swept the urban middle class following a gratuitously rigged parliamentary election.

Surkov’s ejection amounts to a paradigm shift in Russian power relations, says a former insider.

“Under Surkov the paradigm of power relations in Russia was ‘loyalism’ – be loyal, we are fighting against those who fight against us,” said Marat Guelman, a former political consultant and Surkov associate.

“Now everyone must be afraid. This is a new oprichnina,” he says, referring to the 16th century reign of Ivan the Terrible.

Surkov is being replaced as deputy chief of staff and head of the Kremlin’s domestic politics unit by Vyacheslav Volodin, “a former protégé who has overseen a wholesale shift in the regime’s attitude to the opposition,” writes the FT’s Charles Clover:

But the playful, postmodern attitude of the Surkov days has been replaced by a more ideological and confrontational approach under Mr Volodin, with an accent on nationalism and anti-westernism.

 RTWT

“Wednesday’s dismissal of Deputy Prime Minister Vladislav Surkov (above left), once a trusted aide, has underlined how isolated Putin is a year into his third term,” writes Reuters’ Timothy Heritage:

His replacement by a less sophisticated operator, Vyacheslav Volodin, heralded a shift in policy towards anti-Western rhetoric and tougher tactics against the protesters….Since Surkov’s departure from the presidential staff, veterans of the spy and security agencies and other conservatives known as the “siloviki”, or men of power, have gained the upper hand in shaping Putin’s thinking and are behind what the opposition sees as a Soviet-style clampdown on dissent.

Putin has in the past two years been abandoned by, forced out or become distant from the more liberal thinkers who once influenced him, leaving him politically isolated as his popularity wanes and the economy slides towards recession.

“I won’t say that power is slipping from his hands but he is not as strong as he was,” said a source once close to the Kremlin and the government. “At the start of the 2000s, he was a unifying figure. He is no longer that.”

Putin’s ratings are much lower than at their peak before the 2008-09 financial crash, said Lev Gudkov, head of the Levada Center, an independent polling group.

In a recent Levada poll, 41 percent did not want Putin to contest the presidency in 2018, against 28 percent who did.

“People are dissatisfied … you can campaign, try to convince and make promises, but they feel the decline in living standards,” Gudkov said. “Regardless of the propaganda, and the populist statements, Putin’s social (support) base is falling.”

Surkov was the architect of the Kremlin’s “sovereign democracy” which sought to obscure the reality of a “power vertical” that concentrated power in Putin’s hands, but he had become “marginalized” in recent months, says Marat Guelman, a former political consultant who worked with him.

“He was caught in a paradigm shift. Today we see a return to tradition, to obscurantism. I think he himself wanted out,” Guelman said.

Few observers missed the irony that, in his run-in with Putin, Surkov met his political demise at the very hands of the arbitrary and unaccountable regime which he worked years to create.

“He was used to working in comfort, defended from external threats by his superiors,” said Alexei Venediktov, chief editor of Ekho Moskvy. “In fact, he himself created such threats for others.”

Putin is presiding over a declining and decaying society, according to Oliver Bullough’s The Last Man in Russia. 

“Russian life expectancy hit a high in the mid-1960s—69 years, the same as in the contemporary West,” reviewer Brian Bethune writes for Macleans:

Since then, Westerners have added about a decade and a half to their average lifespans, while Russian life expectancy for males has shrunk to 63 and Russians of both sexes are five times more likely to die of “external” causes—murder, suicide, drowning, car crashes—than West Europeans. Birth rates cratered along with the Soviet Union; there were 148 million Russians in 1990; now there are 141 million. The country, Bullough argues, is dying from within.

“A judge on Wednesday postponed for one week the trial of Aleksei Navalny, the opposition leader and anticorruption blogger who is accused of embezzlement and corruption, prolonging the anticipation of the most politically charged court case in recent Russian history,” The New York Times’ David Herszenhorn reports:

His lawyers had requested a month-long postponement, and also urged that the trial be held in Moscow, where Mr. Navalny lives. A lawyer for Mr. Navalny, Olga Mikhailova, said the postponement would allow time for a regional court to issue a ruling, expected early next week, on a complaint by Mr. Navalny that the authorities had mishandled his case.

