Defend Ukraine's right to self-determination

Russia’s occupation of Crimea and the threat to invade other parts of Ukraine on a trumped up pretext, is a reactionary response to a popular uprising for democracy in Kiev and a diversion from serious economic problems confronting the Putin regime.

As leaders East and West seek to blame one another, the key issue – Ukraine’s right to self-determination is being swept under the carpet. The excuse for the invasion of Crimea – that the Russian-speaking majority had to be saved from “fascists” – is part of a fake narrative dreamt up in Moscow and one used down the ages.

Moscow claims that the Maidan uprising in Kiev has been run and financed by Western reactionary forces and is aimed at suppressing Ukraine’s Russian speakers. Yet the Maidan uprising which began in November 2013 was first and foremost a popular revolution, which included many elements in Ukrainian society, amongst them – but not led by – right wing nationalists against a corrupt, autocratic regime. 

Many Jews took part in the uprising, for example. An ex-Israeli special forces soldier led a Kiev fighting unit against the Yanukovych government. Volodymyr Groysman, a former mayor of the city of Vinnytsia and the newly appointed deputy prime minister for regional policy, is a Jew.  

 

A language law introduced last week by Kiev’s parliament to reverse a provocative act by ex-president Yanukovych was yesterday vetoed by Ukraine’s caretaker president Turchynov. He acknowledged it had been a mistake.

While Putin’s provocative actions are a blatant infringement of Ukrainian sovereignty, the Russian bear has found some allies in strange places. British media commentators including Jonathan Steele and former British ambassador Rodric Braithwaite are calling for NATO and John Kerry to “back off”. As Timothy Snyder writes in the New York Review of Books:

"Interestingly, the message from authoritarian regimes in Moscow and Kiev was not so different from some of what was written during the uprising in the English-speaking world, especially in publications of the far left and the far right. From Lyndon LaRouche’s Executive Intelligence Review through Ron Paul’s newsletter through The Nation and The Guardian, the story was essentially the same: little of the factual history of the protests, but instead a play on the idea of a nationalist, fascist, or even Nazi coup d’état.”

The first time Ukraine saw even a glimpse of nationhood in modern times was in 1919 when the Zluty unity agreement was signed and the Ukrainian People’s Republic came into existence. Areas of the country were, however, ceded to Poland.

Early Bolshevik policy strongly asserted the right of all nations to self-determination in the former Tsarist empire and elsewhere. During the 1920s, under Mykola Skrypnyk’s Ukrainization policy, the Soviet leadership encouraged a national renaissance in the Ukrainian language, literature and the arts.

Crimea became an autonomous part of Ukraine in 1954 after being gifted by Nikita Khrushchev. It was his effort to make up for Stalinist oppression, when 7.5 million people – mostly Ukrainians – died in the Holodomar, a terror-famine deliberately imposed by Stalin in the early 1930s. Since 2006, the Holodomor has been recognized by Ukraine and several other countries as an act of genocide.

The Stalinist policy of starvation and repression was followed up from 1944 by ethnic cleansing with the forcible deportation of over 200,000 Crimean Tartars. Even Tartars fighting in the ranks of the Red Army were demobilised and sent to labour camps.  

Not too surprisingly, Stalinist repression had led some Ukrainians to welcome German forces after the invasion of the USSR in 1941. Nonetheless, the vast majority of Ukrainians fought with the Soviet Red Army and Moscow named Kiev as a hero city.

Ukraine’s longing for nationhood re-emerged as a powerful force encouraged by Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost policy and, finally, the 1991 break-up of the Soviet Union. It inspired the human chain of 300,000 Ukrainians which led to independence of today’s Ukraine.

         

After Ukraine declared its state sovereignty in 1990 and its independence in August 1991, a dispute flared up over the status of the Crimea. It was settled by an agreement in 1992, by which Crimea was granted autonomous status within Ukraine.

But Vladimir Putin – following in Stalin’s footsteps, has never accepted Ukraine’s right to exist. In 2008, he said to George Bush that if Ukraine joined NATO, Russia would annex Crimea and eastern Ukraine: “Don’t you understand, George — Ukraine is not even a nation! What is Ukraine? Part of her territory is Eastern Europe, and part, a considerable part, was given by us!”

