Abstract
What happened to hopes for an open Russia?
The Russian state has long been accused of being an enemy of freedom of expression and its advocates. The relatively short period of restructuring in Russia, known as perestroika, had one main achievement: glasnost, or greater openness. It served to develop a respect for human rights in Russia – yet today, free speech remains seriously undermined.
Independent journalists are already an endangered species in Russia
Since the end of perestroika in the early 1990s, the conditions for free speech have steadily worsened, including through the controversial privatisation of the state’s biggest assets in 1993 and the presidential elections of 1996, which were widely believed to be rigged. This privatisation created a powerful oligarchy which, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, gained control over the whole of Russian television and most media outlets. In 1996, Russian oligarchs and the Kremlin entered into a Faustian pact of dependency, supporting Boris Yeltsin in the 1996 presidential election, who was running for re-election – chiefly because his main opponent, Communist Gennady Zyuganov, sought to return privatised assets to state control. Since then, the Kremlin and these oligarchs have become a powerful force, working together to silence their critics. In 2000, Vladimir Putin became Yeltsin’s successor, and continued to successfully restrict Russian citizens’ freedoms and rights.
Throughout the 13 years since Putin’s appointment, Russian citizens have become the most frequent applicants to the European Court of Human Rights. Several leading human rights organisations rate Russia as among the most corrupt countries in the world, as well as one of the most dangerous places for journalists to work. In late April 2013, Human Rights Watch issued a report describing Russia as suffering the worst conditions for human rights in the post-Soviet era, a conclusion that might be reached by any Russian familiar with the European Convention on Human Rights.
Russian TV is poisoned by state censorship. So-called news programmes serve as government propaganda, with TV journalists obeying blacklists of forbidden guests and interviewees, and denying viewers coverage of events that reflect negatively on the government, such as protest actions. For example, in March 2013, several activists managed to hold an unsanctioned demonstration in Moscow’s Red Square, protesting against a repressive law on registration in places of residence. They chanted anti-Putin slogans and held a banner criticising the State Duma using foul language, yet not a single state channel reported on the event.
The broadcast of deliberate misinformation is another problem. In March 2012, NTV channel screened a documentary, Anatomy of Protest, which claimed that people were paid to attend Russia’s biggest post-Soviet protest rallies against allegedly fraudulent elections, a claim that has since been proven to be untrue.
Partly as a consequence of television censorship, the March 2013 protest rallies were organised and discussed primarily online. Videos of election law violations spread quickly on Russian websites and social media. Subsequently, during the most recent parliamentary and presidential elections, the LiveJournal blogging service and some independent online media suffered distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.
There are signs that the Russian government has been in some ways encouraged by China’s approach to online freedom – at least there seems to be a clear tendency for it to move in a similar direction. The government has taken steps that may lead to the creation of a version of China’s Golden Shield Project, informally known as the Great Firewall of China. In November 2012, the State Duma passed a law that effectively blacklists any website that contains information the Kremlin regards as unfavourable. According to the law, no court decision is required to shut the website down if it promotes suicide, drugs, pornography or extremism. Since extremism is defined very vaguely in Russian legislation, human rights activists have expressed numerous concerns over the scope this gives for any activity to be categorised as ‘extremist’ and the associated website to be closed down without recourse to the courts.
Deep packet individual page inspection (DPI), a filtering system that allows internet service providers to block a range of internet sites, including Skype, is regularly used by the government. Russian security forces expert Andrei Soldatov has pointed out that this gives the Kremlin all the resources it needs to remove content it dislikes at any time. Political scientists close to opposition parties, such as Dmitry Oreshkin, are sure internet censorship will be taken to its fullest extent in Russia, but that, ultimately, the government will fail: unlike China, he says, Russian society will fight back.
Silencing of opposition voices
The classification of those unsympathetic to the Kremlin as extremists is just one of a number of tactics used to silence dissent. The cases of Novosibirsk artist Artyom Loskutov and The Other Russia opposition activist Taisiya Osipova are just two instances where questionable allegations of drug abuse were used to silence political voices. Loskutov was arrested for possession of marijuana, while Osipova was sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment for drug trafficking, despite questions hanging over the evidence against them, raised by rights activists, journalists and experts.
Defamation legislation is also frequently used against independent journalists, which are already an endangered species in Russia. One of the most remarkable examples is that of Russia’s Department of Presidential Affairs, which won three defamation lawsuits against the Novaya Gazeta newspaper, famous for its investigative journalism, in just one week. ‘The court was being used as a censorship instrument, but even such controversial proceedings are better than shooting journalists’, editor-in-chief Dmitry Muratov told Index on Censorship. In 2012, just six months after decriminalising defamation, the Duma has recriminalised the offence, stipulating fines of up to 5m roubles (US$160,000).
ABOVE: Rally in support of journalist Mikhail Beketov, Moscow, November 2008. In April 2013, Beketov died from complications related to brain damage sustained in a 2008 attack directly connected to his work as a journalist
Credit: Denis Sinyakov/Reuters
But of course the murder of journalists is a tactic widely used in Russia. Anna Politkovskaya was murdered in 2006; Anastasia Baburova in 2009; Yuri Shchikochikhin in 2003; Paul Khlebnikov in 2004. Oleg Kashin was beaten almost to death in 2010; Mikhail Beketov, who was left with disabilities after an attack in 2008, died in April 2013. Not one of the assailants of these respected journalists has yet been brought to justice.
Artists, too, come under regular attack. In August 2012, Russia’s most famous political prisoners after Mikhail Khodorkovsky – members of the feminist punk group Pussy Riot – were sentenced to serve two years in a prison colony on charges of hooliganism motivated by religious hatred. Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Maria Alekhina and Ekaterina Samutsevich performed an anti-Putin ‘prayer’ in Moscow’s Christ the Saviour’s Cathedral in protest against the leader of the Orthodox Church Patriarch Kirill’s public support for Putin. Samutsevich later received a suspended sentence. Previously, organisers of the Forbidden Art exhibition in Moscow, Yuri Samodurov and Andrey Erofeev, were found guilty of inciting hatred and sentenced to large fines.
Most of the victims of state repression have been supported by non-governmental organisations, who have managed to survive through funding received from abroad. Last year, the State Duma passed a law that obliges these foreign-funded NGOs to register as ‘foreign agents’, enabling the government to effectively paralyse their activities through an overwhelming barrage of inspections. Leading Russian NGOs have unanimously boycotted the law, and subsequently faced a crackdown.
Civil society has struggled to combat the range of tactics Russian authorities use to stifle freedom of expression and this struggle continues, with new challenges at every turn. Up to now, the state’s repressive influence on Russian society has largely held sway, but the battle to preserve the space for oppositional voices has a long way to go.