The head judge in the case has reportedly acknowledged that it would be ‘an extraordinary event’ if Navalny were acquitted, writes Robert Amsterdam.

“The opposition considers Navalny’s trial politically motivated, meant as a warning from Putin that protest will not be tolerated,” The Washington Post’s Kathy Lally reports:

More than 100 supporters made the 12-hour train trip from Moscow to rally behind the activist. Dozens of journalists also lined up for hours, some standing outside overnight, to get places on the wooden benches that seat only 60. The U.S. Embassy in Moscow sent a human rights officer to observe, and European officials were also represented.

“The system will collapse but this could still take several years. Our task is to bring this closer,” Navalny said prior to his trial.

Navalny has turned himself into a Russian version of a shareholder activist, Joshua Yaffa writes for Foreign Affairs:

He bought small stakes in state-owned corporations and then pushed them to become more transparent, exposing cases of apparent fraud and nepotism. His largest coup came in November 2010, when he posted documents on his blog that appeared to show that managers at the state-owned Transneft Corporation had stolen $4 billion during the construction of an oil pipeline to China. As Sergei Guriev, the rector of the New Economic School, told me, “Navalny is not fighting corruption in general, he is fighting specific incidents of corruption.” Or as Navalny himself put it when I first met him in 2010, it’s not enough to say, “corruption is bad.” Instead, he said he wanted to show “what was stolen, who stole it, where the money went, and who in government is responsible.”

“For Putin, as it has been for generations of Russian leaders, the law works not as a check on power but as an instrument for consolidating it,” writes Yaffa, a Moscow-based journalist and a contributor to The Economist.

“As his reputation grew, Navalny widened his focus beyond corruption and began morphing into a de facto politician, albeit one outside of any official political structures,” he observes:

His sincerity offers the obvious antidote to the political manipulation of Vladislav Surkov, Putin’s chief ideologist until 2011, whose favored style was cynical, if not nihilistic. His labeling of the pro-Kremlin United Russia as the “party of crooks and thieves” became the most successful meme in Russian politics in a generation. Navalny emerged as the star of the protest movement that broke out in December 2011.

With time, Navalny matured as a political figure: he began to deemphasize the nationalist rhetoric that appeals to many Russians but does not sit well with liberal Muscovites, and his speeches became less confrontational. He is far from the democratic savior of Russia that many in the West imagine him as, but he is undeniably the one unifying figure in the opposition around whom a mass movement could form.

The case has acquired significant political resonance, as Russian civil society faces a Soviet-style crackdown and the opposition surge has faded.

“Like the prosecution of Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky a decade ago, it has the potential to be an era-defining event,” RFE/RL analyst Brian Whitmore says of the trial.

“For all the apparent fear he instills in the halls of power, Navalny is ultimately untested as a national politician and would struggle to pose a direct challenge to Putin,” writes Yaffa, a Visiting Scholar at the Harriman Institute at Columbia University:

Beyond certain platitudes, his views are not well defined; his platform amounts to a vague pledge of “not to lie, not to steal.” A recent poll by the Levada Center showed that as the percentage of Russians surveyed who knew of Navalny grew from six percent in April 2011 to 37 percent in March 2013, the number of those prepared to support him for president dropped from 33 percent to 14 percent. In a way, that makes sense, as it was only his committed supporters who knew of him two years ago.

“But if Navalny hopes to increase his popularity — and electability — he cannot merely introduce himself to more Russians,” he concludes. “For Navalny and those who place their hopes in him, notoriety is the easy part. That, if anything, is the benefit of becoming the Kremlin’s most feared nemesis.”

Other observers take a more ominous view of the proceedings.

“If Navalny is sent to jail the Kremlin will have crossed a rubicon beyond which there will be an all-powerful authoritarian machine which will be hard, if not impossible, to stop,” wrote the opposition weekly New Times.

The imminent trial of Alexei Navalny (above) “will decide how close Russia has come to autocracy during the reign of Vladimir Putin,” says a prominent commentator.

“Navalny’s trial matters,” writes Ben Judah, the author of the forthcoming book Fragile Empire: How Russia fell in and out of love with Vladimir Putin.

“Eight years ago, the trial of billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky made it clear that no oligarch could stand up to Mr Putin,” he writes for the FT. “The Navalny trial extends that principle: it affirms that nobody should challenge him.”