A succession of leaders representing either a Western-leaning bourgeois or oligarchs looking to Russia have failed to develop Ukraine and played one community off against another. Corruption became endemic with Tymoshenko and then Yanukovych enriching themselves. Now Ukraine is bankrupt. The European Union, for all its mouthing about democracy, has no intention of bailing out any leader in Kiev.

Underlying Putin’s aggressive nationalism is his deep fear of a people’s uprising within Russia itself. The superficial success of the Sochi games was accompanied by a contempt for the corrupt abuse of public funds, disdain for local people’s rights and ecological devastation.

Russia of course has huge oil and other natural resources. But the recent growth of some sectors, which saw the enrichment of oligarchs and parts of the middle classes in the 1990s and noughties, is in crisis. Interest rates have shot up, the stock market fell 9% this morning and the rouble is at an all-time low. A massive capital flight has been under way for years. Much of it has ended up in luxury homes in Knightsbridge, laundered by Western banks or in the shape of football clubs.

Putin has quickly reversed the pre-Sochi cosmetic release of opponents, like Pussy Riot. He closed down one of the few remaining television stations that criticised the monstrous Sochi Olympics. Protests by anti-invasion activists in St Petersburg and Moscow were quickly suppressed by riot police.  He remains what he has always been: an autocrat presiding over a corrupt capitalist oligarchy who brutally suppresses and kills his opponents.

It is indeed rich of Kerry, Hague and other Western leaders to mouth criticisms of Russia’s military intervention – bearing in mind the US-UK-NATO invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq and bombing of Libya along with remote killing by drones in Pakistan.

Opposing Putin’s act of aggression in no way, therefore, implies support for NATO and the EU. They can no more represent the aspirations of Ukrainians than Yanukovych or Putin can, while the new government in Kiev has no solutions either. All the people of Ukraine, whatever their mother tongue, have the right decide their own future free of interference from outside forces. That principle is an absolute.

A World to Win editors

Punk band trio victims of Kremlin crackdown

The prolonged detention of three members of Russian punk band Pussy Riot shows just how unsafe the Kremlin feels in the wake of the continuing protests against the rigged presidential elections which Vladimir Putin 'won'.

At concerts over the weekend, singers Franz Ferdinand and the Red Hot Chili Peppers expressed support for the Pussy Riot band members who have been condemned to remain in a Russian jail for another nine months pending their trial on absurd charges.

Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Yekaterina Samutsevich, and Maria Alyokhina have languished in jail since March on charges of “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred”.  Their rendering of “Blessed Virgin, Mother Mary, Drive Putin Out!”, in Moscow’s Christ the Saviour cathedral of, has enraged ultra-reactionary church leaders as well as Putin.

Prosecution lawyer Mikhail Kuznetsov accused the young women of being “the tip of an iceberg of extremists, trying to break down the 1,000 edifice of the Russian Orthodox Church by creating a schism, guiding the flock through trickery and cunning not to God but to Satan”. The decision to keep the trio in jail until next January was taken in a closed hearing at the end of last week.

If convicted on trumped up charges (former KGB officer Putin will know all about those), the three face up to seven years in prison. One of the women's lawyers, Mark Feigin, called the ruling illegal and described it as a show of force by the Kremlin in the face of growing calls for the women's release. "It's not a matter of law. It's not a matter of reason," he said.” It’s a way of saying, 'We can do what we want.'"

The ruling has to be seen as part of a series of sinister machinations aiming to roll back rights and freedoms so strongly asserted by Russians in recent years, particularly during the December 2011 protests. The last three months have seen brutal crackdowns all around the country.

When tens of thousands took to the streets on May 6 against Putin’s election victory, police detained over 600 people and assaulted many more. Fourteen people are charged with organising and participating in mass riots and violence against police officers.

Repression is widespread, and not only against political campaigners. Some 1,500 kilometres from Moscow, in Bashkortostan’s Prison Colony No. 4, 900 inmates are on hunger strike in protest against the beating to death by prison employees of Sergei Lasko on July 17.

A series of measures have targeted constitutional rights to freedom of speech, access to information, the right of assembly and association. On Friday just before the summer recess, the regime rushed through legislation which close observers of the Moscow scene are describing as an “anti-constitutional coup”.  

