I got so much static for this post on "Your Agents".
Some people didn't get it. Some people were annoyed by it. Some people wanted to take the opportunity to harangue me about why Navalny was a bad thing, and others to harangue me for not supporting Navalny enough. Some people who are accused by others of being KGB agents liked it. Some people who likely really are KGB agents liked it. Some people who have been around the block a few more times with the State Department got it and applauded it.
Olga Chernysheva, a courageous and dedicated woman who has done mountains of work on human rights in Chechnya, Russia at large and also Central Asia, for some reason decided to be insulted on behalf of her colleague Stanislav Dmitrievsky, evidently on a misreading of my English. She thought I was taking the side of the prosecutors in Russia (!), calling Dmitrievsky somehow "dubious" by implying he was cynical or those who dealt with him were doing deals, and somehow comparing him to the fugitive Snowden and thereby discrediting him.
I struggled to get the English meaning of my phrases across — my point wasn't that he was cynical; the State Department is; dealing with doesn't mean "doing deals"; the figures aren't comparable but it was about the nature of the US government; it creates a Snowden by violating privacy (let's say) or not doing due diligence in hiring (let's say); it then is cynical about the real heroes who are people like Stanislav, taking great risks to his own freedom to help others who are victims of torture.
Olga went on and on about how I didn't understand the suffering of her people — I tried refining my English text to make it more clear to the non-English reader that Stas wasn't being dissed — ultimately I began to wonder, as I often do in dealing with Russian dissidents, why I bother. Russian dissidents are damned difficult people, let me tell you. I have devoted a large part of my life to helping them, so I get to say this. They are sectarian, suspicious, ornery, depressive, defeatist, and irritating. But they are right, and I continue to champion them.
Stanislav Dmitrievsky himself said I misunderstood him, because his State Department interlocuators weren't cynical, they were ironical. Khorosho. Russians are very big believers in making a distinction between Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, between cynicism and irony. They were rueful, he indicated, and meant nothing bad. OK, he was there and I wasn't, but I have to say that I know my State Department maybe a tad better than he does, and I think any sense of ruefulness was ultimately based on a deep cynicism about the efficacy of advocacy. I know there is heavy intellectual weight-lifting going on in so many quarters now trying to dissuade people from the "naming and shaming" approach and claiming that denouncing Russia "doesn't work" and we need to "work with reformers". You know, like Medvedev and Surkov at Skolkovo. So I think when an official says, in response to Dmitrievsky's perfectly good list of suggestions for advocacy, that they can't serve as "your agents," it is defeatism, and closer to cynicism than irony.
Anyway, for due diligence, let me translate Stanislav's follow-up post on my FB:
I will clarify my position in Russian to avoid an incorrect understanding (my English is not sufficiently good for this. Above all, a big thanks to Catherine for bringing attention to our problems — this is very important now. And a separate gratitude toward Oksana — her remarks indicate that my text possibly contains some lack of clarity and things unsaid that should be explained.
This text was, above all, addressed to a Russian reader. The main message was the mythologization of the "famous Gosdep" [State Department] and other various American state institutions in the Russian public mind. Putin's propaganda, like Soviet propaganda in its day, imposes on Russians an enemy image of the USA, and surprisingly, not only the simpleminded fall for this bait. Thus, in some oppositon circles it has now become fashionable to be embarrassed to meet with American officials or avoid such meetings. Meanwhile, there is the opposite tendency especially among the "old democrats" — a sacrilization of such meetings (the State Department is the hope of suffering humankind). All of this would be funny if it weren't so sad. So I wanted to illustrate that I was not infected with any of these viruses, that I am open for any contacts and I appreciate them in the realistic, and not in the mythological vein.
The second topic (and Catherine has completely correctly captured it) is the amazing helplessness of the current executive branch of the USA before Putin's blackmail. I don't think that here some sort of concrete bureaucrats in the State Department are to blame (I think that the majority of them are smart people, they all perfectly well understand and sympathize with our situation); rather it's the general position of Obama's policy of the "reset," a position that is in fact extremely cynical (democracy and human rights in exchange for…), entirely near-sighted, and ruinous for both Russia and the USA. The bureaucrats in this situation are more like hostages to the poiltical will of their leadership.