A leading anti-corruption blogger and opposition activist who plans to contest the 2018 presidential election, Navalny says he “fully expects a guilty verdict in the ‘absurd’ trial against him which, he says, was orchestrated by Putin,” Robert Amsterdam reports:

‘Everyone’s known for years that if Putin ever made the decision to shut me down, then he’ll shut me down.’

Billionaire politician Mikhail Prokhorov brought attention to an interview by Investigative Committee spokesman Vladimir Markin, in which he admits that Navalny’s public profile accelerated the inquiry against him: Prokhorov says that this statement alone would be enough to dismiss the entire case against Navalny ‘in any law-abiding state’.

Navalny was “the most public face” of last winter’s anti-Putin protests, The Guardian reports. “Yet according to recent research by the Levada Centre, an independent poll group, only 37% of Russians had heard of the opposition activist,” it adds.  

But “that’s a lot” for an activist with few resources, says Navalny.

“It’s small for the purposes of running for office or trying to take power,” he tells The Wall Street Journal.

“But that’s a lot, because how would people find out about me? My laptop—that’s the only media resource I have. And plus there’s the TV, which tells about how I stole everything, how I’m a fake lawyer,” he says. “For me, it was a big surprise that 37% know [who I am] and that another portion of people are ready to support me.”

Navalny recently revealed that the anti-American head of the Duma’s ethics committee maintained secret properties– in the United States. Vladimir Pekhtin resigned after Navalny posted photographs and records showing Pekhtin’s name on deeds to two condos in Miami Beach and another in Ormond Beach.

But Navalny has also been targeted by the Kremlin because he was beginning to attract financial as well as political support, he suggests.

“In order to scare the opposition, so that it can’t raise money and organize, you have to send them to jail. There’s no other way,” Navalny says:

Since the protests on May 6 [after Mr. Putin's election to a third term], we saw that more people were willing to give us money and finance us. But because we have open finances and we publish who finances us, people became afraid. So we’re in a paradoxical situation: The number of offers has increased, but it has become harder to raise money.

“Russia is moving in the direction of Belarus. Putin consciously has chosen the Belarus variant for himself,” he contends.

Navalny will likely be convicted in order to make him ineligible to run for public office, says Alexei Makarkin, deputy director of the Center for Political Technologies.

“The government wants to take Navalny out of politics, to neutralize him. The question is, ‘Will he be jailed, or will he get a suspended sentence?” Makarkin tells The Moscow Times:

About 55 percent of respondents who have heard of Navalny — or about one in three Russians — think he is guilty, according to the results of a March poll by the independent Levada Center.

If Navalny is imprisoned, he’ll become a symbol for the opposition. But years in prison could also erode his political strength as it has for jailed former oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, said Alexei Mukhin, head of the Center for Political Information.

Navalny “is neither a saint nor a western liberal,” writes Judah, a fellow at the European Stability Initiative in Istanbul:

But he is a hero for Moscow’s young who made politics cool again in a capital drunk on oil money. Millions of Russians use his slogan – “down with the party of crooks and thieves” – to attack the overbearing political machine of United Russia, Mr Putin’s political party. It was his angry, feverish rhetoric that whipped up the December 2011 protest movement to the point it shook the regime.

“Putin and his allies think Europe is hypocritical, and more attached to Russian oil and gas contracts than to human rights” and he is “always quick to resist outside interference,” Judah notes:

But Russia joined the Council of Europe in 1996, and committed itself to upholding the European Charter on Human Rights. So European democrats on the council should suspend the voting rights of the Russian delegation in its assembly – as they did in 2000 over atrocities in Chechnya. They should be restored only once Moscow can prove there are no political prisoners in the country.

Action by the Council of Europe would send a much-needed signal to Russia’s new middle class and its Facebook generation, who are captivated by Mr Navalny’s message, that European democrats actually care about them.

RTWT

Russians don’t have authoritarian DNA in their genes and it is a myth that democracy is somehow unsuitable for Russia, says a prominent analyst.

Russian society itself erects no insurmountable barriers to the formation of a rule-of-law state,” writes Lilia Shevtsova (right), chair of the Russian Domestic Politics and Political Institutions Program at the Carnegie Moscow Center.  

