[spectre] Russian NGO industry meets Putin for a civil society summit

[geert lovink]

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23 November 2001

The Kremlin Tames Civil Society

The Kremlin is trying to bring Russia's civil society to heel
and transform it into a loyal supporter of the authorities.

by Dmitry Pinsker

MOSCOW, Russia -- A pompous gathering, pretentiously called the
"Civic Forum," will take place in the Kremlin on 21 November. The
forum's aim is twofold--for Russian civil society to demonstrate
its existence to the world and show its loyalty to the president.

This undertaking began back in May, when, with military precision,
President Vladimir Putin ordered court spin doctor and director of
the Effective Politics Foundation Gleb Pavlovsky to come up with
a concept for Russian civil society within two weeks and begin its
immediate implementation.

The Kremlin spin doctors paid no heed to the Narodnaya Assambleya
(People's Assembly), an independent association of Russia's largest
civil society organizations, [which] warned that it's impossible to
"build civil society from above." The association has now found itself
also roped into organizing the forum with the Kremlin.  True, the
Kremlin would have liked to and even tried to ignore these independent
organizations, but that strategy didn't work.

Civil society organizations today are the last area of public political
life not to have been integrated into the "power vertical." The Kremlin
has brought the Federation Council to heel, established a firm
pro-presidential majority in the Duma, and tamed the regional governors.
It has used the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs to
rein in businessmen and has brought most of the media under its control.

Russian NGOs provide 1.5 million jobs, and another 10 million are
involved with them or concerned by them in some way. This represents
10 percent of voters--on the whole particularly active voters.  As
Pavlovsky pointed out quite openly, this is a political resource the
authorities can't afford to overlook.

The authorities have at least three other reasons for wanting to
get involved in building civil society:  First, they are concerned
by the interest that exiled oligarch Boris Berezovsky has been
showing in the issue.  Berezovsky and his money are behind the
Foundation for Civic Freedoms, which allocates grants to various
social and human-rights programs, such as the Sakharov Museum and the
Alexander Yakovlev Foundation, which is collecting archive material
on Soviet-era repressions.

The second reason is financial. The Kremlin is worried by the fact that
almost all Russian public organizations survive on foreign money. For
Russian officials with their paranoia--whether real or merely a tribute
to the current fashion in the Kremlin--and visions of plots by foreign
secret services at every turn, the fact that money is coming in from
abroad and isn't controlled by the state is obvious cause for concern.

"Most of this money is normal, 'clean' money, of course," said one
highly placed Kremlin official. "But we know full well that some of it,
especially coming through Islamic organizations, is sent by extremists
to fund terrorism and anti-state activities. And some of it comes from
foreign intelligence services."  This is about the most liberal opinion
coming from the Kremlin.

Finally, the third reason for the state's interest--though it won't admit
it--is that these public organizations have become a serious force that is
ever harder to ignore. The state became particularly aware of this when
environmental organizations took only three months to collect 2.5 million
signatures for a petition that a referendum be held on bringing foreign
nuclear waste into Russia.

The Kremlin's initial strategy was to build up loyal organizations in
parallel with the "awkward" ones, which would gradually push genuine
opponents of the authorities to the sidelines and then take their place
at negotiations with government officials and act as representatives
on the international scene.

Pavlovsky later tried to explain the fact that major organizations--such
as Memorial or the Committee of Soldiers' Mothers--weren't invited to
take part in a forum held in June by saying that the organizers didn't
want to frighten the authorities right away. In fact, the organizers
tried to invite Alexander Auzan, the head of the Consumers Confederation,
without inviting other members of the Narodnaya Assambleya. As a result,
Auzan refused to take part.

"The Kremlin's mistake is that civil society isn't the field in which
the authorities can be virtually the sole player," Auzan said. "The
consolidation process that Pavlovsky calls for is already under way.
After what happened in June, it has been moving even faster. They've
only made us stronger."

The June attempt to build a loyal civil society didn't work, and the
Kremlin found itself having to agree to cooperate with the "awkward"
organizations . But, having agreed to play by rules not of their own
making, the civil society organizations find themselves always one step
behind. It's entirely possible that next week's forum could make what
many NGO leaders have feared a reality, even though they continue working
in the forum's organizing committee--namely, that the authorities will
find a way to go back on their agreements and will simply use the
independent organizations' names and authority to pursue their own aims.

The first of these aims is purely organizational--to create an
administrative structure to represent Russian civil society at the
international level and to engage in dialogue with the president.
Obviously, this structure has to be a "comfortable" one for Putin.
Most unpleasant for the NGO leaders is that the Kremlin has already
begun creating this structure, only not from above, but from below, by
turning to regional associations with little knowledge of Moscow politics
but with an intuitive, Soviet-style attraction to power.

The second aim is ideological and propagandistic. Pavlovsky has been
busy repeating it the last few weeks. After the events of 11 September,
the idea goes, society's main task today is to help the state ensure
national security and help broaden the president's powers.

As for any idea of debate, Kremlin officials say that if anyone wants
to raise controversial issues at the forum, they're free to do so and
can speak their minds. The main thing is that by the end of the forum,
the president should have a loyal, organized civil society ready to
give all his policies its full support.

/Dmitry Pinsker is a political correspondent for Yezhenedelny Zhurnal./

This article originally appeared in the 16-22 November issue of
The Russia Journal, which is published weekly in Moscow and
Washington.