Putin's Path into the 19th Century (Russia)

DEMOCRACY IN RUSSIA

Putin's Path into the 19th Century

By Jörg R. Mettke
June 5, 2006
Source

The Russian president has completed his authoritarian state -- with a supervisory board for Russia's civil society. The new People's Chamber, a Soviet-style amalgam of officials, is expected to have a voice in politics. But will it have any real power?

Astronomer Nikolai Chernych, the discoverer of 537 asteroids, likes to use the names of great writers when naming his discoveries -- names like Pushkin, of course, as well as Gogol, Lermontov, Twain and Chekhov. But he reserved a discovery he made on September 22, 1979 for a modern-day hero.

Planetoid Number 3601, discovered in the sky above the Crimean Peninsula at a distance of 338 million kilometers (210 million miles) from the earth, received the name Velikhov, after Russian physicist Yevgeny Pavlovitch Velikhov, now 71, for many years the vice-president of the Moscow Academy of Sciences, head of the Kurchatov Institute for Nuclear Research and a global lobbyist for the large-scale construction of fusion reactors.

For the Kremlin, a man who had already been honored with a starlet during Soviet days seemed the perfect choice as director of an unusual experiment in democracy. As of this spring -- and coinciding with the beginning of Putin's seventh year in office -- 126 actors are putting the Russian civil society to the test. Part of the reason for the move lies with growing American complaints that Moscow's leadership has "unfairly and improperly restricted the rights of the people," as US Vice President Dick Cheney recently said in a speech in the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius.

The "People's Chamber" is intended as a forum for the voice of the people. Officially, its role is not only to guarantee the cooperation of all citizens with all government bodies, but also to protect "rights and freedoms" and oversee officialdom. The secretary of the new chamber -- not mentioned in the Russian constitution -- is Yevgeny Velikhov.

Deserving citizens of the fatherland

After consulting at length with his former KGB comrades, Russian President Vladimir Putin appointed Velikhov an extra-parliamentary representative of the people -- along with 41 other "especially deserving" citizens of the fatherland. They formed the first third of the "People's Chamber," as it was written into law last year. Other representatives include high-ranking religious officials from the managing Metropolite of the Russian Orthodox Church to the Buddhist Pandito Chambo Lama, the chairman of Russia's Mufti Council, a leading rabbi and the country's Protestant bishop. Members of the medical profession were also added, including a heart surgeon, an expert on addiction and a pediatrician. In addition to Velikhov, Russian academia is represented by an architectural historian and an ethnologist. To complete the picture, the group includes a few leaders of charities, lawyers, journalists and political scientists, forming an inner circle or miniature version of Russian society that exists only on the drawing boards of Putin's social engineers.

The leaders of the chamber, appointed by the president, selected a second third with a makeup similar to that of the first, drawing on leaders of the country's leading non-governmental organizations. As a result, a group called the "Women's Movement for the Health of the Nation" was brought on board, as were members of a writer's and lawyers' association, filmmakers and many representatives from business, including Putin's model oligarchs, Mikhail Fridman (with a net worth of $9.7 billion) and Vladimir Potanin (net worth: $6.4 billion). Representatives of the country's intellectual and spiritual side include chess legend Anatoly Karpov (Russia's other chess star, Garry Kasparov, was deemed unfit for chamber membership, due to his opposition group affiliations) and Alla Pugatchova, a nationally renowned singer now on the verge of retirement.

The final third comes from the provinces, and includes trade unionists, veterans of the Soviet war in Afghanistan and a poet from Dagestan. All, it goes without saying, are honorable people and representatives of the "constructive, non-government sector of our fatherland," as one member of the chamber noted with some satisfaction following the group's first plenary session at the Kremlin.

Perhaps not surprisingly, one participant in the regional selection conference in St. Petersburg said he had a striking feeling of déjà-vu. Another member, the president of Russia's gardening federation, likewise said that the process strongly reminded him of his work in the Soviet Communist Party's territorial committee. Back in 1989, he says, the party leadership would appoint delegates to the party convention according to specific profiles, such as "a milkmaid, not older than 49, mother of three children and preferably the recipient of an award."

Loyalty and authority before democracy

But today's leadership wasn't interested in appointing workers, milkmaids or even cooks capable of governing, to reflect a dream of Lenin's. What the current government had planned was a People's Chamber without the people, a body made up of presidents, vice-president, chairmen, general directors and other executives. One in 14 members is a lawyer, one in seven is a political scientist, journalist or writer, and one in four is an established scientist or academic. At least one in three members of the group claims to be a "civil rights advocate."

However, many civil rights organizations seeking independence from the government bureaucracy stayed away from the People's Chamber from the very start. The reason, claims "For Honest Elections," a citizens' group from the Kurgan region east of the Ural Mountains, lies in the fact that the government's most important selection criterion is loyalty to the government authority -- it's merely an imitation of civil society the group claims. Human rights organizations "Memorial" criticizes the chamber for subjecting social activist groups to a selection process and imposing a "hierarchy" on these groups. Finally, a representative of a group of soldiers' mothers from the Saratov region says that Putin's primary goal is to use his People's Chamber to demonstrate his commitment to civil society -- while getting rid of other, more distasteful civil rights groups.

