Abstract
When independent pollsters reported that the Russian government was not as popular as it might like the public to think, they were labelled as foreign agents. It’s no crime to tell people the truth, says
Let us start with basic principles. A crucial feature of any true democracy is the ability of citizens to make their voices heard – by the country’s leaders and by each other: not just in elections but all the time. Well-conducted opinion polls are one way to measure public opinion. They are certainly not the only way but for some tasks they are indispensable. They are the most scientific way to gauge the level of support for politicians, parties and policies – and whether that support is rising or falling. It follows that any attempt to curb the right to conduct and report opinion polls is not just a matter of business regulation but an assault on a vital democratic freedom.
It found that 51% of Russians agreed with the nickname of the governing party, United Russia, as “the party of swindlers and thieves”
This is why an apparently narrow controversy in Russia is so important. One of the country’s leading independent research agencies, Levada Centre, faces closure. On 15 May 2013, state prosecutors warned Levada that it “violates federal legislation” by accepting research commissions from abroad. Such work (say the prosecutors) makes the centre a “foreign agent”. Under a law passed in November 2012, this needs to be registered. The centre has not joined any such register and is liable to fines of up to half a million roubles. One does not need to suffer from acute paranoia to detect a familiar pattern – a nervous government exploiting its control of the legal system to use administrative measures in order to silence an independent voice.
How have things come to this? A brief chronology leads us towards the answer.
In the 1960s, Professor Yuri Levada taught sociology at Moscow State University. As part of the slight loosening of Soviet oppression, as Nikita Khruschev sought to distance himself from the horrors of Stalinism, Levada was allowed to establish an institute to conduct limited surveys.
In 1972 his institute was closed down. He was one of many victims of the Brezhnev era. Some of Levada’s findings had caused offence in high places, such as his discovery that few people read Pravda’s long and tedious editorials praising the Soviet system.
In 1987, during Mikhail Gorbachev’s “glasnost” phase, Levada was able to try again; he established VTSIOM, the “all-Union Centre for the Study of Public Opinion”. It was technically government-owned but established a reputation for independence and accuracy during the turbulent years that saw the downfall of the Soviet system and the rise of Boris Yeltsin.
In 2003, the government exploited its powers as owners to clear out VTSIOM’s board of directors. Levada and some of his colleagues resigned and established their own, fully independent, Levada Centre.
For the past decade, the centre has conducted surveys for a variety of Russian and overseas clients. Levada himself died in 2006, but his centre lives on. It produces a detailed annual, state-of-the-nation survey that is vital reading for anyone who wants to track the mood of the Russian people. Among its clients are serious western institutions such as the Ford Foundation and George Soros’s Open Society Institute. These are openly acknowledged.
ABOVE: Challenges to government positions have provoked severe repercussions in Putin’s Russia
Credit: Maxim Shemetov/Reuters
As an independent institution, the centre has upset government leaders by showing what the public really thinks of them. In April, it found that 51 per cent of Russians agreed with the nickname of the governing party, United Russia, as “the party of swindlers and thieves”. It regularly shows that President Putin is less popular than the government claims.
On the other hand, being independent, the centre also produces findings that sometimes support the government position and show that most Russians reject liberal values. For example, the centre’s April survey found that 73 per cent want a ban on public displays or justification of homosexuality – which meant that there was majority support for a law, passed in June, to fine people who “propagate” homosexuality. And by two-to-one Russians thought the two-year prison sentences imposed on the feminist punk rock group, Pussy Riot, were “reasonable” rather than “excessive”. Only 9 per cent thought the Pussy Riot members should not have been prosecuted at all.
In short, the Levada Centre cannot be accused of being a western Trojan Horse seeking to distort public opinion in pursuit of a hostile, liberal agenda. Its “crime” seems to be no more and no less than its determination to tell the truth about public opinion.
Now, in theory, the centre might appear able to withstand the prosecutors’ assault. Just 3 per cent of the centre’s income comes from foreign sources. That, though, understates the threat. In an email to me, Lev Gudkov, the centre’s director, said that “it frightens our Russian and foreign business partners reluctant to make enemies with the Kremlin; it stigmatises us as ‘foreign agents’ with a considerable sector of Russian public opinion.”
He added: “We are now in the process of juridical consultations, trying to avoid a possible closure”. One option is to file a lawsuit asserting that the “foreign agents” law violates Russia’s own constitution. However, Professor Gudkov fears that this challenge would take too long and that, meanwhile, their research activities would collapse. A quicker solution would be to accept the prosecutors’ demand that the centre accepts that it “influences public opinion and therefore does not constitute research but political activity”. Gudkov says that demand is unacceptable: “it is humiliating as it forces us to slander ourselves.”