Putin has just signed a law which means that non-governmental organisations (NGOs) who engage in political activity must register with the Justice Ministry as “foreign agents” and print it on all their publications – with the concomitant association of espionage and treachery. Failing to comply can mean six months’ suspension without a court order and up to three years in jail.

At risk are organisations like Amnesty, Transparency International which monitors corruption and the Golos (Voice) group, which collected and published allegations of last December’s election fraud. Golos’ deputy director Grigory Melkonyants says the law aims to make the work of NGOs more difficult, to intimidate and to blacken their image and disgrace them for getting money from abroad.

Of course the Russian Orthodox Church – which also receives money from abroad - is exempted from the law.

At the weekend, veteran human rights campaigner, Ludmila Alexeyeva celebrated her 85th birthday, saying the Russian state was “cruel to dissidents”, in what her supporters saw as a criticism of Putin’s regime. Ever the cynic, Putin sent her congratulations. But few are fooled by his attempts to gloss over the truth.

The May 6 committee is appealing for the widest possible publicity and support for its international day of action this Thursday. They believe that the fate of dozens of innocent protesters and those already in jail is at stake. 

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary

Putin's 'victory' tainted from the start

The anti-Putin rally planned for Moscow today will have to defy a state of siege organised by an undemocratic, authoritarian regime that weighs rather than counts the votes cast in presidential elections.

Vladimir Putin may have been “elected” as president of Russia for the third time, giving him six more years in the Kremlin, but his victory is tainted because no one believes he got nearly two-thirds of the vote.

Since replacing the transitional figure of Boris Yeltsin, the ex-KGB man has built a regime that is the political mouthpiece of the oligarchs who carved up the former Soviet Union after it was brought down in 1991.

Human rights and democratic niceties have been cast aside in favour of top-down Kremlin rule that sees journalists killed, free assembly discouraged and public sector workers bussed into pro-Putin rallies.

Today Moscow is surrounded by 12,000 police and troops with Omon riot squads patrolling pavements and underpasses, sometimes three deep. Sub-machine gun carrying troops have encircled the state Duma, Russia’s toothless parliament.
The heavy policing is needed because Putin’s election victory is rejected by large sections of the Russian population.

After the election fraud revealed in December’s parliamentary elections led to widespread demonstrations, the regime put on a big show of electoral transparency by installing webcams in polling stations. But vote rigging, dirty tricks and violations were taking place at other, more decisive, levels.

Lawyers who challenged the December election results discovered that votes were often cast in an orderly fashion and then counted by the local precinct committees. But then, at polling station 1181 for example, when the results were entered into the national database they were some 23% higher than those originally counted. A similar pattern had emerged throughout the country according to mathematicians studying the results.

Radio stations like Ekho Moskvy (Moscow Echo), who have refused to toe the Putin line, are now being threatened with a crackdown. Other news and media outlets are experiencing pressure from the authorities.

And while opponents of the regime, like anti-fraud campaigner Alexei Navalny, are making use of Twitter, the regime is not missing any dirty tricks. A fake Twitter account was created for the US Ambassador Michael McFaul. Russia Today television tried use this to discredit those who challenged the election results.

And what of the other candidates?

The only parties allowed to stand constituted no real alternative to Putin. Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov, who came in a distant second with around 18% of the votes, is an unreconstructed Stalinist and nationalist. Liberal Democratic Party leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky believes in white supremacy and has advocated hitting villages in Chechnya with tactical nuclear bombs. Sergei Mironov, of the A Fair Russia party, has endorsed Putin’s presidency and has no independence from the regime. The only other contender was playboy billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov. No threat to Putin then.

With “alternatives” like that, it’s questionable whether election fraud was even that necessary!

Independent candidates who threatened to be a real alternative were stopped from standing. In one town, Lermontov in the Caucasus, 13 people went on hunger strike late in February to back up their demand to be put on the ballot paper.

There are those who espouse the Kremlin line, denouncing the opposition as largely western influenced and/or the city-dwelling middle-class Twitterati. But the hunger strikers in Lermontov, as well as protesters in other far away places like Kovrov, 264 kilometres from Moscow, show this is not the case.