That smoke and mirrors are arrows in the chamber's quiver becomes obvious when looking at new laws promoting tighter government control over Russian non-governmental organizations (NGOs). There have also been heightened efforts to criminalize still-independent civil rights groups and accuse them of affiliations with foreign intelligence agencies. Both efforts were announced in a major propaganda campaign conducted parallel to the selection of the new chamber.

The People's Chamber, which Putin's spin doctors have sought to portray as some global democratic innovation, isn't even popular at home. Barely half of Russians recently surveyed had even heard of the body, and only one in 10 respondents believed that it would ever develop much political authority. In other words, it will likely be no more effective than the two chambers of parliament -- which have likewise been turned into little more than executors of Kremlin policy.

A lackey to a benevolent czar

The People's Chamber, says Alexey Chadayev, a "culturologist" allied with the Kremlin, is "the equivalent of the House of Lords," just "without an aristocracy." Chadayev, a former activist with a group calling itself the "New Right," ought to know. President Putin personally appointed Chadayev the chairman of the chamber.

The elitist feeling of being selected, not elected is intended to unify members across party lines. The Putin gang's belief that an artificially assembled, pre-democratic body like the People's Chamber will mobilize the country, making it what Putin calls "more stable, effective and competitive," reveals just how energetically Moscow's political class is peering back into the 19th century instead of looking forward into the future.

Though meant to liberate the people from the chains of bureaucracy, the new body functions essentially as a lackey to a benevolent czar. Vladimir Putin, who is constantly inflating his country's bureaucracy by establishing new boards and committees almost daily, expressly instructed the new chamber not to shy away from conflict with bureaucrats. And when it did encounter such conflict, Putin said, the chamber would "run into difficulties, or even worse -- no one there will be pleased to see you."

He's probably right. But the guardians of Russia's bureaucracy aren't exactly shaking in their boots at the prospect of being audited by the People's Chamber. They know full well that even during the Soviet days, one of the political leadership's favorite rituals was to occasionally attack its own bureaucratic lines, thereby keeping employees in good spirits and on the right course. As a result, the country's armies of government bureaucrats -- from the worker and farmer inspections with which Josef Stalin planned to "destroy bureaucracy" to the Brezhnev era's reformed "Committee of People's Control" -- never suffered serious setbacks as a result, but instead were always able to easily conform to the newly established establishment.

Civil rights activists with Memorial already predicted the same fate for the People's Chamber a year ago, when the debate over Putin's initiative was just beginning. It would create a "new bureaucratic superstructure," they complained, one that would be at best capable of "imitating a dialog" between the state and civil society.

Good intentions by the minute

The 126 appointees plunged headlong into their administrative duties. The Moscow building assigned to the chamber -- a former dormitory for the Soviet Communist Party's university -- had to be moved into and its renovation, at just under €3 million, had to be negotiated. A support staff of 100 had to be recruited, and it eventually turned into half a dozen departments, sub-departments and an analysis center. Offices had to be distributed, cars rented and expense budgets defined.

The chief of staff was sent by the Kremlin administration and appointed by government decree. Seventeen commissions were established, chairmen and deputy chairmen were elected, and diplomatic talks were held with the parliamentary delegates of the people in the Duma and Federal Council to discuss cooperation.

Before long, recommendations, announcements, statements and resolutions began spewing out. The Chamber has announced that it plans to combat the practice of recruit hazing in the army, help out the country's charitable organizations, defend freedom of speech, stop the deterioration of museums, increase funding for culture and education, refine many old and new laws, promote the sciences and complete the hunt for terrorists. "Good intentions are coming in by the minute," moans the news director a Moscow daily newspaper. "We don't have enough people on staff to report on every meeting."

When Chamber Secretary Velikhov thanked the president for his "great confidence" during the chamber's inaugural session in the Kremlin's St. George Hall, he recalled past "conflicts between the state power and the people, producing tragic consequences for Russia."

Velikhov could certainly have mentioned his own name in his references to the past. When Andrey Sacharov was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975, academy member Velikhov and 71 other "outraged" members protested against the "degrading and provocative nature" of honoring a person "who is bringing the political, economic, social and cultural achievements of the Soviet people into disrepute under the guise of the struggle to achieve human rights."

The letter, of course, was dictated from the top, although five Academy members refused to sign it. Stalin, after all, had already been dead 20 years so that, as Nobel physics prize winner Vitaly Ginsburg said, "the risk of arrest, torture or even being shot was very low."

Nevertheless, Velikhov's appointment to the Chamber is no accident. Perhaps it's even part of a plan -- in two respects. First, Putin's administrative council neither expects nor encourages civil courage. And Sacharov, if he were alive today, would probably not be selected to be a member of the People's Chamber in the new Russia.

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan