U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton challenged what she calls a global crackdown on human rights during a trip through former Soviet republics over the weekend, lamenting a “steel vise” squeezing the life out of social activism.

Clinton arrived in Azerbaijan on Sunday after declaring in Poland that intolerant governments, including Russia’s, are undercutting rights groups whose work is vital to the development of democracy. She said the trend is apparent and growing worse, even in countries that call themselves democracies.

At the palatial residence of President Ilham Aliyev, overlooking the vast, glimmering Caspian Sea, Aliyev and Clinton spoke briefly before reporters and television cameras.

Aliyev stressed the urgency of his country’s territorial dispute with neighboring Armenia. The two nations are in conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh, an enclave in Azerbaijan that has been under control of Armenian troops and ethnic Armenian forces since a 1994 cease-fire.

“This is the major problem for us and the major threat to regional security,” he said.

At an airport news conference later with her Azeri counterpart, Elmar Mammadyarov, Clinton said they had discussed at length the territorial dispute.

“The final steps toward peace are often the most difficult, but we believe peace is possible,” Clinton told reporters.

“This is a high priority for the United States,” she added. She said the 1994 cease-fire agreement “must be enforced.”

Following her meeting with Aliyev, Clinton gathered with about a dozen Azeri youth activists, including bloggers, to encourage them to speak out in favor of social change.

She said she raised the issue of freedom of expression in her talks with Aliyev.

On Saturday, addressing an international conference in Poland on democracy and human rights, Clinton recalled Winston Churchill’s warning 60 years ago that an iron curtain was descending across Europe. She noted that with the collapse of the Soviet Union, that curtain no longer remains.

“But we must be wary of the steel vise in which governments around the world are slowly crushing civil society and the human spirit,” she said.

Among the offenders she cited: Zimbabwe, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Cuba, Belarus, Egypt, Iran, Venezuela, China and Russia.

Clinton said her current trip, which began in Ukraine on Thursday and was to include stops in Armenia and Georgia, is intended to demonstrate the Obama administration’s commitment to democracy and human rights.

In Ukraine, Clinton praised the new Moscow-friendly leadership for its pursuit of democracy, skimming over concerns about a rollback of liberties.

At a joint news conference with Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, Clinton said the Obama administration supports efforts by Ukraine to deepen its relationship with Russia, so long as it also remains open to closer ties to the United States and Europe.

Yanukovych said he views the United States as a reliable strategic partner and is prepared to take new steps to build a stronger partnership.

Clinton also met privately at her Kiev hotel with former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, who lost the February presidential election to Yanukovych and remains his political enemy.

The document was written by two of Solidarity’s co-leaders, former Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov and former Deputy Energy Minister Vladimir Milov. As Nemtsov puts it, the pamphlet is meant “to tell the truth about the results of the rule of Putin and the tandem,” as the relationship between the prime minister and president is commonly referred to.

Immediately after the authors presented the report, its host website was hit by DDOS hacker attacks that rendered it completely inaccessible. Then, on Tuesday, police in St. Petersburg seized 100 thousand copies of the published report, a tenth of the total million that were printed by the organization.

As the Moscow Times reports:

Police seized pamphlets criticizing Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on the eve of a high-profile business forum showcasing Russia, opposition leaders said.

St. Petersburg police confiscated 100,000 copies of a new report on Putin’s decade in power co-authored by Boris Nemtsov, a former deputy prime minister, said Olga Kurnosova, head of the local branch of the opposition United Civil Front.

Kurnosova and Nemtsov contended that police were trying to keep the 32-page report [in PDF form; 48 in MS Word form - ed.] from the public and visitors at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, which started Thursday.

“The police had the task of preventing the distribution of the report during the forum among its participants and citizens,” Kurnosova said.

St. Petersburg police declined to comment.

Police held the driver of the vehicle that was delivering the pamphlets for several hours, Kurnosova said.

She said police told her that they had sent the pamphlet to be checked for evidence of extremism — a tactic that opposition politicians say authorities sometimes use to stifle criticism — and that the check would take two or three days.

Nemtsov has co-written several reports highlighting corruption and other problems that he contends have gotten worse since Putin was elected president in 2000.

On Thursday, Nemtsov wrote on his blog that another 100 thousand copies of the report had been confiscated from the printing house by Federal Security Service (FSB) officers:

Instead of arguing with the theses in the report, denying the basis of the theses, they decided to show their effectiveness by acting in a Putin-like manner. Grossly violating citizens’ right to information, they decided, like in the good old days, to liquidate the opposition’s literature.

The reason is that facts and figures of the true results of Putin’s rule are laid out in the report. They tell us that they’ve built an effective state, while in fact, the level of corruption has reached monstrous proportions (on the level of the most backward African countries) in these ten years of rule. They assure us that the birth rate is rising, and that the death rate is falling – as a matter of fact, under Putin, Russia has been losing half a million people per year. They tell us that he has gained victory over the oligarchs and poverty – actually, there are more than 60 billionaires in the country, and 20 million poor. They tell us that Putin has pacified the Caucasus and gained victory over terror – as a matter of fact, in the ten years of his rule, the number of terrorist attacks has risen six times, and the regions of the Caucasus, receiving many millions in subsidies, have wound up outside of the Russian legal realm.

This is the truth that, in Putin’s opinion, Russians mustn’t know. This is where the actions of the security officials come from.

While distribution of the pamphlet started in Moscow and St. Petersburg, Solidarity is planning to release copies of the report all over Russia. For now, and especially given that police have apparently seized 1/5 of all of the printed pamphlets, the organization is encouraging citizens to print their own copies and distribute them in samizdat fashion.

“Putin. Results. 10 Years” is available in Russian by clicking here.

Dmitri Peskov, press secretary for Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, said that the prime minister was aware of Monday’s events, but stressed that the rally was not held in a location sanctioned by the Moscow city government.

“The prime minister, of course, knows about the demonstration. He knows, in particular, where it was given permission to be held and where it was actually held,” said Peskov.

Putin made a guarded statement last week that protests should always be allowed if their participants follow the law, after being confronted about the issue by a Kremlin-critical rock musician. But as the Moscow Times points out:

City officials banned the rally on Triumfalnaya Ploshchad, saying an authorized pro-Kremlin rally was already scheduled to take place instead.

Preventing unwanted public gatherings by holding official rallies is a well-known tactic. In his 2000 book of interviews, “From the First Person. Conversations with Vladimir Putin,” Putin admitted to using it himself when working in the St. Petersburg administration in the 1990s.

When asked what the prime minister thought about the actions of the police – which included detaining up to 170 people, beating dozens of them, holding them for hours in buses that were more than 95°F, shattering one man’s arm, and manhandling a World War II veteran – Peskov declined to comment.

Any discussion of the incident was blocked in the State Duma on Wednesday by United Russia, the country’s leading political party headed by Vladimir Putin. Communist Party Deputy Sergei Obukhov tried to raise the issue but was shot down by First Deputy Speaker Oleg Morozov, who condemned him for giving an unsanctioned presentation.

Meanwhile, Moscow Human Rights Ombudsman Aleksandr Muzykantsky said that he takes issue with the fact that youth activists routinely hold events on Triumfalnaya Square on the 31st of every month – the same time the Strategy 31 rallies are meant to take place – thus providing the city government with a formal way to refuse to sanction the oppositionists’ event.

“It brings to mind how in the 20s of the last century they [Stalin loyalists - ed.] would disrupt Trotskyist meetings by using young people who stirred up fights. Those who disrupted the meetings were, in the end, convicted of taking part in Trotskyist rallies,” said Muzykantsky, as quoted by Interfax. “Young people were used cynically, and then they were thrown out.”

He added that he pitied the young people who are attracted to taking part in the events that are meant to disrupt the Strategy 31 rallies.

Russian Human Rights Ombudsman Vladimir Lukin, who joined Muzykantsky at Monday’s rally as an observer (and who police attempted to arrest), called the detentions “illegal” and said that the idea of a “sanctioned action” does not actually exist in Russian legislation. Instead, according to the constitution, organizers are only required to notify the local government if they plan to hold a large demonstration, he said.

Just as a two-day summit between Russia and the European Union wrapped up on Tuesday, EU representatives said that they knew of Lukin’s comments and promised to investigate Monday’s actions by the Moscow police.

Michael Webb, the deputy in charge of the EU delegation, said that “on the whole, the European Union supports Russia so that it fulfills the obligations that it undertook as part of the Council of Europe. And also so that it realizes civil rights as secured by the constitution. In particular, the right to free assembly and free speech.”