“Mentality, culture, historical memory, and political habits do not make a democratic transition impossible, as the experience of other civilizations has demonstrated,” she writes in a major new report on Russia’s democratic prospects: 

A number of obstacles stand in the way of Russia’s path to an open society: its past, its traditions, the mindset of its elite, common stereotypes about its nature, and peculiarities of the personalized-power structure. However, as the history of other transformations over the past fifty-seventy years demonstrates, when certain preconditions for democracy are absent, the political elite (primarily its intellectual segment) can compensate for that absence with its own vision and with a readiness to offer society a consolidating strategy. This, of course, requires that the elite reject its selfish, old-regime interests. However, in the final analysis, even non-democrats can begin to build democracy, as Juan Linz and Giuseppe Di Palma have shown: “The non-democrats of yesterday can become democrats, even convinced democrats.” 

But recent events demonstrate that Russia’s civil society is “trying to free itself from the stifling embrace of the Russian system and of the political regime that is its engine,” she notes.

President Vladimir Putin last week angrily lashed out at many of the non-governmental organizations engaged in that civil society resurgence and at U.S. criticism of the Kremlin’s attempt to form a post-Soviet Eurasian federation .

Addressing officials of the Federal Security Service, or FSB, the successor agency to the KGB, Putin criticized “recent nervous statements about integration processes in the former Soviet lands.”

While he didn’t mention any names, Putin was clearly referring to a statement by former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who said in December that the US would resist what she called “a move to re-Sovietize the region” in the guise of regional integration.

“Let’s make no mistake about it,” she said. “We know what the goal is, and we are trying to figure out effective ways to slow down or prevent it.”

Putin warned FSB officials of foreign efforts to undermine the proposed alliance.

“They may use various instruments of pressure, including mechanisms of the so-called ‘soft power,’” he said. “The sovereign right of Russia and its partners to build and develop its integration project must be safely protected.”

After Putin’s inauguration in May, the Kremlin-controlled parliament quickly rubber-stamped a series of repressive laws that sharply hiked fines for taking part in unauthorized protests, extended the definition of high treason and required non-government organizations that receive foreign funding to register as “foreign agents,” a term that sounds synonymous to spies in Russian. Leading Russian NGOs have vowed to ignore the bill, which also allows an unlimited number of inspections and checks that could paralyze the activities of NGOs.

“No one has the monopoly of speaking on behalf of the entire Russian society, let alone the structures directed and funded from abroad and thus inevitably serving foreign interests,” he said. “Any direct or indirect meddling in our internal affairs, any forms of pressure on Russia, on our allies and partners is inadmissible.”

Despite the Kremlin’s crackdown on independent voices, “the signs are now plain for all to see…..that the Russian system is beginning to decay,” Shevtsova writes in her must read report, Russia XXI: The Logic of Suicide and Rebirth:

It cannot sustain the crumbling status quo, nor can it be certain of finding a new incarnation for itself. The only real questions are what stage of decay the system is in, whether the agony of its demise has already started, and, if so, how long it will last. To be sure, the system still has some resources, if not to revive itself, then to draw out its death, and that survival instinct could take a nasty, even bloody, form.

Nevertheless, “the Russian system, that is, the existing institutions, informal rules of the game, entrenched interests, political traditions, and mentality and habits of the elite (and society as well), has demonstrated an exceptional ability to survive and to absorb body blows,” she notes:  

It has proved that it can survive a change of the political regime, while retaining the mechanism of personal rule embodied in a leader who stands above the fray. The Russian system has even survived through two different structural, economic, and ideological incarnations: first by exchanging tsarism for communism in 1917, and later by discarding communism for imitation democracy in 1991. Throughout all of these periods of change, the essential elements of the Russian system have remained unchanged: a personalized-power regime whose fusion with property necessitates tight control of the economy; a ruling class that hungers for external spheres of interest; a claim to Russia’s global status; and militarism as the means of securing and justifying the regime’s domestic and foreign policy agenda.

