This photo of a seemingly dejected Navalny flanked by his wife was published on Facebook by Alexandra Astakhova, head of the photo department at Vedomosti, and I assume it is her/their photo taken at the time of the trial in Kirov. Maybe all Navalny is doing is crouching down to stare at his i-phone, who knows. But blogger Oleg Kashin, who I gather has been one of Navalny's critics, posted it with the comment: "Which of these people would you like to see as president?" — i.e. that Navalny's wife was the stronger character for resolutely enduring the persecution without complaint. But at least one reader commented, "It's not evening yet!" i.e. it's not over yet. Indeed.
BY CATHERINE A. FITZPATRICK
Stanislav Dmitrievskiy is a human rights activist from Nizhny Novgorod who has worked for many years on the issues of the prison system in Russia, torture, kidnappings, killings particularly in the North Caucasus. For his dedicated work, in particular for his role as head of the Russian-Chechen Friendship Society, he has suffered a variety of harassment including interrogations and detentions himself.
Recently, he visited the US, and had this to say about his visit to the State Department in a Facebook post on June 27:
It is very interesting from here, from the USA, to appraise the demonization of American civic and state institutions in the Russian public consciousness. And it's not just Kremlin propaganda — a number of our opposition members think in the same vein. The most demonized institution for some reason is the State Department — even more than the White House or the CIA. If you are an agent, then invariably you are an agent of the State Department, and if you have sold out the Motherland, then invariably it's to the State Department, and not at all the Congress or the President or, in the worst case, the FBI and the Supreme Court.
I was at this State Department last Saturday. Nowadays, in light of the "reset" policy, this is unfortunately a completely helpless outfit. I tried to explain to them that Putin is already getting the upper hand with their President, and that the Chekist scum cannot appreciate diplomacy and perceives any concession by Obama as weakness and an excuse to pressure him even more strongly. I spoke about the fact that Russian political prisoners, regardless of their political views, must again become an object of international policy, as it was with the Soviet dissidents. I spoke about the persecution of the opposition, the fabrication of criminal cases, the pressure on human rights organizations and the need to call things by their real names in talks with Russian officials.
In conclusion, I heard this:
"Do you want us to become your agents?"
P.S. I'm flying home tomorrow.
You know, words fail.
No, actually, they don't. I'd love to find out who said that. The scrawny little puke who was still watching Barney in the Yeltsin years who just doesn't get it about the Soviet Union or its legacy in Russia and who probably doesn't even speak Russian and who probably had to take the Foreign Service test three times because he flunked the personality part. You know, who probably considers himself really plugged in because he drinks and gossips in bars with the Russian Embassy loafers and knowingly loathes Navalny, not because he might be too nationalist or hang out with the wrong sorts now and then, but because he wouldn't be sufficiently "inclusive" with Putin's thugs were he to actually get elected. You know, big tent approach.
Or maybe it was the pudgy middle-aged blob in the white shirt and plaid tie who just hates people who oppose governments, everywhere. They probably have something wrong with them; maybe they need to have their meds adjusted. In any event, Bastrykin said he was sorry when the US raised the terrorizing of a journalist on a delegation meeting, and the opposition just doesn't know how to take yes for an answer.
"They never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity, you know," he said sagely.
Or maybe it was a really earnest, nerdy woman who secretly edits Wikipedia and goes to cosplay gatherings and feels she really helps the dissidents by writing long sections of the Country Reports on Human Rights Practices and raising their cases at meetings of the OSCE in Kazakhstan that nobody sees, but who feels she is saying something very witty and in fact "tough love" in nature to these very people who are accused in fact in real life, in real time, for real, of being her agents. "Better they should face reality."
But…So many things have gone so wrong for a person in the State Department to be saying this that I don't even know where to start. Some people who read this will get it instantly; others I might have to explained it in about 3,000 more words, so I will if you ask. And yes, these are fictional, composite figures who bear no resemblance to persons living or dead. This is a blog.