From the Moscow Times:

Kasyanov told the Khamovnichesky District Court that the changes were politically motivated and contradicted the everyday practices of oil companies.

“By the end of 2003, I had a clear understanding that both were arrested under political motives,” he said.

Kasyanov said he tried to talk with Putin after Lebedev was arrested in July 2003 and Khodorkovsky was arrested in October that year, but Putin refused to discuss the issue with him. Only on the third try did Putin reply, he said.

“I asked Putin to clarify what he knew about the situation, but he refused twice, and then he gave me an answer,” Kasyanov said.

“He said Yukos financed Yabloko and the Union of Right Forces, political parties that it was allowed to finance, but also the Communist Party, which it wasn’t allowed to.”

Khodorkovsky and his lawyers have been trying for months to convince the court to call the prime minister as a witness. Until Monday, it had dismissed this possibility as “premature,” despite a series of questions penned by Khodorkovsky that only Vladimir Putin would be able to properly address.

After Kasyanov’s testimony, the idea that such a subpoena would be premature made even less sense than before. Therefore, lawyers for the defense requested once again that the court call in Prime Minister Putin, as well as Russian Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin, arguing that new circumstances had come to light that made their interrogations necessary for the case.

On Thursday, however, the court turned down the lawyers’ request. Judge Viktor Danilkin had said previously that he “did not find any legal basis” for the subpoenas, and now said that the new arguments by the defense left no different impression. The prime minister and finance minister would be interrogated only if they personally appeared in court, he said.

Prosecutor Vyacheslav Smirnov, meanwhile, made it clear that there would be no interrogation of the prime minister in the Khamovnichesky Court, period. When journalists asked him why, Smirnov responded: “Because we live on the ground.”

Nashi Celebrates Fifth Year With Kremlin Support
April 16, 2010
By Alexander Bratersky

Pro-Kremlin youth group Nashi, best known for harassing ambassadors and opposition leaders, celebrated its five-year anniversary Thursday with a major show of support from the Kremlin, which said the activists remained a vital force in Russia.

Kremlin first deputy chief of staff Vladislav Surkov — who is widely believed to have organized the group while an adviser to then-President Vladimir Putin in 2005 — spoke to the raucous crowd of 2,000 delegates, as did Nashi’s founding father, Vasily Yakemenko.

Created to resist revolutions like those in Georgia in 2003 and Ukraine in 2004, Nashi has taken a back seat to other youth groups in recent years as the threat of widespread public unrest dwindled.

But Surkov told members Thursday that he “would always support” them.

“If we all go on vacation, the consequences won’t wait. We see what’s happening in Kyrgyzstan — that means we’re needed and have to be at our posts. … Those who chose for themselves the political fight will never be able to relax again,” Surkov told the crowd. “I’m calling on you to remain in that fight,” he said, before conveying greetings from Medvedev.

Putin said in a letter to the congress that the movement “unites people who love their motherland and are trying to make a serious contribution to the resolution of the current problems of the state and society.”

Yakemenko, now director of the Federal Agency for Youth Affairs, restated the group’s allegiance to Russia’s two leading politicians.

“The Nashi movement is the movement of those who feel outraged and mad by the things they see around them. Our movement knows no authority except the authority of the policies of Medvedev and Putin,” Yakemenko said.

The congress, held in an ornate Moscow business center, also elected a new ruling board, in which a previously low-profile activist, Marina Zademidkova, 25, collected three times more votes than her nearest competitor, Anton Smirnov.

The State Duma’s youngest member, Robert Shlegel of United Russia, known for his initiatives to restrict media freedoms, was also elected to the five-member board. Nashi will elect its new formal leader from the group on May 15.

Incumbent leader Nikita Borovikov, 29, did not run for a spot on the board.

Political expert Stanislav Belkovsky said the movement’s future would depend on financing from the Kremlin. “The movement doesn’t have a solid ideological base,” he said.

Ilya Yashin, a member of the Solidarity opposition movement who is a frequent target of Nashi attacks, said the group would still come in handy as the state tries to deflect the growing “protest mood.”

“It’s possible that the experience of movement’s managers would be needed when people hit the streets,” the former Yabloko youth leader told The Moscow Times.

