Abstract
About five years before the Soviet Union toppled, as long repressed thoughts and memories began to emerge in the public domain, an underground rock group from the Urals produced a runaway hit crying out against the stifling power of enforced communality. The song, by the band Nautilus Pompilius, has been compared to Pink Floyd’s single ‘Another Brick in the Wall’. It was called ‘Bound by One Chain’ and denounced the restrictive, impersonal bonds of collective obligation that had assured the conformism and stability of Soviet society for seven decades: ‘I reach for a hand but get an elbow, I search for eyes but feel a gaze … Bound by one chain, tied by one goal …’
In fact the Soviet population was fettered not by a single ideological chain but by many. People functioned under the watchful eye of the Communist Party and the state, but they were also linked by intricate bonds of interpersonal relations and informal codes designed to circumvent the system and provide whatever was in short supply. Lives were tightly and inextricably connected and everyone was dependent on their network, the favours they could give and the favours they took. The patronage and support offered might be illegal or legal, but it was hard to stay wholly within the law so the possibility of selective punishment was forever pending. Who knew when a temporarily submerged rule would come up and bite?
In March 1989, when glasnost and perestroika seemed increasingly well established, I was sent by Index to a city regarded by some as the ancient heart of Russia: Kiev, the centre of early medieval Rus’ and now the capital of independent Ukraine. It was the third anniversary of the nuclear explosion at Chernobyl, less than 60 miles away, and my assignment was to talk to nationalist and environmental activists about identities and loyalties, and the implications of what had happened. I came away a week later with memories of interrupted interviews in parks or crowded cellar cafes, and of green demonstrations where shadowy figures in leather coats and homburg hats flitted through the crowd questioning protesters, before engaging in friendly chat with heavyweight thugs amusing themselves with serviceable-looking flick knives (Index 5/89). But above all, I felt a sense that what had happened to Reactor Number 4 on 26 April 1986 somehow epitomised the lethal fall-out from a system that had failed as much because of flawed communication as – to use a favourite Soviet euphemism – ‘for technical reasons’.
It was the communication aspect that fascinated me most. The Soviet experience seemed to produce brilliant raconteurs, ideal interviewees: focused, eager and clear, never at a loss for words, trained from school age to speak out boldly, with a view to making short shrift of the flawed thinking of western capitalists. But now that the apathy and falseness of the system was being exposed, they could step out of the dialectical materialist framework and the moralising that had formed them. People were finally thinking things through and putting them into words, and conversation possessed the intensity and directness of freshly minted ideas seemingly untouched by calculation, agenda or interest.
Gorbachev’s reforms were making attempts to overcome the dual pull of party political power and constitutional legality. Political prisoners, serving long terms in labour camps for what they had said or written, were being released. But as a visitor to the Soviet Union, one was still functioning in a system where ideology and connections mattered far more than any written legal code. Under communism, relations between members of the community and their interests were addressed only in so far as they conformed to the expectations of a party-minded ‘people’s state’. The Communist Party and its associated privileged elite (nomenklatura) came first, alongside the security apparatus and the army. Everyone else – that is to say a majority of about 200 million – was expected to follow deferentially. In a failing economy people survived by clinging to an untold mass of informal arrangements and commitments through which they secured milk, fruit, sausage, jeans, Beatles LPs or the latest unofficially published novel. Overhanging this was the shadow of another kind of law associated with the certainties of state-protected privilege, immoveable position and power. Those who possessed these certainties knew they would never walk alone because they formed an integral part of the body of the state, and – unless loyalty was breached – the state guaranteed to protect them.
Nautilus Pompilius’s lead singer celebrates the 25th anniversary of the hit single ‘Bound by One Chain’, Moscow, December 2008
Credit: Ria Novosti
They seemed nebulous, humourless figures who somehow didn’t quite merge with the crowd, but looked well-nourished, confident, and in control. The guy in a good suit towering over everyone else in a Moscow metro carriage; the perfectly turned out young woman assisting at an international conference; the unobtrusive, seemingly approachable hotel porter whose eyes narrowed when he was asked to point to the nearest bus-stop (‘Where exactly do you want to go?’); the athletic-looking student at Moscow State University whose softly spoken sister offered tea and jam in perfect porcelain cups, and who remarked, though not to me: ‘Ah yes … the forbidden fruit is sweet.’ Or those innocuous seeming figures who emerged unexpectedly from the crowd and tapped your arm as you picked at a bowl of watery stewed fruit in the Lenin Library canteen: ‘I remember you. You were at Yurii Kariakin’s lecture.’ (Flattering, because the event had been attended by hundreds; yet this couldn’t be a chat-up line – he was already gone.) Or else as you disembarked from the metro at Revolution Square: ‘I recognise that coat. It’s Polish.’ (Not so – though my name is … but she had vanished into the crowd.)