The movement against the regime is widespread as shown by the 10-mile long ring of people who defied sub-zero temperatures to join hands around Moscow on February 26 in a pre-election show of solidarity against the regime.

The outcome of Sunday’s election was a foregone conclusion. But everyone knows that Putin’s 64% “victory” is contrived from start to finish. His is a tarnished and shaky power. The election will go down in history as illegitimate. How the opposition will now find strength, new leaders, policies and organisations to move forward to a Russian spring is the real challenge.

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary

Anti-Putin movement marks end of an era

Russia’s street protest movement, which has shaken not only the Kremlin’s autocrats but global financial markets, is the largest for two decades, and is the end of an era.

The pro-capitalist triumphalism of the early 1990s has turned into disenchantment, not just with the sham democracy which voters experienced earlier this month, but with the corruption of a mafia-style capitalism.

The demands for a fair election are part of a much bigger movement of discontent which is sweeping Russia under conditions of the global economic crisis.

On Saturday, up to a 100,000 Russians from Vladivostok in the east, to Moscow and St Petersburg, right through to central London, demonstrated against the rigged parliamentary elections.

A map on Spandex, Russia’s largest search engine, showed the protests scheduled for Saturday in around 100 cities around the country, with links to details for each event on a Russian social networking site.

Placards denounced "False elections, false laws, false authorities” and protesters shouted “rogues and thieves give us back our elections”, and called for a “Russia without Putin”. Up to 50,000 came to a rally held on an island in Moscow.

Their five-point demands are:

• Freedom for political prisoners
• Annulment of the election results
• The resignation of Vladimir Churov, head of the election commission, and an official investigation of vote fraud
• Registration of the opposition parties and new democratic legislation on parties and elections
• New democratic and open elections.

The demonstrators defied pre-emptive strikes by the regime, which saw the arrest last week of opposition leaders like blogger Alexei Navalny, Solidarnost leader Ilya Nashin, Eduard Limonov of the unregistered Other Russia party and Oleg Orlov of the Memorial human rights group. In Ulyanovsk, Lenin’s birthplace, all the protest leaders were arrested, but the protests went ahead nonetheless.

Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks by Putin’s “cyber-warriors” also focused on preventing Russia’s 51 million internet users from accessing anti-regime media websites.

President Medvedev has announced an inquiry into voting procedures on his Facebook page, while rejecting a re-run of the election, the central demand of the protests. He was met with an immediate and often mocking response by people saying they did not believe him.

The protests are the largest since the turmoil in August 1990 when thousands took to the streets of Moscow to thwart a putsch aimed at removing the then leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev.

Since replacing Boris Yeltsin, ex-KGB chief Vladimir Putin has reversed the democratic gains promoted by Gorbachev to enable an oligarchy to establish capitalism in Russia. When Putin was barred from standing for election for a third term in 2008, he was appointed as prime minister. He insists he will run for president again in March.

From a massive majority in earlier elections, support for Putin and his United Russia party has fallen to an all-time low, especially as the global economy has swung into a downturn. On Friday, shares in Russian companies saw massive drops as investors fear continuing political instability, as well as lower demands for oil.

One school of thought claims the Russian democratic movement is funded and inspired from Washington, pointing to financial backing from the National Endowment for Democracy for bloggers like Alexei Navalny and Boris Nemtsov’s People’s Freedom Party and the election watchdog Golos.

But to denounce those angry with the Russian political system as pawns of the West is ludicrous and insulting. As one demonstrator said: “I don't think any citizen of the country can say he is very happy with anything. We don't have an independent judiciary, there is no freedom of expression – all this combined creates a situation where people are forced to protest.”

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary

Russians revolt against fraud elections

The dramatic slump in United Russia’s share of the vote in Sunday’s parliamentary elections shows that voters defied a massive campaign of intimidation aimed at bolstering support for the ruling party.

President Medvedev and prime minister Putin’s party saw its share fall from around 64% to just under half after a campaign in which the Kremlin tried to bully the electorate.

In the run-up to the election, Russia experienced a ferocious crackdown by the authorities to muzzle the media, control the Internet and arrest opposition politicians. On polling day, eyewitnesses talked of ballot boxes being stuffed while “voters” were bussed around polling stations to cast multiple ballots for United Russia.