While Nashi members in the regions have also been involved in less political activities, such as charity work, the group’s radical fight against the Kremlin opponents will continue to be its focus, members said Thursday.

“We thought that we have defended our sovereignty, but we shouldn’t forget that they are trying to occupy us,” Borovikov said, referring to Western powers and the “agents of the ideological influence.”

He said they were behind Russian opposition leaders and liberal-leaning media, which he accused of “promoting drugs and providing a tribune to terrorists.”

Before Borovikov’s speech, the group was shown a 15-minute film about Nashi, highlighting its opposition to the “organizers of color revolutions” and “liberals and fascists.”

To illustrate the message, the film showed former chess champion Garry Kasparov and former Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov — both members of the Solidarity movement.

Without naming names, the film also attacked “losers” in government and the media who are trying to block the country’s modernization, a key initiative by Medvedev to close Russia’s technological gap with the West.

“The task to create civil society has been completed. The new task is to defend modernization and sovereign democracy,” the film narrator said in a robotic voice.

But not all of the delegates said they supported the hard-hitting ideology, which has discredited the movement with some of the public.

“We often don’t have concrete ideas to express,” said Artyom, who asked that his last name not be used because he was not authorized to speak to the media.

One demonstration at Prechistinskiye Gates took the form of a funeral memorial, with participants lighting candles and laying flowers at the base of a copy of the nation’s governing document.

The demonstration was jointly organized by the United Civil Front, Oborona, and the movement We. Together with a number of other activists, the group held placards enumerated the articles of the constitution that they believe no longer function. Another placard declared “In Russia, human rights are observed on three counts – the right to be silent, the right to endure, and the right to die.”

Roman Dobrokhotov, leader of the movement We, explained the reasoning behind the form of the protest. “Today we want to commemorate the constitution of the Russian Federation; since its birth we have observed the asymmetries of government authorities, and those have lead to its sudden death,” he said.

Dobrokhotov went on to say that the constitution has been subjected to “political incest” since 2000, the beginning of Putin’s first term as president.

Boris Nemtsov, a former Deputy Prime Minister and leader of the opposition Solidarity movement, said that authorities aim “to trample and annihilate the constitution and to strip citizens of all rights.” He added that censorship and alienation from the electoral process was harming the rights and freedoms of Russian citizens.

“Unfortunately, the majority of citizens feel that they have no power to contend with this. But there are nevertheless people in this country who are prepared to fight for freedom,” Nemtsov said.

Towards the end of the demonstration, participants laid a funeral wreath at the foot of the constitution while the national hymn played in the background. It concluded with a moment of silence, and the proceeding arrest of Dobrokhotov by law enforcement agents.

Solidarity activists held another demonstration outside the doors of the presidential administrative building in central Moscow. Approximately fifty people took part in the unsanctioned protest, holding placards with letters that together spelled out “Observe the constitution!”

A few minutes after the start of the demonstration, a number of men in plain clothes, believed to be officers from the Federal Guard Service, ran out of the building and began to aggressively detain the protestors.

While most of the activists managed to escape, six were detained, and the men confiscated a number of cameras and videos.

According to a survey released on Thursday, respect among Russians for the constitution has doubled over the past seven years. The number of Russians who feel that the constitution is unimportant and not respected fell to 21 percent from 40 percent in 2002, and those who feel that it should be amended only in extremely rare circumstances rose from to 47 percent from 35 percent in 2000.

The constitution of the Russian Federation was adopted through a popular referendum on December 12, 1993. The most recent amendment to the document was incorporated approximately a year ago by President Dmitri Medvedev, lengthening the presidential term from four years to six.

In a statement on Wednesday, Mandzhgaladze qualified her statement by saying that only two categories of people are not allowed in Georgia: “occupying powers and spies sent by the Russian security services.”

Russian State Archive Director Sergei Mironenko and senior researcher at the Center of Caucasus Studies at the Moscow State Institute of Foreign Affairs Nikolai Silayev were denied entry into Georgia upon arriving at Tbilisi International Airport on Tuesday.

The two researchers, together with four others, had planned to attend a conference on Georgian-Russian relations from December 1 – 3.

The four other researchers in the delegation left in protest at the decision, and all six returned together to Moscow.

Mandzhgaladze asserted that the two researchers work for the Russian security services.