The phrase, "What do you want us to be, your agents?"was uttered in the context of a conversation about how the Russian authorities have declared us "agents of the State Department," and it was, as it seemed to me, a manifestation of bitter irony and self-irony — the object of the irony was Putin's propaganda, and the object of self-irony was their own inability to radically influence the situation.
In general, of course, there are different politicians in the USA, and different public figures and approaches are also different. I believe that for the USA, the passage of the Magnitsky Act was the most effective means of support of democracy in Russia in the last 20 years. I take my hat off to those representatives of the legislative branch who promoted this law. I can say the same thing about NED — we have worked with this foundation for 12 years now. During that time, they never once tried to impose any approaches on us (they sometimes even emphatically distanced themselves from a conversation about their preferences in a given situation) and remained with us in the most difficult situations. When in 2006 I was sentenced, and the Russian Chechen Friendship Society was liquidated by the Russian authorities, many donors cautiously withdrew. Even the European Commission suddenly, with a contrived, technical excuse, refused to give us a grant that had already been approved. And here NED in this situation only increased their assistance and thanks to that, our monograph appeared.
The opus they have been working on — a huge 1,200 page compendium of all the facts regarding the cases that have been brought from Chechnya to the European Court of Human Rights, but then not dealt with by Russian authorities despite rulings in favour of the Chechen plaintiffs — is absolutely vital. I hope it gets a lot of attention, especially in the Council of Europe, which admitted Russia under the understanding that it would prosecute these Chechen cases — which it has not done. (Some small financial compensation may have been made in some cases, but the prosecution of officials responsible for atrocities has never gone forward in Russia). This is one of the most important human rights projects in Russia today. God speed to them with this book, and God bless NED for contributing to it.
But…as I said, NED for me poses some problems. I believe it to have something of a "Captive Nations" approach to Russia — to see Russia as a problem you break up with by supporting a hundred nationalities, and a failure to develop a grander vision about how to deal with Russia itself. While there surely are discussions about this, I haven't seen yet that anyone has stepped up and pulled together the larger roadmap about how to sustain Russian civil society going forward, by making all these silly nonprofit inane activities that occur actually work better, whether from DRL or USAID or NED or whatever, and make them into something that really is effective. Quite frankly, this means sustaining an exile community linked to the Internet and radio broadcast programs, and this just hasn't been developed.
While some repairs are being made at RFE/RL after the debacle when 40 broadcasters were fired in Moscow, there are still chronic, entrenched problems there and in other programs related to Russia. The "reset" not only paralyzese and debilitates good people in them; it rewards bad thinking.
Yes, the Soviet Union was the "prison-house of the peoples," as the Shachtmanites used to say — and Carl Gershman, long-time head of NED, and former head of Social Democrats USA decades ago, and an old Shachtmanite himself, should know. Quite a few people in this field, especially if they come from an ethnic constituency with roots in the Soviet Empire, and especially if they come from Polonia, will take the anti-Russian approach. Oh, they will support Ludmila Alexeyeva or have a study program named for Galina Starovoitova, the assassinated Armenian parliamentarian but they don't have a big plan for Russia because they don't like Russia or the Russian language and loathe the concept of using it as a lingua franca in this region; they don't have a vision of how Russians themselves are one of the peoples in the prison-house who need to create a viable alternative to destructive imperialism.
It's especially hard to have the conversation about NED because while they are open, and not secret, and funded by Congress, and not the CIA, they are still, well, reticent. They publish lists of grantees as generic activities of unidentified groups with dollar amounts, but they don't specify the actual organizations and dates of transaction because to do so might bring down more persecution on these vulnerable groups. This is the eternal problem of trying to criticize US aid and other programs like radio broadcasting to Russia, because it is taking place in a climate where Putin is arresting people as "foreign agents".
Some, like Stanislav, have always publicized their donors and suffered for it. But although they have endured terrible persecution, I think openness and legal activity pays off in the end: finally on July 5, they got a court ruling that their important work is not defined as "extremism" under Russian law, which it might well have been given Putin's whims, but recognized as legal work. So often actual anti-extremist work of the sort this Friendship Society did is characterized tendentiously as extremist by the powers-that-be in a deliberate misunderstanding because they're the extreme ones and the intolerant ones when it comes to minorities.
In any event, as they have noted, concerns remain about the propensity of the Russian judicial system to be used to harass human rights activists and mischaracterize their work.
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