Russia’s democratic opposition has been disabled by the failure of the country’s liberals which have emerged as “one of the pillars of the new post-communist autocracy,” serving as “Viagra for Russian authoritarianism,” Shevstova laments:

More than any other class of intellectuals, liberals ought to be most invested in establishing freedom and the rule of law, but the sad irony is that it was liberals who delivered the most crushing blow to the chances of liberal democratic change in Russia. I called them “system” liberals (Andrei Illarionov later coined the shorter “syslibs”). Operating within the system and serving the government in different capacities even as they tried to monopolize the mantle of liberalism, these syslibs were instrumental in restoring one-man rule in Russia. Bright and popular personalities in the service of the new Russian autocracy, they have done much to discredit liberal values and to create an atmosphere in which cynicism and double standards thrive.

Like the syslibs, many Western politicians question Russia’s democratic potential and fear its populist and nationalist forces, Shevstova adds:

Many in Western political circles do not believe that a free Russia would behave decently. They believe that under authoritarian leadership Russia is more predictable and relatively docile. Order and stability, even at the expense of freedom, is what many Western leaders prefer to see in Russia. This goes a long way toward explaining the Western policy of acquiescence toward Russian autocracy.

The West’s democracies are also losing the battle of ideas with authoritarianism, Shevstova warns.

“Western civilization, in the eyes of a significant part of the Russian population, has lost its role as the alternative to the personalized-power system,” she writes:

This is partly the result of the current Western “malaise.” Western intellectual and political gurus have been candid in acknowledging the state of the Western model. Francis Fukuyama today writes of “dysfunctional America,” Zbigniew Brzezinski warns of Western decay, and Walter Laqueur has announced “the slow death of Europe.” Naturally, this Western crisis is inspiring neither liberal hopes within Russian society nor attempts to follow the Western model, at least for the time being.

The reset in US-Russian relations and EU policy toward the Kremlin “are considered by many democracy-minded Russians as legitimizations of the personalized-power system that give it additional strength to survive. For the first time, one can hear harsh criticism of Western policy toward the Kremlin coming from pro-Western circles in Russia,” she contends:

For example, one of the leading figures of the Russian democratic opposition, Vladimir Ryzhkov, says: “Paris and Berlin are solid supporters of Putin. Obama’s Russia policy is much more advantageous to Putin and his inner circle than that of former U.S. President Bush.” ….

The president of the Levada Center [a grantee of the National Endowment for Democracy], Lev Gudkov, who is an independent sociologist, says:

I think that both the opposition and the public at large (there is practically no difference here) perceive the “reset” policy as a purely cynical act of trade-off between Putin and the new American administration. The agreement is based on a few assumptions. Among them are America’s promises to refrain from criticizing Putin’s authoritarian regime and accept – at least superficially – Putin’s claims to the status of a major statesman who restored Russia to its historical superpower position. ……. Essentially, the over whelming majority of Russians believed that for the sake of increasing the Russian regime’s world prestige and protecting its geopolitical interests, it is not only lawful but appropriate to treat the Americans as “useful idiots” (to resort to the phrase attributed to Lenin). They believed that to this end any means are justifiable, including deception, blackmail, etc.

From Andrei Piontkowski, an independent publicist [and former Reagan-Fascell fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy]:

This “reset” once all the lofty peel is removed is reduced to a simple bargain: the American military cargo transit to Afghanistan in exchange for safe havens in the West for the assets the Russian ruling elite has illegally accumulated. [...] ….

“At this point, I would expect my Western colleagues to say: ‘Come on! This is rubbish! What do you expect the West and the United States to do? Isolate Russia? End trade? Stop negotiating nuclear weapons cuts?’” Shevstova continues:

Of course not. I am not so irresponsible or naïve. The opposition and the liberal critics of the West do not expect Western governments to fight for Russian democracy and freedom; this is an agenda for Russians. But in pursuing trade or security relations, nothing is forcing Western governments to play the game “Let’s Pretend” with regard to the path the Kremlin has taken.

By masquerading as an imitation “sovereign democracy,” Putin’s regime was for a while able to maintain a degree of legitimacy, but no longer:

• the Russian people no longer have to concentrate on basic physical survival, and their memories of the 1990s have begun to fade;
• a new generation of Russians is demanding a higher standard of living;
• increased prosperity has allowed city residents to begin to pay attention to issues of freedom and dignity;
• Medvedev’s presidency created a gap between the imitation of liberalization and the reality that proved irritating to many;
• the sharp degradation and corruption of the regime became evident;
• new social means of communications appeared;
• the regime’s methods began to backfire in the 2011-12 elections, as the regime’s efforts to intimidate and discredit the opposition led to increased support for it (as well as its radicalization) and further alienation of the regime from the people.