Videos posted to YouTube showed election workers opening ballot boxes with pre-marked ballots for United Russia. One poll worker told NK TV that ballot boxes were filled with checked-off ballots while she and others were in a meeting. At one polling station pens with disappearing ink were discovered, a video reported.

Members of the right wing youth group, Nashi, were brought in to Moscow as key squares were blocked off by police. Triumph Square – a popular place for oppositionists – has been fenced off since 2010. A Twitter user (@agoodtreaty) spotted a mocking sign on the fence surrounding the square saying: “Dear Muscovites! This fence has been erected in the event of popular unrest due to massively fraudulent elections. We apologise for the inconvenience.”

Countless blatant acts of repression – varying from brutal to comical – included the detention of Sergei Udaltsov, head of the Left Front and Eduard Limonov, leader of the opposition The Other Russia movement. Limonov supporters were also detained while Udaltsov was hustled into an unmarked car by unidentified men and then sentenced to five days’ arrest by a district court for “disobedience”.

Campaign ads by opposition parties were banned on state television by order of the Central Elections Commission. Intimidation and censorship by federal and local authorities included attacks on journalists, with a Moscow Times reporter ejected from a polling station in Oktyabrsky.

The ruling United Russia party was clearly behind denial of service attacks on a host of independent, business and liberal websites and media including Live Journal, a popular blogging platform, Ekho Mosvky, the New Times, the independent election monitor Golos, Bolshoi Gorod, Kommersant and the Slon.ru business news portal. Election commission officials confiscated the media accreditation of Radio Liberty reporters.

The authorities’ clampdown was easier in rural areas, where fewer people have internet connections. But Putin’s brutal state, which has overseen massive corruption and scores of journalists beaten and murdered in recent years, has not succeeded in preventing Russians – 51 million of whom have access to the Internet - from denouncing electoral manipulation.

Attempts to subvert the electoral process – shown on YouTube and social media - have increased voter scepticism about what one Muscovite derided as a “jackass democracy”.

Editor Grigory Okhotin resigned from an offshoot of the Ria Novosti news agency , after receiving an internal email asking employees “not to post any article hostile to Putin and United Russia on the site” during the week before the elections.

Ekho Moskvy’s editor-in-chief wrote on Twitter that the cyber attacks were an attempt to stop evidence of election violations from leaking out. The radio station fought back with a screenshot of its site full of Bad Gateway messages, which it jokingly called the “new site design”, on its Facebook page.

A decade after the fall of the Soviet Union, and the restoration of capitalism, Russia is run by oligarchs and a brutal, one-party state. Yesterday’s elections show a rising tide of anger against the regime throughout the country. Replacing the Putin’s “jackass democracy” with a Russia under the control of its people with true economic and democratic rights is surely the order of the day.

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary

Useful links

http://journalists-in-russia.org/

http://www.rightsinrussia.info/

http://www.aworldtowin.net/resources/Pashentsev.html

Tolstoy still an 'enemy of the state'

You would think that the centenary of the death of Leo Tolstoy, widely regarded as among the greatest of novelists, would be celebrated in the country of his birth. You would be wrong, however. He is actually considered an embarrassment. That’s how bad things are in Russia today.

When Dmitry Medvedev came to power as president in 2008, he was painted as a less authoritarian leader than his predecessor Vladimir Putin who is now prime minister. But increasingly it is clear that on his watch, state-sponsored terrorism against those who challenge government appointees and the rule of the super-rich is continuing with a vengeance.

We are not talking only about contract killings against journalists and human rights activists and the continuing military occupation of Chechnya, but the atmosphere of repression against anyone considered “unpatriotic”. The tyranny of the state goes hand in hand with the unfettered influence of the deeply reactionary Russian Orthodox Church and a largely corrupt legal system.

Writers and film-makers who depict the country and its history from an anything others than a glorifying point of view are frowned upon. A recent movie – a new feature film by Aleksander Buravsky about the famous 900-day siege of Leningrad in World War II – was denounced because it showed Stalin’s secret police tracking down a dissident policewoman while the city starved.

