U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry meets with representatives of
Russian civil society during a meeting at the U.S. ambassador's
residence, the Spaso House, in Moscow, Russia, on May 8, 2013. [State
Department photo/Public domain]

Secretary of State John Kerry failed to stand up to the Kremlin on its crackdown against civil society during his trip to Moscow this week.

Despite making a token brief visit with NGO activists, Kerry did not make the kind of forceful public statement to the press in either the joint state press conference or in his own interviews with the media, instead, preferring to let the NGOs leak the fact that he claimed to have stayed up until 2:30 in the morning with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov talking about the NGO legal issues.

This sort of weakness was displayed despite the fact that US public and private foundations have supported some of these brave non-governmental organizations for decades, even before the collapse of the USSR — and have absolutely nothing to be ashamed of in doing so. There's no reason why development and overseas aid can't include human rights and democracy building — the amount of funds that have gone to Russia's beleaguered independent sector is dwarfed by the hundreds of millions invested by big IT companies in Silicon Valley in the endangered Medvedev "innovation" project of Skolkovo, for example, not to mention other big corporate investments in Russia whose money the Kremlin is happy to take. So let's be clear on this.

The meeting with Kerry seemed awfully tame — and felt like a sop to concerns about human rights without really raising them. I always feel as if the US diplomats are behaving like they are quietly visiting the sick when they go and quietly have these meetings, instead of standing up at the podium and speaking out even at the level of Europeans these days.

I wrote on Amb. Michael McFaul's Facebook post:

This was a nice gesture, but a robust, vocal, public denunciation of what the Kremlin is going to civil society, in many cases to groups supported by both US public and private funds, should have been what happened. I can never understand why Obama is so reluctant to do this, when even [the EU's] Ashton and the Germans have been able to publicly condemn this. [State Department spokesperson] Nuland's [off-handed characterization of the crackdown as a] "witch-hunt" was in fact freelancing off the script. This has always been the problem since 2009, Obama's refusal to confront the Kremlin for old DSA-style ideological reasons and then your having to follow that policy. Raising the problem privately; telling NGOs informally that you raised it privately — that's just not the same as a full-bore press conference on the scene.

…and I got the usual RealPolitkers chastizing me for claiming that we can ever condemn Russia about anything.

In fact, even meeting with this big agent of a foreign power, these groups were adding to their already bulging police files. This week, Russian authorities have even accused Memorial in St. Petersburg of "foreign agent" status for a perfectly routine and lawful participation in the UN Committee Against Torture's review of Russia's report — something NGOs the world over do for numerous countries. When "foreign agent" status comes from talking to…the UN (!) you realize how seriously messed up all of this is.

In a videotaped interview with Vladimir Kara-Murza on Svoboda, Memorial Human Rights Center's chairman Alexander Cherkasov described the meeting with Kerry. His organization is one of the many being subjected now to repeated inspections and threats of charges for refusing to register as a "foreign agent".

For some reason, in the 40 minutes they had, they didn't really talk about the crackdown, and as Lyudmila Alexeyeva told Izvestiya, there weren't any proposals coming from Kerry about this. He just listened.

Instead, they seemed to talk about the Boston bombing. Cherkasov monitors the North Caucasus closely for his organization, the largest human rights organization in Russia, now under attack by the prosecutor's organization.

"Everybody tries to remove responsibility for this bombing," Cherkasov notes aptly in this interview. The US wants to attribute the bombing to self-radicalization via the Internet and not organized Islamic resistance to America; the Russian intelligence services want to blame the American environment and the failure of immigrants to adapt.

This is bringing about a forced cooperation between US and Russian intelligence and law-enforcement which has only one precedent, notes Cherkasov: the Kennedy assassination.

Yet what these facile explanations do is distract from the very real problems in the North Caucasus caused by the Kremlin's fierce counter-terrorism crusade.

Cherkasov said that the acute problem for NGOs in Russia now is that there is a grave danger that there will be no independent monitors of the government, and particularly of the events in the North Caucasus. No civic experts will be able to have their voices heard beyond the official version with their human rights and humanitarian concerns.

Cherkasov doesn't think Kerry "gets it" about the Russian "foreign agents" issue. It's his first time in Moscow, and he isn't sure that Kerry, who himself comes from what Cherkasov says is a big bureaucratic institution, is able to fathom the workings of an even bigger bureaucratic machine in Russia.

The point is that if anyone who does even the most benign thing — like the group helping cystic fibrosis patients — is going to be hounded as some kind of suspicious "foreign agent" guilty of subversion and espionage in advance, then there won't be any restraint over the Russian government. There won't be that civic oversight which the Moscow Helsinki Group sought to bring into being when it was formed in 1976, and which many other groups have struggled to maintain in these last decades.