“If the current trends continue in Russia, its economic, social, and political decay will continue, which will bring inevitable geopolitical decline, Shevstova argues:

The ability of the Russian system to adapt to the new internal and external circumstances continues to decrease. The authorities try to respond to new challenges mainly through coercion. The regime cannot change the political and social rules of the game, because that would mean new and unpredictable outcomes, and the Kremlin fears these more than it fears the results of the current rot.

Exactly how this political decay will develop and what forms it will take are still very unclear. Will it be a lengthy process of stagnation and decline that goes beyond any timeframe we can adequately measure today? Or will it be interrupted by social and political explosions, and, if so, when and with what consequences? Would these explosions (or explosion) just lead to the continuation of the authoritarian system under a new guise, or would it transform Russia into a liberal democracy?

The upcoming political agenda features some key objectives for the nascent opposition:

One of them is consolidating the opposition and formulating an agenda that is responsive to the challenges posed by a more repressive regime. Another objective is integrating political and socio-economic demands. Yet another is uniting all of the opposition factions and the moderates within the system ready for change under the banner of universal democratic demands and the peaceful transformation of the system.

“The fast-paced events of the day and the degradation of the system may call for some ad hoc changes to the agenda, but one objective remains paramount under any circumstances: the pledge by all participants in the political process to renounce personalized power and to step down from positions of power in case of electoral defeat,” Shevstova concludes.

“This has never happened in Russian history. If Russia finally manages to do it, it will have reached its ‘end of history’ and the beginning of a new one.”

RTWT

As President Barack Obama enters his second term, the reset of US- Russian relations “has clearly run its course,” a new analysis suggests, leaving “little doubt that a new American policy toward the Kremlin is needed.”

The US should “actively challenge—rhetorically and through policy decisions—the authoritarian actions of the regime…at the highest levels of the U.S. government, starting with President Obama,” says a report from Freedom House, the US-based rights watchdog.

A close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin this week claimed that the US violated “a tacit understanding” to refrain from publicly criticizing Russia’s democratic regression, undermining the 2009 reset negotiated with then-president Dmitry Medvedev.

But Washington should “abandon talk of seeking ‘win-win’ cooperation, since Putin views power relations in zero-sum terms,” the report suggests.

Furthermore, the US must implement the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act; restore the notion of “linkage” to make clear that human rights and democracy will affect broader bilateral relations; and “stand in solidarity with Russian activists—financially and vocally—by finding innovative ways to continue supporting those who seek political liberalization in Russia.”

The Obama administration had based its hope for improved ties on the ability of Medvedev to secure liberal reforms, but expectations were frustrated as Vladimir Putin remained the dominant force in government and Russia “moved abruptly in a more repressive direction” upon his return to the presidency, writes Freedom House research director Arch Puddington, in an introduction to Contending with Putin’s Russia: A Call for American Leadership:

Putin has since pushed through measures to deter public demonstrations, smear and limit funding for nongovernmental organizations, and place restrictions on the internet…made anti-Americanism a central part of his political message…accused the United States of fomenting demonstrations against election fraud, shut down all U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) programs in Russia, withdrawn from a series of cooperative agreements with the United States, and signed a vindictive law that prohibits the adoption of Russian children by citizens of the United States.

Nevertheless, the Kremlin’s “more aggressive behavior should not be misread as a sign that Putin’s position is stronger than before,” according to Freedom House president David J. Kramer and Eurasia program director Susan Corke.

“At heart, his recent actions represent a paranoid and compensatory response to the understanding that the system he built is growing increasingly vulnerable.”

While Russia’s domestic repression gives considerable cause for concern, its authoritarian inclinations also have an international impact, Kramer and Corke contend.   

“The Kremlin is determined to thwart democratic uprisings anywhere in the world because each event thins the protective global herd of dictators and is potentially transferable to Russia itself,” they write.

The report includes a valuable factsheet outlining the series of legal restrictions on non-governmental groups during the Putin era, prepared by Katherin Machalek, research analyst for Nations in Transit; an equally useful chronology, prepared by researcher Marissa Miller, detailingthe suppression of political opposition, independent media, and civil society; and severaltables and graphs, prepared by senior research assistant Bret Nelson, illustrating the decline of political rights and civil liberties in Russia as measured by Freedom House’s annual reports.

