Nashi undertook similar actions against the Estonian ambassador to express the ‘outrage of the Russian people’ against her country’s decision to remove a memorial to Soviet ‘liberators’ of Estonia (considered occupiers by most Estonians) from the centre of the capital, Tallinn.
Whenever complaints were made, Kremlin spokesmen would shrug their shoulders, claiming it was nothing to do with them, almost laughing it off as a bit of harmless fun. But the link with the Kremlin is explicit. The Nashi website is full of articles by Surkov, Putin and Medvedev, all of whom also attend their conferences and summer camps. Putin’s party, United Russia, also has its own official youth wing, Molodaya Gvardiya (Young Guard – another Soviet-era term), which is rather more disciplined than Nashi.
Surkov’s second line of attack, to ward off the orange ‘contagion’, was aimed against non-governmental organisations, particularly those which received funding or support from abroad. These had been identified by the paranoiacs in the Kremlin not just as factors in the revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine (and a third grass-roots revolt in the former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan in February 2005) but as the means by which the United States was allegedly plotting the downfall of the Putin regime.
Civil society had burgeoned in Russia ever since Gorbachev’s glasnost policies had allowed the first ‘informal organisations’ to be registered. Now there were hundreds of thousands of them, and about 2,000 dealt with human rights and democracy issues. Organisations such as the Carnegie Centre provided independent expert analysis of Russian politics; Memorial chronicled the crimes of the past and kept alive the memory of the victims of communism; the Helsinki Group monitored human rights abuses. And some of them received grants or subsidies from Western governments or from parent NGOs abroad.
Less than a year after the Ukraine revolution the State Duma introduced legislation to rein them in. The law, which would severely hamper the activities of foreign-supported NGOs operating in Russia, caused an outcry in the West, and President Bush, among others, successfully lobbied for some of its terms to be softened. Nonetheless, the version signed into law by President Putin on 10 January 2006 required all Russian NGOs to disclose their finances and sources of funding, and ensure that their activities complied with Russian ‘national interests’ or risk closure. It became considerably more difficult for foreign groups to fund and support their partners in Russia. (By October, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the Danish Refugee Council and two branches of Doctors Without Borders had been forced to halt their work temporarily for allegedly failing to comply with registration requirements.)14
Aware of the bad publicity surrounding the new law, the Kremlin resorted to Soviet-style propaganda to make the public aware of how heinous NGOs could be.
A fortnight after the law was signed, Lyudmila Alexeyeva, a 78-year-old human rights activist and chairperson of the Moscow Helsinki Group, was at home in Moscow when a friend called and told her to switch her television on, quickly. ‘I switched on the TV,’ she told me, ‘and saw some strange silhouettes. The presenter, in a dramatic voice, was saying that some English diplomats had made some kind of transmitter, inside a rock, in some square, stuffed with top-notch technology.’15 State television had been given an extraordinary scoop: clandestine footage of British spies in action. The pictures showed named British diplomats, including one Marc Doe, a ‘second secretary’ (often a euphemism for an MI6 agent), retrieving data from a fake rock, in reality a transmitter, planted in a park. The report showed the rock being opened up, to reveal a James Bond-style gadget inside.
The story was bizarre, but it was not untrue. Tony Blair’s chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, admits: ‘The spy rock was embarrassing. I mean, they had us bang to rights. The rock was there for all to see, on television. Clearly they had known about it for some time and had been saving it up for a political purpose.’16
The political purpose became clearer as Lyudmila Alexeyeva continued to watch. ‘Suddenly they are talking about this diplomat at the British embassy, Doe, or something like that, who “managed” our human rights organisations. And then they show some piece of paper with the words “Moscow Helsinki Group”.’ In fact, the document, signed by Doe, appeared to be authorisation for the transfer of £23,000 to the Moscow Helsinki Group.
The Russians did not expel any of the British spies they had caught red-handed. The story had a different purpose: to demonstrate that NGOs like the Helsinki Group were in the pay not just of the West but of the British secret service. Alexeyeva says she had never met Marc Doe, and the Helsinki Group had only received one grant from the Foreign Office’s Global Opportunities Fund, which was merely processed by the embassy. The Foreign Office says that all its payments to Russian NGOs are openly published on its website. But by using a spy to handle some of those payments, it had played straight into the Russians’ hands.
Two days after the ‘spy rock’ exposé, President Putin justified the controversial NGO law by making an explicit link between espionage and NGO activities: ‘We have seen that attempts are made to use secret services to work with NGOs and that they are financed through the channels of the secret services. No one can say that this money doesn’t stink. I assume that many people will now understand why Russia has passed a law regulating the activities of non-governmental organisations in this country. The law is intended to block the interference by other states in the internal affairs of the Russian Federation.’
Triumph of the strongmen
In his annual presidential address in April 2005, Putin uttered a sentence that has often been quoted as proof of his nostalgia for communism. ‘The collapse of the Soviet Union,’ he said, ‘was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.’ In fact, he was not talking about the communist system as such. What he regretted was the passing of a mighty, unified, multi-ethnic state, whose collapse – as he went on to say in that speech – left ‘tens of millions of our fellow citizens and compatriots outside Russian territory’. This was, as he put it, ‘a genuine drama’ for the Russian nation – and it is hard to dispute that.
It was an unfortunate choice of words, however, since so many of his actions at the beginning of his second term really did look as if he was trying to restore the Soviet Union, communism and all. In response to the Beslan siege he had removed many of the most democratic elements of the electoral system, tightening his personal grip on power. In response to the popular revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine he had squashed human rights groups and set up an ugly chauvinistic youth organisation. All the while, his stranglehold on the media was tightening.
There was little reason now for genuine liberals to remain in Putin’s team. As early as February 2004 Putin had lost his prime minister, Mikhail Kasyanov, who was sacked after a series of disagreements – the final straw being Putin’s decision to appoint his friend Igor Sechin to the chairmanship of the state oil giant Rosneft. Sechin was just one of Putin’s cronies (others included ex-KGB man Viktor Ivanov, ideology chief Vladislav Surkov and deputy chief of staff Dmitry Medvedev) who ended up running massive state companies, in addition to their administration jobs. Kasyanov saw this as proof that ‘Putin was drifting away from liberal approaches, towards a command economy’.17 Out of government, Kasyanov went on to become a leading opposition figure, and one with much credibility, having worked side-by-side with Putin for three years – and having considered him initially a reformer.