Assessing Russia's Impunity of Hate and Intimidation

If one were to bracket the period from Mikhail Khodorkovsky's political arrest three years ago, to last week's assassination of Moscow independent journalist Anna Politkovskaya, we find the breakdown of rule of law and free speech in Russia, without which democracy cannot stand. Putin's brand of democracy has morphed into a Soviet-style climate of hate and intimidation targeting peaceful dissenters, human rights and religious freedom NGOs and their monitors and activists, and other truth tellers, especially independent journalists.

In an upcoming report by UCSJ and our Moscow office, we, together with the Moscow Helsinki Group, will document recent crimes of intimidation, e.g.:

Crimes against journalists (2005)

• 6 homicides (including Politkovskaya in 2006)
• 35 attacks
• 21 threats
• 37 arrests

Political Prisoners (partial data)

• 6 Scientists (for "spying"), including Danilov & Sutiagin
• 7 journalists, including Grigorii Pas'ko, Stanislav Dmitrievskii
• 4 human rights activists, including Lev Ponomarev (3days)
• 4 Yukos oil entrepreneurs: Khodorkovsky, Lebedev, Piichugin, Bakhmina -- all for multi years.

Murders of Human Rights Activists (since June 2004)

• Nickolai Girenko, professor of Ethnology and expert on racism. Shot dead 19 June 04
• Ludmila Zhorovlia, lawyer for defendants' rights in Vorkuta. Shot in home, with son, 21 July 05
• Magomedzagid Varisov, journalist and activist against religious extremists. Killed in Makhachkala, 28 July 05
• Timur Kacharava, anti-fascist activist. Killed by knife attack 13 November 05 (with Maksim Zgibai, who survived.
• Anna Politkovskaia, journalist, critical of Putin's human rights violations, including the Chechen war. Gunned down in her apartment, 7 October 2006.

Beyond these murders and intimidation of activists, even President Putin has acknowledged the impunity of grassroots antisemitic and xenophobic hate crimes and propaganda and, thus, the dangerous extent of corruption and dysfunction in Russia's justice system. Estimates of the number just of rampaging neo-Nazi skinheads run as high as 50,000.

UCSJ will urge the State Department's "human rights country report," all international human rights NGOs, and concerned members of the public to recall the success of Soviet-era grassroots campaigns by the Helsinki Proces to protect Soviet dissidents, Jews and other minorities. The safety of today's prisoners, like Khodorkovsky, of Russia's ethnic and religious minorities, and the entire civil society depends on keeping a bright spotlight trained on the Kremlin.

In the blog "A Step at a Time," look for the link to the Khodorkovsky web page; and note these three posts on Politkovskaya:

In "The Paradigm Change," David McDuff quotes Russian philosopher Mikhail Ryklin, who speaks for all human rights activists and truth tellers in Russia: "Until now, we, the critical voices, believed in a civilizational minimum at the least, that society stood on a more or less solid base. Now the message is: none of you are safe any more."

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