As for Tolstoy, author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina, he is persona non grata in official circles. Tolstoy, whose last years are depicted in the Oscar-nominated The Last Station starring Helen Mirren and Christopher Plummer, died 100 years ago. His centenary is being marked around the world but not officially in Russia.

This is because Tolstoy was excommunicated by the orthodox church in 1901 due to his anti-state views. He was an aristocratic Christian anarchist who championed the poor peasantry. He was opposed to war and believed in non-violent resistance. Tolstoy defied the Tsarist state in circulating anarchist writings in the later years of his life.

The Russian church still runs a vendetta against him in a ferocious defence of its terrain. Last September, a court in the southern Russian district of Rostov, quoted Tolstoy’s denunciation of the church as “extremist material” in a case against a group of Jehovah’s witnesses. Clearly Tolstoy still remains an enemy of the state and church.

Those who try to expose the police and the security services risk being silenced by thugs. When a detective called Major Alexei Dymovsky went public on YouTube to denounced police corruption in the Black Sea port of Novorossiysk, he was sacked and jailed. A human rights campaigner who tried to defend him was attacked brutally.

British international human rights lawyer Bill Bowring maintains that the legal system in Russia is subservient to those at the top of the political tree. A recent report commissioned by a body overseen by Medvedev himself revealed that cases decided in accordance with the law, but not in the interests of officials, will be overturned on appeal and returned for further consideration. Judges whose decisions are overturned too frequently are soon dismissed.

Convictions predominate and there is a fear of acquitting, according to the report. The rate of acquittal in non-jury cases is 1%. The report says that “the most important factor in the work of the judges is fear and dependence on the chairman of the court”. A former Deputy chair of the Constitutional Court, Tamara Morshchakova, has pointed out that if a judge seeks to oppose other state powers, she is simply “eaten up”.

Tolstoy’s opposition to such a judiciary and such a state is as relevant today as it was in the years running up to the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917. He could have been writing about 2010 when he remarked that “there could not be worse violence than that of authority under existing conditions”.

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary

The real price of art

This week Russian oligarchs like Chelsea football club owner Roman Abramovich will have yet another opportunity to spend astronomic sums of money buying art. In May alone, Abramovich spent a total of £60.2 million on two paintings – one by Lucien Freud, the other by Francis Bacon. Sotheby’s auction house is holding a three-day auction of paintings by top Russian artists, including all-time favourite Marc Chagall, and noted modernist Natalia Goncharova, many of them from the period leading up to the October 1917 revolution.

Apparently the previous, long-term owners of these works could no longer afford the insurance premiums as the price of art rises at unprecedented rates, which is why they are now on the market. A Sotheby’s spokeswoman said that prices have gone from £20,000 a few years ago to between £200,000 to £500,000 in just a few years. Russian art offers a superb status symbol for the new class of billionaires who preen at the top of Russian society, as well as sending their children to Britain’s top public schools. In addition, art has come to be seen as safe investment at a time when property prices have become unstable, and the global economy lurches into deeper crisis.

Over the weekend, Abramovich berthed his £152 million yacht on the city centre riverside in St Petersburg so he could join politicians and super-rich oil and mineral company executives meeting at St. Petersburg International Economic Forum. He will have heard Russia’s new president Dimitry Medvedev, who was inaugurated last month, warn that the world might be in the throes of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

In a speech aimed at impressing Russian nationalists, Medvedev said his country could play an ever bigger role in the global economy. What he really meant was that it would be on Russia’s terms. For example, BP’s giant Russian venture, TNK-BP, which pumps a quarter of the company’s oil, failed to reach a hoped-for deal at the St Petersburg summit. The Kremlin prevented an agreement being reached so it could satisfy nationalist pipe-dreams of making Russia into a modern super-power by insisting that non-Russian operators would be excluded. With the price of a barrel of oil soaring by $11 in one day’s trading at the end of last week, Russia’s manoeuvres are bound to increase global tensions and instability.

