#6334 #6335
[Second Issue of the Day]
#9
Transitions Online
July 1, 2002
editorial
The Darker Side
Putin’s administration is scoring success after success. Perhaps now’s the time for him to turn his attention to Russia’s laws and courts--and his own darker side.
Russian President Vladimir Putin will probably have had few weeks more successful than last week: the adoption of a new land code finally buried the Soviet concept of collective farming [LINK]; the finance minister reported that for the first time more money was entering Russia than leaving it, and Russia joined the ranks of the world’s leading economies, turning the G7 into the G8 and immediately receiving $20 billion.
The background also looks positive: The economy is growing; Russia is now a partial member of NATO; the EU and the United States have in recent weeks finally acknowledged Russia as a “market economy” (paving the way for entry into the World Trade Organization); Moscow is paying its debts on time, and the instability of the 1990s and the fear of an implosion of power have passed.
Putin now appears untouchable, his re-election a shoo-in--not something that seemed likely in 1999 when only the start of the second Chechen war cemented Putin’s jump in popularity and his rise to power in March 2000. But the gains of the week were marred by two examples of deep-seated and pernicious attitudes within Putin’s administration and Putin himself.
The first relates to Chechnya. In his second annual press forum, Putin handled questions on Chechnya in a manner that was less prickly than normal. Some of this softening of his tone looks disingenuous: It must--or should be--hard to say that “at a certain point, the Chechen people were abandoned to the mercy of fate” while ignoring the reality that “fate” in the past three years has been largely Russian-made and that their mercy in this “war against terrorists” involves the wholesale destruction and well-documented extortion, rape, and murder of civilians. Still, saying that “the Chechen people are not guilty of anything” may rate as talking peacefully.
That, though, is still a long way from talking peace. How far that distance remains was indicated by Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov’s response last week to a peace proposal put forward by Aslan Maskhadov, who was elected Chechnya’s president in 1997: "Negotiations with civilian Maskhadov are possible only if he comes to us with his hands up and if the talks are conducted by a prosecutor."
The second example were the sentences handed down on two ex-KGB officers, Oleg Kalugin and Aleksandr Litvinenko, and the sentence confirmed on Grigory Pasko, a naval officer turned environmentalist, journalist, and whistleblower. Those decisions seem closely aligned to Putin’s views--and not just because the head of the Federal Security Service (FSB), the successor to the KGB, is said to be a personal friend.
Putin himself has called Kalugin, who is alleged to have handed over secret information to Washington in the past ten years, a “traitor,” and in 1999 he accused environmental groups of being a “convenient cover” for spies. In the case of Litvinenko, there may also an element of personal vendetta: Litvinenko has alleged that the FSB--caught red-handed with explosives in the basement of a Ryazan apartment block--was responsible for the bombing of apartments in Moscow that triggered the second Chechen war. He is also seen as an associate of Boris Berezovsky, the one-time Kremlin insider who is now Putin’s arch-enemy.
So perhaps instead of showcasing Putin the reformer, this week displayed most clearly the tension between his reforms and his KGB-nurtured inclination to use a strong hand.
His strong hand will probably not lose him votes. It is certainly not losing him Western support at the moment. The problem for Putin is that the search for vengeance against alleged spies or absolute “victory” at all costs in Chechnya have corrosive effects. He, and not just liberals, should be concerned about some of them, as they ultimately threaten the country’s image internationally and undermine his attempt to turn Russia’s fortunes around.
Take Russia’s laws and the legal system. The trials of Kalugin and Litvinenko were concluded just days before trials in absentia were banned, demonstrating how Russia’s slow courts are willing to fast-track (and rule quickly on) cases involving “national security” and the nation’s security services. The case of Pasko, who was once amnestied but under last week’s ruling faces four years in jail, effectively provides backing for FSB harassment of journalists who try to reveal profiteering, irresponsibility, and ineptitude in the country’s military and intelligence services. And then there is the expected imminent release of Colonel Yuri Budanov, accused of kidnapping, raping, and murdering a Chechen girl in a case in which the prosecutor has acted like a defense attorney and in which psychiatry may have been put to Soviet-style use. Russia’s prosecutor-general has, in an unprecedented move, been highly critical of the handling of this case.
But the views expressed by the prosecutor and the defense attorney are not very different from those of people in authority. Indeed, which is worse--to call a raped and murdered woman “nothing more than a combat statistic” or to assert that Chechen rebels are “bastards” who should be “rubbed out in the toilet”? The first is an argument that Budanov’s defense attorney voiced; the others are statements by Putin.
In an environment like this, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that Russia is suffering from a wave of racial hatred either in its rawest form--the assault and murder of foreigners--or alloyed by other ingredients, such as failure in the World Cup. That atmosphere of intolerance makes last week’s adoption of a loosely worded anti-extremism bill worrying. A bill that does not define extremism (it is merely anything that incites "any social animosity") and leaves the definition up to Russia’s courts is worse than no law at all.
Laws as shoddy as this, a judiciary as arbitrary as this, and a president with a tendency to verbal extremism hardly enhance Russia’s reputation for law and order. This has economic consequences. Writing for the St. Petersburg Times this week, Britain’s ambassador summed it up by quoting Sergei Witte, who served as prime minister under Tsar Nicholas II: "What I am afraid of is … that our way of doing things has such specific characteristics, so different from the way things are done in civilized countries, that not many foreigners will want to do business with us."
That may be one reason why Russia, despite Putin’s brand of perestroika, attracts far less foreign investment than the Czech Republic and its 10 million inhabitants.
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