In Kiev, Oles Shevchenko, a political prisoner of eight years standing, reassured me: ‘On the whole the KGB don’t touch people these days. But we do tend to be followed. Don’t worry. Ignore them.’ I did, but how could you ever know who was who? ‘I search for eyes but feel a gaze,’ Nautilus Pompilius intoned … Everyone was watching, looking-out for … what? And if they weren’t, they were doing a pretty good job pretending. Conversation was periodically interspersed with an absent, tuneful little hum – ‘uhuu’ – which might mean anything but seemed to say: ‘That’s your story. But I know. I’ve seen. You can’t fool me. I’m watching.’
How did one function in all this? There was the preparation: no international calls – they were said to be uniformly bugged; names of contacts were acquired through Russian networks in the West or from earlier visitors. And while everyone talked of openness and restructuring, there were slightly chill warnings from Soviet émigrés, whose experience made their remarks hard to ignore: ‘They follow you in threes. At customs, look confident, make sure your knees aren’t knocking. They have mirrors. They check.’
Once through the customs hurdle, it was a question of memorising maps and directions; using public telephones, never calling from hotel rooms; arranging to meet at a metro station (‘I’ll be by the first carriage, carrying a copy of Ogonyok’) or under a monument ( ‘I’ll be wearing a dark hat and sunglasses’ – was he having me on?). I’d choose unlikely routes; slip off the trolleybus last; walk down unlit pathways and deserted patches of forest in between apartment blocks in search of an address brought into the country in a sock or tucked away under a bra strap. There’d be that pointless precautionary look back, before diving into an apartment block entrance, and I’d arrive, often unannounced, bearing gifts: the latest Margaret Atwood, coffee, tights, soap, eau de cologne, a new John Updike. I walked into people’s lives like some kind of untested catalytic agent offering promises of a readership, exposure, links with a free world, in exchange for thoughts and beliefs that were offered on trust. And I’d leave with tapes, notes and typed sheets which I’d spread around my bags or about my person before venturing back to the airport.
1986 – South Africa
Journalists are prohibited from reporting at the scene of ‘any unrest, restricted gathering or security action’ under emergency regulations introduced in June. The crackdown coincides with the 10th anniversary of the student uprising against apartheid in Soweto.
The crumbling Soviet system brought jubilation, discomfiture and intense uncertainty. ‘In this country social disturbance means a bloodbath,’ the widely-respected official literary critic Lev Anninsky told me in 1987. ‘That’s why we have always kept our society so tightly reined, and that’s why there is so much anxiety now that the reins appear to be looser.’
Even dissenters like Leonid Borodin, just released from five years’ imprisonment when I visited him in his Moscow flat, complained of the confusion that glasnost brought. ‘In open opposition things seemed clearer,’ he said. ‘It was easier to understand where we stood. Now there’s nothing with which to oppose perestroika and in a way we have been proved wrong.’
As former editor Sally Laird observed in Index at the time, the boundaries between ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ had ‘begun subtly to shift’. Ideological slogans and the upright thinking designed to resist the ‘ideological-cultural aggression of imperialism’ were colliding with expressions of interior experience and an overwhelming sense of the absurd. People read about the Stalinist labour camps in official magazines; listened to the BBC, Voice of America and Radio Liberty, danced to songs denouncing state hypocrisy and conformism; told jokes about the system, and walked to the metro past billboards pasted with scarlet slogans: ‘Lenin lived, lives and evermore shall live.’
Soviet citizens were in constant contact with ‘the powerful magnetic field of ideological influence’, the émigré Alexander Zinoviev wrote. ‘They absorb from it a certain electric charge … There is physically no way they can escape from it.’ In practice, though, ideology was less about political and economic ideas than about collectivity and loyalty: to the Party, the state and the leadership that embodied it. In a sense, Vladimir Putin, who publicly lamented the fall of the Soviet Union as ‘one of the greatest geopolitical catastrophes of the 20th century’, has continued to carry this ‘electric charge’ for over a decade now, with ideological and free market ways of addressing issues running in tandem. Though the economic principles of Marxism have been shaken off, the principle of group dependence, high expectations of mutual help from friends, exchange of favours, shared responsibility, and conformity still prevail alongside the time-honoured ethos of pervasive rule violation and selective punishment. Despite a more synchronised and potentially effective system of legislation introduced under Putin, individual interests remain subordinate to collective ones. People are driven by the rules and the mores of the group that nurtures them. Russians call it ‘krugovaia poruka’, a protective mutual guarantee. Political, professional and business practices remain based on interpersonal trust, mutual surveillance and a code of discipline more likely to be enforced by an informal network than by the law. And, at a political level, an ideology of absolute loyalty to the Kremlin has been enshrined within the code of conduct expected of state agencies and public figures. Any threat to the status quo and to the functioning of these agencies is ruthlessly addressed.
