Soviet refuseniks demonstrate in Moscow in 1973 in front of the Interior Ministry.

President Barack Obama is calling on Congress to "abolish" the Jackson-Vanik amendment as Russia is set to join the World Trade Organization (WTO) next summer.

Congress should not do that, but should stand firm, and refuse to abolish the Jackson-Vanik amendment per se, which is a perfectly fine piece of legislation that must remain in place.

Instead, Congress should *graduate* Russia from Jackson-Vanik, permanently, because Jackson-Vanik no longer applies to Russia.

I don't know why this has become so hard to understand — that you don't need to abolish Jackson-Vanik in order to do the job of having it permanently no longer apply to Russia. As I wrote last year:

This simple construct — graduate don't repeal — seemed to be hard to get across, so avid is the desire of some to remove any "legacy of the Cold War," so heavy is the Russian pressure, and so eager are some who remain very, very concerned about human rights in Russia to appear fair and not be appearing to move the goalposts. I quite appreciate the creative ideas for continuing to keep the spotlight on Russian abuses, using all kinds of existing mechanisms, whether hearings at CSCE or reports from the US CIRF. But these activities, while merited, have no legislative action component.

This sort of graduation was done with Ukraine in 2006 — there was never any talk about how we had to abolish Jackson-Vanik then.

Why is it always put in terms now — by the Russians mainly, and by our latter-day detente-niks — of "abolition"? Because the Russians want the entire thing to go away, to be undone, and to be handed the moral victory over Cold Warriors. They want to be able to undo the record of the human rights struggle of the 1970s and 1980s and have the last word, and win. And they shouldn't be allowed to do that, not only because the record should be allowed to stand, but  because their human rights record remains highly troublesome — everything from the case of the lawyer Sergei Magnitsky permitted to die in prison to the assassination of human rights advocate Natalia Estemirova to restrictions of the rights of the media and free assembly, as well as the failure to prosecute the assaults and murders of guest workers and other ethnic minorities.

No one should be handing the Kremlin this victory, the Cold War was a good thing (a perfectly legitimate response to Soviet mass murder and annexation of territories) and given the persistence of some of the legacy of Stalin (never prosecuted) even today, this morally-dictated legislation should remain in place. P.S. It's useful still to apply to Turkmenistan, which maintains blacklists of people not able to travel or emigrate from the country, and some other countries in the world like North Korea.

Yes, we get it that Jackson-Vanik's "day is over," in the sense that it was put in place largely in response to the Soviet Union's refusal to permit freedom of movement as a basic human right, and now people can leave Russia at will. It is not a piece of legislation meant to deal with all human rights problems –we get that. Read the language of the bill; it is limited to apply to countries with non-market economies that did not permit people to emigrate. Yet the moral imperative it served — preventing the Soviet Union from getting most-favoured-nation trade status because of its bad behaviour — doesn't somehow get cancelled out retroactively — and stands as an important check on future bad behaviour.

So: rule that it no longer applies to Russia — it doesn't — and leave it in place.

There really is no reason on earth that Congress cannot pass a resolution that says Russia is permanently waived — graduated is the word used for Ukraine — from Jackson-Vanik. It should be a simple matter. That is hasn't become a simple matter lets me know this: the Russians are putting enormous heat personally on Obama and his aides trying to claim what they say was a "promise" to "abolish" Jackson-Vanik. It's not a promise that the president could give; if he used this language it was part of his terrible fumbling on Russia and human rights politics in the early days of his administration (the policy has improved but there is still an overall reticence to condemn human rights problems forthrightly).

Why are the Russians doing this? Because they want to permanently send a message to the US that they cannot have moral legislation passed that addresses Russia's immorality. They don't want to legislate morality; they don't want foreigners legislating human rights, either. They want to be able to roll back history and come out looking as if they are the victors, with their legal nihilism — that not law, not legislation but peace pacts make things happen. Preserving Jackson-Vanik intact, as is, is an important check against Russian legal nihilism — symbolic, yet literal, too.

The Obama Administration should not be pursuing this "abolition" when it has no need to do so (another option is to have the president issue the permanent waiver, while keeping the legislation in place, although it's better if Congress does it so as not to create yet another executive edict.)

Why doesn't Obama do this? I believe it's because his old DSA-style "progressive" politics, the politics of the organized socialist movement dictate that you do not cross Russia and its allies ((regardless of whether Obama can now be technically defined as a "socialist" on this or that grounds). It's a very old hangover from the old "new" left, and it's a shameful one. It comes from a hugely mistaken belief that there was something "progressive" about Moscow then, or that even today, as a counter-weight to US power, there is something "progressive" about Moscow today. Um, there isn't anything "progressive" about Moscow. It's brutal and cynical. Therefore, it should not get a pass.

Remember when Obama went to Russia and — horribly — talked about how the Khodorkovsky case was "an internal affair" of Russia's? What a bungle! That set back progress with the Helsinki accords and Helsinki talks 30 years — where human rights was recognized finally even by Russia as *not* an internal affair. That this bungle came even in the act of raising the Khodorkovsky case was even more regrettable.

Khodorkovsky doesn't have to be a perfect democrat nor does his case have to be a pristine prisoner-of-conscience case to "get it" about how and why you need to raise this case as a human rights case. It's about officially-sanctioned revenge, it's about vindictive policies that curb freedom and prevent challenges to the Kremlin's power. It's about the absence of the rule of law. If universally-recognized legal procedures were in place and practiced, there would be no Khodorkovsky case, especially the second sentence. So you get to raise it, regardless of gingerly feelings about "internal affairs" — because universality applies…universally.

When the Russians claim that the president "can't interfere" in the justice system because it's independent — snort — you call their bluff. They do, of course anyway. But the answer is to say that invocation of universal norms, invocation of the values of Helsinki (that such invocations *isn't* encroachment on "internal affairs") is not compromising of the judiciary's independence.

Human rights law is really hard to get passed. You would never get Jackson-Vanik passed again if you had to, today, for any other issue perhaps more burning that emigration was in the 1970s, i.e. torture.

So leave it in place, do not cede a moral victory to the Kremlin that is entirely unnecessary, and work up the right sort of bill for a resolution or act of the appropriate sort that will accomplish this deed.

It's important to remember the context last year when this was debated at the Kennan Institute: people thought President Dmitry Medvedev was some sort of liberal and reformer and that he should be "rewarded" by having his liberalism met with liberalism on the American side, via repeal of Jackson-Vanik.

Well, I hope we've all gotten over that silly stuff by now, and we can focus on the real problem: the sheer, unrelenting brutality that the Putin regime means (and the recognition that Medvedev's rule was merely a peredyshka or breather of sorts with inevitable re-Putinization). Keep Jackson-Vanik in place; graduate Russia.