She added that Georgia “is open for Russian tourists, businessmen, people of the arts, sportsmen or ordinary citizens.”

According to the Moscow Times, the Georgian Institute of Russian Studies invited the Russian delegation, and the researchers had been warned that they might encounter some problems entering the country.

Both banned researchers, however, expressed shock at the decision, and Silayev said that he had recently been able to visit Georgia.

Relations between Russia and Georgia broke down in August 2008 during a military conflict between the two countries over the breakaway republic of South Ossetia. Russia has since recognized the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, another breakaway republic. Russia and Georgia both blame each other for instigating the war.

…but there are many serious problems still to be resolved and the seedlings of recovery will have to be extended to the consumer and small businesses if sustained recovery is to be achieved. The July data shows that the financial well-being of these important economic segments is still deteriorating. In absolute terms, the 9.3 percent year-on-year decline in GDP and the 10.8 percent drop in industrial output places Russia firmly at the bottom of the performance table of all major economies.

The risk of a second crisis wave has by no means been eliminated, although few expect the next challenges to cause the same level of destruction that we saw in late 2008 and earlier this year. But dealing with the still-unclear scale of bad debts in the banking system and restarting credit markets, at an affordable cost, as well as restoring consumer and investment confidence, are critical if the economy is to catch up with the positive trend in most major economies, which are now either seeing broadly based growth or are on the brink of it…

Too Early to Break Out the Champagne

Yet how much did Putin actually achieve, and at what cost?  Writing for the Moscow Times newspaper, political analyst Yevgeny Kiselyov argues that Putin’s legacy is far from positive.

–

But behind that glamorous television image, high popularity ratings and personality cult stands a deplorable track record. During Putin’s years in power, the country lost a complete decade. Russia missed a golden opportunity to use an extended period of high oil prices to modernize the country both politically and economically. Now as we near the end of the first decade of the 21st century, Russia remains mired in the past century. The country’s economy, including its federal budget, continues to be over-dependent on revenue from oil and other raw materials exports. Eighteen years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it still lacks a modern communications infrastructure. In addition, there is an appalling shortage of high-quality roads ­ including the so-called highway between Moscow and St. Petersburg ­ as well as modern train stations and airports.

In reality, the Russian economy began to grow rapidly before Putin’s rise, when the price of oil was about $15 per barrel. This growth started in earnest in 1999, after the ruble was devaluated following the 1998 default. But in the thick of Putin’s presidency, when oil prices approached $100 per barrel, exceeding even the boldest forecasts, the rate of economic growth year on year actually began to slow. Meanwhile, economic growth in similarly oil-rich Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan during the same period was two to three times higher.

Putin dedicated practically all of his early years as president to the war in Chechnya, the struggle with a few obstreperous and overly ambitious oligarchs, construction of his power vertical, the placement of loyal insiders in key government posts and instituting governmental control over the country’s largest media outlets.

Economic reforms that included the creation of the stabilization fund, the adoption of a new Land Code and new labor laws as well as the reform of natural monopolies were all begun under now-disgraced former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov. After his ouster, the reforms ground to a halt and a new course was set toward building Putin’s state capitalism.

Not Much to Celebrate After 10 Years of Putin

From The Moscow Times:

Undercover pro-Kremlin agents have worked in opposition groups across Russia to provide the presidential administration with information on opposition activists and rallies, a self-described handler said Thursday.

Anna Bukovskaya, a St. Petersburg activist with the pro-Kremlin Nashi youth group, said she coordinated a group of 30 young people who infiltrated branches of the banned National Bolshevik Party, Youth Yabloko and United Civil Front in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Voronezh and six other cities.

The agents informed Bukovskaya, who passed the information to senior Nashi official Dmitry Golubyatnikov, who in turn contacted “Surkov’s people” in the Kremlin, Bukovskaya told The Moscow Times. Vladislav Surkov is President Dmitry Medvedev’s first deputy chief of staff.

The agents provided information on planned and past events together with pictures and personal information on activists and leaders, including their contact numbers, Bukovskaya said by telephone from St. Petersburg.

They were paid 20,000 rubles ($550) per month, while she received 40,000 rubles per month, she said.

She said Nashi, which is believed to have been created by Surkov, had nothing to do with the project and speculated that Kremlin officials might be behind it.