In memory of Sally Laird: 1956-2010
Sally Laird became editor of Index on Censorship in August 1988, following the death of George Theiner. A scholar of Russian, educated at Oxford and Harvard, she had already spent two years as the magazine’s specialist on Soviet affairs, covering the rise of perestroika. Her tenure as editor was brief (one year only) but it coincided with a momentous period of history: the Rushdie affair, Tiananmen Square and the Velvet Revolution were some of the memorable highlights. Evidently, there was much to talk about. Sally inherited an ethos that suited her; then, as now, the magazine was notable for the width and sobriety of its coverage. Though the issues involved were naturally emotive – as emotive as can be, in many cases – one could rely on Index to gather the facts objectively and to set them out in painstaking detail. This didn’t mean that opinion was absent – rather, that it was latent, and belonged (invisibly, as it were) to the magazine’s liberal remit. Sally was an excellent writer – an essay on ‘Writers under Gorbachev’ was widely cited; and she encouraged journalism that was personal, sceptical and spiced with elegant humour. These, at any event, were her own qualities, beautifully brought to the fore in an essay like ‘Prague Autumn’ (January 1989), where she recounted a visit to the Czech capital in the company of a group of Charter 77 activists, in order to seek out and make contact with Václav Havel. In this wry, funny, self-deprecating piece, she described photographing Havel’s arrest by the secret police, only to suffer the indignity of having the film promptly ripped out of her camera. At the end of the year – a year in so many ways of extraordinary hope and excitement – she left Index to help set up a new Central and East European publishing project funded by George Soros, before moving to Denmark in the early 90s to work there as a full-time translator and writer. I remember those far-off times vividly: 1989 was the year of my courtship. I met Sally in the month she was appointed editor. And in the month she quit the magazine, I married her.
Mark Le Fanu
The journalist Anna Politkovskaya, murdered in the lift of her Moscow apartment block in October 2006, was particularly suspicious of the effects of the Kremlin’s reach, especially the leadership’s dialogue with opponents: ‘It is a recurrent Russian problem: proximity to the Kremlin makes people slow to say no, and altogether less discriminating,’ she wrote in A Russian Diary. ‘The Kremlin knows this full well … First they are gently clasped to the authorities’ breast. In Russia the best way to subjugate even the most recalcitrant is not money, but bringing us in from the cold … The rebellious soon begin to subside.’
Politkovskaya did a great deal to expose the more murky workings of post-Soviet Russia, particularly the abuses and censorship associated with the Second Chechen War, initiated in 1999. Her frontline reports for Novaya Gazeta covered summary executions, kidnapping, disappearances, rape and torture, inflicted on the Chechen population by the Russian armed forces and the Russian-backed administration of Akhmad Kadyrov. Measures had already been taken at the time to ensure that the media could not embarrass the authorities with reports questioning their methods and credibility. The lawyer now representing Politkovskaya’s family, Karina Moskalenko, is currently dealing with a host of still unresolved cases relating to human rights abuses in Chechnya and attacks by the federal armed forces on local populations. ‘These actions have never been investigated,’ she tells me. ‘Cases relating to these issues get to court only very rarely, and journalists who help people to obtain legal aid, human rights activists, lawyers and activists who assist victims seeking legal reparations are being killed in Russia.’ She mentions Stanislav Markelov, a human rights lawyer who fought against discrimination and judicial malpractice while representing Anna Politkovskaya, and was shot by a masked gunman after giving a press conference in January 2009. A trainee journalist, Anastasya Baburova, was also killed in the attack. She recalls the mysterious death of investigative journalist Yuri Shchekochikhin. As his family’s designated lawyer, she is fighting to have the case investigated as a murder. (There has been speculation about possible radioactive poisoning.)
‘In Russia, impunity begins and ends with the unaccountability of the state,’ Moskalenko says. ‘The investigation into Politkovskaya’s murder collapsed on absolutely unacceptable, unprofessional grounds. Answers to crucial questions have not been given and responsibilities neglected. Some people – who may have been present when the killing took place, or not – came to be incorrectly accused. They wanted to lay the blame for everything on them – something which we, as representatives of Anna Politkovskaya’s family, simply could not allow. We demanded a real investigation … Yuri Shchekochikhin did not die of an unknown illness but was murdered because he was a journalist, a human rights activist, as well as a member of parliament and co-chairman of the Committee for the Battle against Corruption. He was deprived of his life because he fought against these kinds of abuses. And since that there has been no effective or timely investigation into his case, it is more and more difficult to establish the truth.’