It frightens our Russian and foreign business partners reluctant to make enemies with the Kremlin; it stigmatises us as “foreign agents”
The good news is that, following professional support at home and news stories in the West about the centre’s plight, notably in the New York Times, Russia’s government has acted cautiously. Gudkov told me: “We have not faced any harassment from the government or similar agencies. On the contrary, there is an unprecedented professional solidarity campaign, including all the major academic organisations in Russia and some abroad.”
There is, then, a window of opportunity. Russia insists that it is a democracy – new and imperfect, to be sure, but edging away from the old, authoritarian methods of the Soviet era. It may yet conclude that the gains to be made from closing down the Levada Centre are not worth the opprobrium of being seen to silence its work.
For this reason, I have abandoned my normal reluctance to sign petitions and round-robin letters. I have registered my support for a Europe-wide campaign to back Levada, and urge others to do the same: www.zeitschrift-osteuropa.de/support-levada/de
Russia, freedom and the media ……………………… “It’s 2016 and when a Russian MP learnt there was nothing more to ban, he just went out and kicked a dog.” This joke reflects the general impression of the latest legal initiatives taken by the Russian authorities. The scale and pace at which the Duma, the lower chamber of the national parliament, adopts repressive laws has earned it a nickname of “a crazy printer”. The “crazy printing” started after Vladimir Putin’s return as president in May 2012. The comeback wasn’t particularly glorious, as it was marked with mass protests that showed Putin had lost his wide popularity and thus had to seek support from more conservative parts of society. The way to win their hearts and remain in power is quite typical of any authoritarian regime: you need to find enemies, both external and internal, and switch public attention from real problems to fighting those foes. “A series of laws passed in Russia over the last year have changed the very fundamental principles of the state and its relationship with society. In fact they have deprived citizens of their constitutional rights to freedom of expression, assembly and association,” says Yury Dzibladze, President of the Centre for the Development of Democracy and Human Rights. One of the most notorious laws passed has been the so-called “foreign agent law”. It requires NGOs that receive foreign funding to register as “foreign agents” if they are involved in “political activities”. Failure to comply leaves NGOs and their leaders open to fines and possible prison terms. The problem is that the authorities define as “politics” anything that can potentially influence public opinion. A wide range of NGOs, from human rights groups to a national park dealing with the protection of cranes, received warnings from local prosecutors’ offices. A common issue with the latest legislation in Russia is that laws contain ambiguous provisions allowing their selective implementation, and some of them do not comply with international standards. Defamation was re-criminalised in July 2012 after being excluded from the Criminal Code just seven months before under President Medvedev. “Propaganda of non-traditional sexual relationships” is banned. The new repressive legislation also includes further restrictions on the right to peaceful protest, a ban on “harming of religious feelings of believers”, introduction of a black list of websites with ‘harmful content’ and the “anti-Magnitsky law”, which forbids NGOs to receive funds from US citizens and also blocks the adoption of Russian children by Americans. The law was introduced after the US passed the Magnitsky Act, which blacklisted Russian officials linked to human rights abuses. “Law making from the Duma over the last year makes me question the common sense of Russian MPs. It looks like they believe they can regulate everything by law, from street rallies to sexual relationships of citizens,” says Dmitry Makarov, a co-chair of the International Youth Human Rights Movement. Freedom of the media is deteriorating. Freedom House rated Russia 176th out of 196 countries in their Freedom of the Press 2013 index, and there are no signs of improvement. Russia continues to be one of the deadliest places for journalists. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 54 reporters have been killed in Russia since 1992, with 16 cases still unsolved. Impunity remains a significant problem. The killers of Natalia Estemirova, Abdulmalik Akhmedilov, Khadzhimurad Kamalov and other prominent investigative reporters have never been prosecuted; nor have the organisers of Anna Politkovskaya’s murder. Akhmednabi Akhmednabiev, a well-known Russian journalist who reported on human rights violations in the Caucasus, recently joined this list; he was shot dead near his house in a suburb of Makhachkala on 9 July 2013. The legal framework of media activities is also getting harsher. As well as adding libel back into the Criminal Code, other legislative challenges have included a law on high treason that endangers Russian journalists who work for the international media (it prohibits providing certain information to foreign countries) and a law that forbids the media from using obscene words. Extensive online censorship, including blocking and filtering of online content, happens, as does surveillance of Russians’ online activities. SORM, a nation-wide surveillance system, operated with Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) technology, allows the state security force not only to control but even to intrude into the internet traffic of any internet user in Russia, without any special permit or court decision. A crackdown on rights and freedoms of Russian citizens is just one part of the story. Repressive law-making is a trend in other countries of the region as well, especially as Russia aims to set the tone on the international stage. The regimes of Belarus, Azerbaijan, China, Iran and other members of the “Authoritarian Club” learn from each other and act together to try to block international human rights mechanisms. They even try to re-define the very concept of human rights, claiming it is nothing but a matter of internal affairs for each and every separate state.