While in Russia for meetings with his counterpart Dmitry Medvedev last July, Pres. Barack Obama sought to highlight the importance of democracy. Speaking at Moscow’s New Economic School, he returned to the subject, noting that freedom of speech, competitive elections, and a free media ensure that societies improve.
Meanwhile, Medvedev declined to attend a Civil Society Summit with Obama, sending junior officials in his place. Still, Medvedev and Obama agreed to establish a U.S.-Russian working group on civil-society issues. Each appointed one chair: Obama selected Michael McFaul, a respected expert on democratization brought into the Obama administration to serve as senior director for Russia on the National Security Council; Medvedev appointed Vladislav Surkov, first deputy chief of the presidential staff.
Throughout his tenure, critics lambasted George W. Bush for his ham-fisted approach to transformative diplomacy. “A generation of work to build consensus at home and legitimacy abroad for U.S. democracy promotion is in disarray,” wrote the Carnegie Endowment’s Thomas Carothers on washingtonpost.com. Certainly, there was much to criticize in his administration’s rush to elections in societies that still lacked the rule of law, had inadequate media protections, and had not disarmed their militias.
By blessing the U.S.-Russian civil-society working group, however, Obama risks worse damage by not only turning a blind eye toward, but also seeming to endorse, the deliberate evisceration of Russian civil society. “Many negative tendencies in development of democracy in Russia in recent years are associated with the name Vladislav Surkov: The curtailment of freedom of the press, the liquidation of the competitive political system, and finally the purposeful erection of barriers in the development of civil society,” 22 human-rights activists in Russia wrote in an open letter to Medvedev and Obama on July 7.
Observers both within and outside of Russia say that Surkov is the creator of Nashi (“Our Kind”), a pro-Kremlin youth organization. In papers such as Russia’s Kommersant, Britain’s The Independent, and France’s Le Monde, critics have compared the group to the Hitler Youth.
When Soviet-era dissident and political prisoner Alexandr Podrabinek penned a blog entry criticizing the Moscow Union of Veterans for forcing a Moscow kebab restaurant to change its name from “Antisovetskaya” (Anti-Soviet) to “Sovetskaya” (Soviet), Nashi staged daily demonstrations outside Podrabinek’s Moscow apartment, made threats on his life, and urged him to leave Russia. Nashi’s harassment began after Surkov met with its leadership.
Let there be no doubt: The Russian leadership cares little about civil society. When U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met with Russian NGOs during her October trip to Moscow, the state-controlled television channels in Russia broadcast nothing. Nor did Medvedev acknowledge the third anniversary of Russian journalist and human-rights activist Anna Politkovskaya’s murder.
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