When Alexander Litvinenko was murdered in London in November 2006, Russian state television reported the story with references to Politkovskaya’s killing a month earlier and the shooting, in 2004, of Paul Khlebnikov, editor of the Russian edition of Forbes magazine. It was implied that all three deaths were associated with underground networks of illegal business and ex-KGB operatives – though this also diverted attention from any suggestion that these (and other unexplained or violent deaths of journalists, human rights activists and lawyers) might be in any way connected with the Kremlin.
1989 – Iran
Ayatollah Khomeini issues a fatwa against Salman Rushdie, sentencing him and all those involved in the publication of his novel The Satanic Verses to death. In 1998, President Khatami’s government announces that it does not support the death threat against Rushdie.
Of course the presence of disgruntled ex-KGB operatives in the community, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, did create a climate in which informal leverage was constantly being exercised to discredit or destroy competitors, enemies and opponents. Boris Yeltsin’s fragmentation of the Soviet security system left tens of thousands of former security officers jobless. It is estimated that in the early 1990s more than 50,000 ex-KGB agents joined private security firms taking with them considerable know-how, a not insignificant proportion of their former employer’s technology of surveillance, and long-standing connections. With a push to the market accompanied by very little management, and inconsistent or contradictory legislation, the pressure to respect informal codes in preference to formal juridical rules was overwhelming. ‘Everybody who did not spend the last decade staying in bed has willingly or unwillingly violated the law’, Boris Berezovsky reportedly remarked in 2000. Not everyone, however, had to take the legal consequences. At a high political level the existing legal system could be manipulated to its limits by savvy political consultants. Telephone law – informal requests phoned through from the Kremlin – tended to be far more efficiently enforced than formal rules.
‘The rigidity of our laws is compensated for by their non-observance,’ Russians like to say. Yet continuing juridical malpractice, and the fact that legal decisions are often taken hand in glove with the state authorities, mean that in cases when fundamental legal issues are at stake neither the plaintiff nor the defendant can rely on a fair trial. Karina Moskalenko calls it ‘a catastrophic state of affairs’. But, most recently, the desire for legal recourse has led many to look outside Russia. Moskalenko is director of the International Protection Centre (IPC), which provides legal aid to victims of human rights violations applying to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), in Strasbourg, or the UN Human Rights Committee, in Geneva. The IPC receives between 300 and 1000 appeals against the Russian state authorities every month, of which hundreds are passed onto the ECHR. More than 160 cases have been won. Moskalenko believes that the effect on public consciousness is palpable.
‘Stereotypes are being destroyed. People are beginning to understand that they need not rely wholly on the authorities. They can take care of their own defence. Equally the authorities in some cases acknowledge the justice of the rulings and change the system, though at times they simply pay out compensation and continue the same practice. That is why, today, the Council of Europe is having to address the issue of the non-implementation of ECHR decisions … But it seems to me that Russians are waking up. The ECHR cannot replace the Russian legal system, it can only decide on cases. It can only rule where human rights have been infringed and where they haven’t. But the very fact that such a judicial agency exists, and the availability of this procedure, holds the authorities back. People cease to be as helpless as they were, or so wholly in the hands of state agencies …’
Anna Politkovskaya’s son Ilya and lawyer Karina Moskalenko at a district military court after the jury acquits four people for the journalist’s murder, 19 February 2009.
Credit: Ria Novosti
In addition, as the legal academic Alexei Trochev has pointed out, Russia’s membership of the Council of Europe has helped support the independence of the Russian courts from law enforcement authorities and strengthened their judicial power in the sense of requiring government agencies to carry out court decisions. The increase in the use of courts by Russians has been dramatic. Even though in 2001 just 23 per cent of the population said they trusted the courts, the last decade has seen a doubling of civil cases in Russia. When powerful business or political interests are involved, however, the legal system remains at the disposal of the authorities. The Kremlin dictates and telephone law prevails. The widely reported case of the oil giant Yukos is emblematic. Unwritten rules had been violated: the head of the company, Mikhail Khodorkovsky (arrested in 2003 on charges of tax evasion, fraud and embezzlement) had not stayed out of politics. He had financed opposition parties; he had bought too much influence in the State Duma and declared participation in the 2008 elections. He broke the rules of krugovaia poruka and is currently serving a prison sentence extended to 14 years.
Long established and routine informal practices undermine the rule of law in Russia. They also impede free speech, media independence and the principle of fair elections. But as Alena Ledeneva has pointed out in her book How Russia Really Works, unofficial support networks also entrap the regime itself. The authorities are as dependent on the controls of krugovaia poruka as ordinary Russian citizens, who have demonstrated since last December against vote rigging and electoral fraud in the parliamentary and presidential elections. Obstacles to the establishment of the rule of law, unprescribed public discourse, and democratic development are being incessantly reproduced, at every level, by a traditional and intrinsically noxious subsystem of cultivated protectionism and partiality. ❒