“Since the mass protests that spanned the period between the December 2011 parliamentary elections and Putin’s inauguration last spring, the regime’s ability to keep a lid on dissent has been sorely challenged,” Kramer and Corke suggest:

Surveys show that an increasing number of Russians, especially the younger generation, are interested in emigrating from the country. They are fed up with daily corruption and a stagnant political outlook that was exacerbated by Putin’s decision in September 2011 to return to the presidency.

Public support for the president has fallen below 50 percent in some recent surveys, and even lower in Moscow, while civic activism is on the rise. More than 100,000 Russians signed a petition on Novaya Gazeta’s website to oppose the U.S. adoption ban, and even several government ministers spoke against it.

“This is a very stable trend: falling confidence, the declining legitimacy of the authorities,” according to Lev Gudkoy, director of the Levada Center, a Moscow-based opinion research group supported by the National Endowment for Democracy.

The general sense of decay is reinforced by the warped, hydrocarbon-based economy, disintegrating infrastructure and social supports, and a long-term demographic decline.

Putin’s authority essentially rests on personal support from the governing elites and security services, as opposed to electoral legitimacy, the rule of law, or formal state institutions. If these elites sense that he is losing his grip or his ability to enable their graft, the whole authoritarian system could come tumbling down amid defections and infighting.

As New York University professor Mark Galeotti put it, “The power of the center is, after all, as much as anything else rooted in imagination and belief; if people think Putin weak, then weak he will be.”

Economist Anders Aslund summed up the problem this way: “He represents no real values and therefore lacks any source of legitimacy other than stability and economic growth that will not last forever.”

Policy Recommendations for the U.S. Government:

? Actively challenge—rhetorically and through policy decisions—the authoritarian actions of the Putin regime, and do so at the highest levels of the U.S. government, starting with President Obama.

? Abandon talk of seeking “win-win” cooperation, since Putin views power relations in zero-sum terms and will not pursue such mutual benefits in good faith.

? Implement aggressively and fairly the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act to deny those Russian officials involved in human rights abuses the privileges of U.S. travel and banking services.

? Restore the notion of “linkage” as a policy tool to make clear that human rights and democracy are part of and will affect the broader bilateral relationship.

? Stand in solidarity with Russian activists—financially and vocally—by finding innovative ways to continue supporting those who seek political liberalization in Russia. This will be most effective when it is coordinated with allies.

? Delay a decision on President Obama’s attendance at the Group of 20 meeting in Moscow in September, and indicate that an earlier trip to meet with Putin in Russia is not possible without a serious turnaround in the country’s human rights situation.

? Withhold support for Russia’s bid to join the OECD unless and until Moscow starts abiding by the rules and norms of organizations to which it already belongs.

? Aggressively investigate potential violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in Russia.

? Work with Russia whenever possible, but when its leaders obstruct international efforts to uphold democracy and human rights or prevent atrocities, search for ways to work around or without Russia.

RTWT

US-Russian relations will remain strained as long as Washington continues to criticize the country’s human rights record, says a close ally of President Vladimir Putin.

The US violated “a tacit understanding” to refrain from publicly criticizing Russia’s democratic regression, undermining the 2009 “reset” agreed by President Barack Obama and then-president Dmitry Medvedev, said Alexei Pushkov (left), the head of the Russian parliament’s foreign committee.

“The reset was based on an agreement by both sides… that all the issues of democracy, human rights, Russia’s internal developments, will be discussed in a non-public format,” said Pushkov.

“The priority is political realism, ideology matters should be secondary. I tell you, issues over ideology and values can destroy anything,” Pushkov told Reuters.

“If the United States believes that as part of bilateral relations between two countries it can be supporting the Russian opposition, this clearly does not help Russian-U.S. ties,” he added. “The U.S. should not be part of Russia’s internal political process.”

In the latest phase of its crackdown against independent voices, the Kremlin is growing increasingly suspicious of even non-political civic activism, reports suggest.

“The rapid emergence of volunteer efforts, fueled in large part by social media, coincides with the eruption of public political protest — and that’s not by happenstance,” write The Washington Post’s Will Englund and Kathy Lally:

There is an overlap between the political opposition and those who have become fed up with a corrupt government that delivers little and who have decided to take matters into their own hands.   