Dmitrievsky doesn't say whether he was at the Russia desk or OSCE desk or DRL (Department of Democracy, Rights and Labor ) or USAID, but it might have been at any one of them — although I know there are better people in any of these departments who in fact ask visitors for suggestions for how better to advocate the same old points about human rights with cynical Russian bureaucratic interlocutors.
In fact, the State Department should be doing all those things and more that Stanislav suggests without seeming like puppets of the Russian opposition (!) — and it does occasionally, but very wanly and limply. Most of the heavy lifting on speaking out to Russia occurs at the Permanent Council of the OSCE in Vienna — out of sight, out of mind. There isn't a regular press corps, as there is at the UN, that stakes out these meetings and waits anxiously for diplomats to emerge from their talks and then peppers them with questions. There should be.
When you have a State Department that is this "helpless" you have to look to the private sector and the media to be speaking out, and of course Congress, and there's some of that, but there, too, the Soros-funded network hooked into the Obama Administration is as soft and soft-spoken on Russia as State. No help there. Human Rights Watch has an office there and does issue press releases but it never campaigns with the full-throatedness that it does on, say, JLo in Turkmenistan or Israel/Palestine.
The question of the right stance to take toward the new dissidents is a legitimate one for debate, but it's a debate hard to have when everyone in Russia who opposes Putin is being called a foreign agent or a criminal using violence — or being snubbed by Western liberals or derided by hipsters like Julia Ioffe in the New Republic. Even so, it has to be had.
Here in the US you have a lot of divisions — "progressives" who believe you should never criticize Russia because the US is always worse and anyway, there's something vaguely good about the Kremlin because it's a fulcrum against US imperialism; conservatives who think you shouldn't criticize Russia because it should be a partner in statecraft and international establishmentarianism and it would be destabilizing to nod to someone like Navalny; radicals who actually make common cause with the thugs of Russia, i.e. Edward Snowden, the NSA leaker, fleeing to Moscow at the advice of WikiLeaks, whose founder has his own Russian show on Kremlin TV; liberals who think Russia is "helpful" on Iran or Syria (!) and therefore one should go slow… There really is almost nobody to criticize Russia except the dreaded neo-cons, and they are busy with the Middle East. There are liberals such as myself but there aren't many of us.
Curiously, I've been endlessly heckled on Twitter by the notorious La Russophobe over Navalny — she/he (it's a mystery, but maybe not much of one) seems to think that it's a personal affront and an international scandal that Navalny failed to create a viable opposition that could overthrow Putin. Given that Russia is Dying anyway according to Phobe, I wonder why she is so keen to refashion the failing opposition. In any event, she is currently venting her spleen and bullying people who don't exactly see things her way.
I goggle at this, because I think when you have a state vertikal and criminalized law-enforcement/abusive secret police system like Russia's, it's awfully hard to get any kind of opposition going, really, and you should be generically supportive of those who attempt to do so against great odds and with personal courage and risk to themselves and their families. I always marvel that Westerners want Russian opposition leaders to save the world from Russia, when they won't stand up to Russia themselves.
Yeah, I get it that Navalny is this flawed figure who is nationalist and has consorted with intolerant assholes of some sort. I wish we did have more documentation on this. It's not that I don't buy it — I took Valeriya Novodvorskaya and others at their word years ago when Navalny appeared that there was something that didn't smell right.
But I think these things need better current documentation in part so that you can separate what is government agitprop and what isn't, but also to combat it — I don't think you don't engage or criticize oppositions but try to debate them.
I personally don't feel it's my job to manage the Russian opposition and it doesn't interest me. If it were up to me, I wouldn't have any of these people run for office in these rigged elections. People like Leonid Parfyonov, who I think has made some of the best speeches at the rallies, would just go on saying the decent thing and making the decent (and nonviolent) protest and they would work at building social movements given that parties there are so weak and infiltrated. But the problem with that sort of "human rights approach" is that it is terribly slow. If these young men who have decided to lead the opposition feel the country is being robbed by crooks and thugs today, why should they prolong the agony?