Putin will go below the level established at least by Gorbachev in the Soviet era in the late 1980s, when he tolerated the emergence of the nyeformaly or informal groups working on single issues like education and the environment.

Look at the list of the groups tarred with this "foreign agent" brush and see how many environmental groups there are! Why isn't the worldwide left, the environmentalists, the anti-globalists, why aren't they showing solidarity to their counterparts in Russia?!

Groups like this are now having their every movement watched by the authorities, says Cherkasov. "But if they are removed, who can independently monitor counter-terror operations?" he aptly asks.

The notion of the very vital relationship between civic groups being able to monitor — and restrain — their militant-minded governments — applicable at home as well as abroad — never seems to penetrate the Obama Administration. There isn't a grasp of the idea that disarmament and human rights are inextricably linked, and you can't have the former without the latter.

Obama, in his entire time in office, has never had a single word of support for Russian civil society and the very large role it should play in fact in our own security. Remember when he got off to such a terrible start on his first trip to Moscow, conceding to Medvedev that the Khodorkovsky trial was "an internal affair" — when of course the Helsinki process repudiated that old communist notion and replaced it with the valid appeal to international standards by which both Russia and the US are bound.

None of us are more secure when the Kremlin has its way, and the Kremlin's enormous onslaught against the peoples of the North Caucasus has now directly contribute to the terrorism in Boston. This connection can't be denied.

Amb. McFaul and Kerry and others no doubt think they've "done a lot" by having the dissidents to Spaso House, and letting it be known to the press that they "talked until 2:30 in the morning" about issues of concern to NGOs — althought the Russian government version of this story differs.

The fact is, it isn't enough: a robust denunciation with more consequences should be in order.  The Magnitsky List should be unabashedly continued and extended. There should be more rhetorical pushback on the NGO crackdown and obvious points made such as the fact that tens of thousands of Russian students and visiting workers as well as immigrants — legal and illegal — are in this country and are not viewed as foreign agents by any default — despite the fact that in 2010, in fact the FBI did catch a nest of spies and had to turn them out (remember Anna Chapman?). The Kremlin propaganda news station RT freely saturates the mindshare of the liberal intelligentsia in the US without even a comment from the White House although it's often peddling outright lies.

In real reciprocity, the US needs to remind Russia that a high level of Russian official and non-governmental involvement in our political and social space is tolerated as a matter of course in a liberal democratic society — and we expect the same even of this authoritarian state. Remember, the crackdown didn't hardly exist before the Magnitsky List, which takes a long-awaited and much-needed stand against criminality. We should see it for what it is: thuggish taking of hostages in a dirty war.

What should be the US response in the face of this crackdown, besides rhetoric — which can't be expected to remove the Russian crackdown but can at the very least remove us from moral collusion with it?

The US should make it clear that all USAID money previously spent inside Russia is going to go into support of genuine civil society projects (not state-to-state exchange) from abroad — payment of costs abroad for websites, for example, or payment for attendance of conferences with per diems. This is how it was done in the years when Gorbachev was only opening up Soviet society and that much has to be done again. Organizations like the National Endowment for Democracy and Freedom House need bigger budgets now, including for publishing the works of Russian civil society experts abroad.

In the Soviet era, we could not directly give grants to groups inside the country without getting them in trouble. But we could give them laptops or tape recorders or i-phones during visits to their country or while they were abroad, and we could provide the moral support of attention and publication and expression of solidarity.

Above all, we should restore RFE/RL and VOA to full strength, hire back those who were fired and bring them abroad if necessary, and counter the ideological warfare that is now waged by this regime with plurality of free discussion and debate as well as independent coverage of the news.

UPDATE: I'm told that the re-hiring may be in the works. Recently BBG members Susan McCue and Michael Meehan visited Moscow and:

urged acting Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) president Kevin
Klose and his management team “to continue their timely outreach now
under way to all the former Radio Liberty journalists, whose expertise
could assist in providing important insight and valuable analysis of the
inner workings of Russia today.”

That doesn't sound quite like a re-hire directive, and with budget cuts, it may not be possible, but watch that space.

Meanwhile, it costs the US nothing to show solidarity to those who are like-minded in Russia. Yet sadly, Kerry ducked this historic opportunity because he was serving Obama's directive to engage in dialogue-oriented diplomacy that only left the US looking weak, with its Secretary of State humiliated, waiting on the tarmac.

Kerry walks past the Stalin monument in Red Square. Say, can't protocol officers figure out how to give this murderous tyrant's statue a wider berth?! Photo by State Department.