Russia’s Soviet past, when the government controlled all aspects of life, has left it with a population that is accustomed to the idea that the government should provide for its citizens and that is suspicious of volunteer organizations. A 2012 poll found that more than half the population disapproves of them, said Boris Dubin, a sociologist with the Levada Center in Moscow.

Legislators from President Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party in the State Duma, or lower house of parliament, are considering legislation to regulate civic-minded volunteers.

The legislation reflects “an absolute lack of understanding of the whole nature of the social phenomenon,” said Yevgeny Grekov, who helps run a drivers group called Volunteers on Wheels.

Russia suffers from a lack of trust among its people. It can’t have a real civil society without such trust, he said, and it can’t have true democracy without civil society. He described his program as a model of civic behavior that he hopes will be instructive.

“They want volunteers to be walking in columns and support the authorities,” Grekov said. “But programs such as ours have no lists. If you want to help, well, help.”

An underlying cause of Russian authoritarianism is the absence of “any meaningful movement or party that is conservative in the Western sense of the word – – pro-democracy, pro-market, but also pro-family values and traditional attitudes (such as recognizing the importance of faith),” says a prominent analyst.

“Those claiming to be Russian conservatives often turn out to be individuals with only a tentative grasp on reality, who demand the restoration of the Soviet Union under absolute monarchy, who despise democracy as ‘a devilish import from America’ and advocate mandatory prison sentences for homosexuals,” saysKonstantin Eggert, a commentator and host for radio Kommersant FM and former BBC Russian Service Moscow Bureau Editor:

While many Russians oppose these patently silly laws that discriminate arbitrarily against citizens, not many are quite ready to see the radical redefinition of their values on which the EU seems to insist. Unfortunately there is no voice of reason between Kremlin propaganda and those who consider reform and democracy to be synonymous with destroying tradition.

RTWT

*The Levada Center receives support from the National Endowment for Democracy, the Washington-based democracy assistance group.

An increase in anti-Americanism stands out as one of the most dominant features of the Kremlin’s policy in 2012, writes Russia analyst Michael Boehm. Since the propaganda campaign worked so effectively, we can expect more state-sponsored anti-Americanism in 2013.

The first anti-U.S. salvo was fired after Michael McFaul arrived in Moscow in mid-January 2012 as the new U.S. ambassador. Pro-Kremlin political analysts and a dozen pseudo-­documentaries on state-controlled television, such as “Anatomy of a Protest,” warned Russians throughout the first six months of the year that McFaul, a renowned academic expert in democratic revolutions, had been sent by Washington to help orchestrate an Orange-style revolution.

The second large salvo was fired in July, when Putin signed the law forcing “politically active” nongovernmental organizations that receive foreign money to register as “foreign agents.” Then in October, ­USAID, the largest source of funds for Russian NGOs, was forced to close its Moscow office.

The 2012 anti-U.S. campaign peaked on Dec. 28, when Putin signed the “anti-Magnitsky act” that bans all U.S. adoptions of Russian children. Article 3 of the anti-Magnitsky act allows Russia to suspend activities of NGOs if they receive money from U.S. citizens and “present a danger to the interests of Russia.” Before, only funds sent by the State Department were considered subversive; now private donations from U.S. citizens are considered subversive as well.

The Kremlin’s hard work on the anti-American front seems to have paid off. ….a recent VTsIOM poll found that 64 percent of Russians oppose foreign-funded NGOs. Furthermore, 23 percent believe Putin’s and state-television’s version of events — that Moscow protesters were paid by the U.S. to rally in the streets — while 47 percent had difficulty knowing who to believe, according to a Levada Center* poll in March. By the end of 2012, Levada found, the percentage of Russians who had a positive attitude toward the U.S. had dropped to 46 percent from 67 percent a year earlier.

These results show that anti-­Americanism remains a tried-and-true method for President Vladimir Putin to boost popularity among his conservative constituency and to shift attention away from Russia’s own problems onto a mythical enemy.

This extract is taken from a longer article in today’s Moscow Times. RTWT

*The Levada Center receives support from the National Endowment for Democracy, the Washington-based democracy assistance group.