The court cases against Navalny are patently trumped up and that shouldn't take any explanation — in a normal country you could buy and sell lumber without all this bullshit because in a normal country, there wouldn't be the conniving that results from the essential allergy to commerce in the Soviet/Russian people to start with. But it really isn't about the lumber deal, because as Vyshinsky, Stalin's prosecutor famously said, "Give me the man and I'll find the article to try him." Indeed. And these cases are all sewn up with white thread, as the Russian saying goes, precisely because the same intelligence forces are stitching them so obviously as message-sending.
I can't grasp why you'd pick on Navalny's final speech or actions as La Russophobe has done for days on Twitter. I know I wouldn't be at my best, able to write a zinging final defense speech, if I had days of sleepless nights and stress and the prospect of six years in prison. I don't like Russian populism of the sort that says "100 families suck all the wealth out of the country" — it's like the 1/99 percent crap we have here in the US. At least when Navalny says it, however, it's more true; it's more about corruption, and not a level playing field under the rule of law, more or less, in which some honestly do better. And he gets that and said as much when he noted that it isn't as if these 100 are oligarchs using their brains to make a buck.
Navalny called Russia a "feudal system" that even his fellow opposition members have challenged on Twitter and Facebook debates. Well, they're 150 years out from the serf system, so maybe there's a point, but whether you call it oligarchism or neocommunism or who-knows-what, it's true that a few people — Putin and his lake condo club — run things and enrich themselves at people's expense. Maybe that wouldn't gall so much if they also didn't knock heads and punish all their critics.
I don't know if you can prove that the state deliberately manufactures cheap vodka to keep people drunk and held down so they don't rebel against their bad education and health care system. That's a little crazy, as even those who in fact who do hope to at least temporarily buy people off with vodka so they don't rebel too much realize that the costs of reduced male life expectancy and social chaos from alcohol outweigh the advantages. At least, you hope they do get it, it's not so clear. It's one of those populist sort of things that makes people like La R get angry over populism that she feels doesn't work.
Well, it's Russia. It's their country. They'll get the opposition they deserve. Recently, an opposition activist came to New York and asked to meet me. He chose an expensive cafe whose bill was going to take up my entire grocery bill for that day for my whole family that I'd eat in maybe once a year on a holiday. He put a message on Facebook for people interested in discussing the Russian opposition and crackdowns to come to the cafe. Then he sat dejected that no one came. I explained that people do not rain down from FB to cafes in quite the same way in NY as they do in Moscow; they aren't that interested and in any event, they're at work. I wouldn't say there is this great intellectual cafe life in New York. Today I sat in a Starbucks and in between the few homeless people muttering to themselves and drinking up the creams, there were some traders and lawyers and businessmen talking among themselves about "road warriors" and MBAs and acquisitions and some sort of thing that was being rolled out over the objections of some regulatory agency… I don't think these are people who want to talk about Tolstoy and his theory of farming or Navalny's concept of shareholders battling corruption until they get enough lawsuits against them to shut them down.
This activist eating the quiche was a brave soul who was organized and thoughtful and trying to do his best and taking positions of conscience and also actions of conscience that lots more people are taking in Russia these days — although not enough. He said very flatly that Russian opposition members didn't want or expect American assistance anymore, and in any event they were all being declared "foreign agents" if they took it. Even so, he still had the idea that somebody somewhere (and it wouldn't be Soros) would help the Russian opposition with the basics, even with things like lawyers' bills or printing or Internet costs or if nothing else — fellowships, plane tickets to get out, visiting scholar positions.
