Russia takes another step toward Soviet-style control

WASHINGTON -- When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the Western world breathed multiple sighs of relief. Not only was the Cold War over, but the West had clearly won the ideological fight -- Russia would now have to adopt democratic and free-market principles.
In Washington during those early '90s, a kind of spring madness seemed to overtake even sensible people. It was often repeated that "now we have no enemies!" Scholars discussed "the end of history," as though we had stopped time -- and soon President George W. Bush was looking into Vladimir's eyes and seeing Thomas Jefferson.
But it hasn't turned out that way. While there have been earlier signals of Russia's regression to its ingrown, paranoid past, the events of the last few weeks have confirmed it. By effectively throwing out any and all independent foreign-backed NGOs, think-tanks, and humanitarian and human rights organizations, the government of President Vladimir Putin has irrevocably turned Russia away from those early hopes -- and indeed, from the modernization that Russia so desperately needs.
The changes came just before Thanksgiving, when the lower house of the Russian parliament voted overwhelmingly -- 370 to 18 -- to approve legislation that would require probably as many as 450,000 private organizations (which exist to oversee and challenge regimes across the world) to register with the Ministry of Justice. Restrictions would be imposed on their ability to accept donations from foreigners, and foreign organizations would be prohibited from opening branches in Russia. They would have to register as purely Russian organizations, with all that means in terms of total state control.
Serious stuff
This is serious stuff. In this finely balanced age, where government, military, guerrilla groups, NGOs, representatives of civil society and too many privately funded and motivated groups to mention influence and rule an immensely complicated world, Russia is deliberately and harshly removing the modern civil structures that make states accountable to their own citizens, to their own and the world's principles.
If this movement continues, the Russian state will again stand alone, as it has since the Mongol invasions of the 13th century: a cold, isolated, totalitarian state that refuses to change with the modern age or to interchange ideas, principles and judgments with the rest of the world.
President Putin has already taken over independent television, eliminated the formerly free election of governors, sent corporate magnates into exile or Siberia, and driven pro-Western parties out of parliament.
Among the organizations that would be taken over by the state in the tame old Soviet style are Human Rights Watch, Open Society, Amnesty International, the Ford and Carnegie institutions, the congressionally funded National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute, the Russian-Chechen Friendship Society and societies to help Russian children.
In short, having successfully eliminated all the internal checks and balances from what is left of the Soviet Union, the Putin government is moving to ban from its very gaze those organizations that could have given it space to modernize -- if it had really wanted to.
The government, not surprisingly, defends its actions by saying that these groups were "CIA-financed." In fact, in contrast to the past, these organizations are internationally transparent. In 2004, for instance, the U.S. government donated only $75 million to democracy and civil rights groups in Russia; the rest came from private groups and financing.
& quot;There is a desire to turn civil society into a kind of waxwork, just as they converted parliament into a waxwork, and have successfully turned the mass media into a waxwork," Alexander Petrov of Human Rights Watch in Moscow was quoted in the Financial Times. "And that is essentially what is happening."
'Greatest catastrophe'
The real key to much of this is found in President Putin's statement last April that the collapse of the Soviet Union was "the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century." Many Americans, probably especially the American president, were shocked. They shouldn't have been; polls in Russia have shown constant regret at the fall of their superpower status, and there was never any chance that Russia, with her different and anti-Western history, would respond with joy at rejoining the West, as did the countries of Eastern Europe.
Adding an element of fear to remaining non- or anti-democratic societies, such as Russia, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Belarus and China, is the specter of the new "color revolutions." These include the "rose revolution" in Georgia, the "orange" one in Ukraine and the "cedar" one in Lebanon. The remaining totalitarian/authoritarian states are terrified of the real or supposed foreign NGO influence in these historic events.
Every minute, the future of Russia becomes more dangerously uncertain. But what is certain is that one should not jump to conclusions about change when profound, historically rooted cultural realities are at stake.
Universal Press Syndicate