I explained as I have many times over the years that their struggles while holistic would have to be chopped up into the bite-sized pieces that US aid handlers can manage — conferences and training seminars. You know, Navalny is a blogger whose rights are violated — as Committee to Protect Journalists earnesly explained it — even though as his supporters on Facebook have explained, every single one of his trial sessions lately in a half dozen cases have been timed to thwart him at key deadlines related to the Moscow municipal elections. Putin is smart enough to make it not about blogging.
This cafe soul seemed at a loss when I asked him if there were any other opposition leaders who had more of a following — since Navalny was likely going to jail — and if Navalny himself had any seconds-in-command or local leaders who could pick up the thread. There wasn't. He didn't. That's just how it was. Unlike Russaphobe, I don't condemn Russian opposition people for this problem. Because to become the second-in-command or third-level local coordinator in an operation like Navalny's, after the main guy has to go to jail, you have to be willing to go to jail yourself, see your relatives harassed and maybe go to jail, too, see yourself and/or your relatives lose jobs or be interrogated, see children mysteriously being beaten or harassed in school. Of course, if there were more people standing up and publicizing the thuggery, there'd be less of it, right?
Well, I don't know. Tens of thousands marched on Bolotnaya Square, and there's a pretty resolute bunch protesting the arrest of some on charges of violence that don't seem substantiated, yet it's not enough given the tremendous power of the state. I'm all for Russia making stronger civic movements and not attempting to come to power, but I have to wonder what we smug Westerners are condemning people to when we only let them help cerebral palsy patients or save the cranes and don't let them confront the people at the top who really cause all the single-issue problems in the first place.
Why is it okay for Islamists who suppress other people's rights in Egypt to "be included" and even remain in power with US aid, all because of the sacredness of democracy, but Russian opposition leaders can't even be backed even morally? What?
La Russophobe wants the opposition to be "better". When I see some of the super-sad types or even the decent people who are rather ineffectual, I get the point. But it's not our country. They have to do it. We can show solidarity. We should do that much. That's why we should condemn Navalny's trial and express moral support for the bravery he showed in going through the trial. Can't we do that much? At any point in this process he could have conceded that Putin wasn't such a crook and that maybe he was the worse crook and he should shut up already and it might have gone better for him. He didn't.
Look, even without a united candidate, even without a real plan, even with going to jail, Navalny was still able to clear the municipal filter — the rigged system that lets those already in power stay in power — because he mounted enough of a public challenge to the corrupt system. That's nothing to sneer at or make crypto nasty headlines about "despicableness".
I don't know how Navalny or anybody else will "destroy the feudal system" that "sits like a spider" in the Kremlin. Maybe it's not enough to do the little things like "Live Not By the Lie" as Solzhenitsyn phrased it or to stand up again — as Sakharov did — to abolish Art. 6 of the Soviet Constitution which still needs abolishing — i.e. the campaign to bring all the NGOs to heel and the rising tide of Putin-sponsored organizations is merely another variant of the same old one Party system.
I never was confident that the demonstrations in Russia would lead to any real changes, and said as much in 2011. I don't need to keep passing any ideological test on this matter. Taking part in rigged elections is a waste of time and money and energy. But Western advisors in organizations like NED always tell oppositions everywhere they should take part in elections because of the utter fetishization of electionism by the State Department, particularly with its "big tent" approach to divided oppositions facing tyrants. Inclusiveness, you know. This message isn't lost on people like Navalny. The young trainers in the seminars that pay their way abroad sometimes or give them a meal at home sometimes tell them earnestly they need to take part in flawed elections so that they "get the word out" and "reach their constituencies" and "learn how to make a viable program". Ok. They've been training and practicing for 20 years, guys. How long do you think they need to take?
Maybe you need to be less passive and show some solidarity and some spine and not go have Obama go to the G20 meeting in St. Petersburg as a show of the utter contempt we should all have for these kinds of show trials of opposition members and crackdowns on NGOs? What is it you're doing wrong that produces people like Snowden — and treats so cynically somebody like Dmitrievsky?
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