Significantly, the man who oversaw Russia’s transition to a capitalist economy, Anatoly Chubais, told the gathering that the Russian state could not function properly unless there was a political opposition. Chubais’ remarks were clearly a criticism of the oppressive regime set up by Medvedev’s predecessor, Vladimir Putin. Under Putin, open political opposition was virtually silenced, with many journalists and rights campaigners assassinated or jailed. Virtually all the media is under government control. Forlorn hopes that Medvedev would be different from Putin are rapidly being dashed. In fact, Medvedev is a puppet president. Before he left office, Putin switched all key powers away from the Kremlin to the office of prime minister, which he now occupies.

From within the country itself, voices are being raised against the wealth-crazed autocrats who preside over the chasm between the super rich and poor. In particular, Russia’s recent history has come back to haunt its leaders. Many were angered by Putin’s statement that no one should try to make Russia feel guilty about the Great Terror. A teacher's manual published during his presidency suggested that Stalin's actions were justified by the need to modernise the economy.

Last week, former Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev called for a national museum-memorial to honour the victims of Stalin’s repressions. Gorbachev and 25 others, including poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, signed a statement announcing the initiative, saying that "the current and future generations need memory and knowledge of the repressions of the Stalin regime" which had left few families untouched. Russia’s present leaders are, however, much more interested in the price of oil – and works of art – than anything remotely connected with democracy and historical truth.

Corinna Lotz
AWTW secretary

'More like Mafia than democracy'

As Russia moves towards its coronation – sorry, presidential election – this Sunday, the clampdown on the autocracy’s political opponents continues to tighten. The outcome is already decided, as President Putin has anointed Dimitry Medvedev as his successor. But just to make sure, the authorities have been using every trick in the book to clamp down on freedom of expression, assembly and association.

This week Amnesty International published a report, Freedom Limited documenting the use of vague legislation to harass anyone expressing their opinion and standing up for their rights. Amnesty outlined the hydra-headed attack on opposition demonstrations, human rights activists, journalists, radio stations like Ekho Moskvy, non-governmental organisations, friendship societies like the Russian-Chechen Friendship Society – indeed any independent organisation that voices criticism of the authoritarian regime.

The investigation into the murder of investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya has run into the sand as authorities high up in the regime are clearly protecting those who ordered the killing. The international Committee to Protect Journalists has warned about the high casualty rate for journalists in Russia.

According to International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) analyst John Crowfoot, Russia is currently the most dangerous place to be a journalist, after Iraq. He has produced a database that outlines the deaths and disappearances of 289 journalists in Russia since 1993. The youngest to have died is a 19-year-old reporter killed last September; the oldest, a retired journalist of 80, was stabbed to death in his home a few years ago. Forty-seven of those killed were women.

Another independent human rights organisation, Article 19 has warned repeatedly about the use of defamation laws to suppress criticism of public figures and powerful individuals against the media. “Criminal defamation” laws have led to imprisonment in three cases over the past two years.

In Nizhniy Novgorod, a city of 1.5 million people, police beat up demonstrators, while in Nazran, Ingushetia demonstrators were wounded and 60 people were detained. Three Moscow television journalists and Oleg Orlov, a member of Memorial organisation were abducted from a hotel, beaten and left in a field by unidentified men wearing masks. Before the December parliamentary elections, workers at state-owned plants and public sector workers were virtually ordered to vote for Putin’s party or lose their jobs.

And it gets worse. Today the IFJ called on journalists’ unions around the world to join protests over a “cynical campaign” by Russian political bosses to close down the Russian Union of Journalists, the country’s largest non-governmental organisation. For the past year state agencies in Moscow have been trying to evict the Russian Union from premises they have occupied for almost 30 years and which they were promised ownership of by previous governments claiming the building is unsafe.

Now the RUJ has learned that the government is trying to sell the building to a private owner and in the process put the RUJ on the street. “The Russian Union has been one of the most strident critics of government pressure on independent journalism,” said Aidan White, IFJ General Secretary. “It is the victim of intimidation and a cynical campaign by its political opponents who have failed to close the union using trumped charges of breaching fire regulations, now are trying to sell off offices that the union insists are legally their own.”

Even world-famous personalities like chess grandmaster Gary Kasparov, who tried to stand as a candidate against Putin was arrested last November along with 200 other people. He spent 28 days in a Moscow jail. After his release, Kasparov did not mince his words: “Putin wants to rule like Stalin but live like Abramovich [the oligarch who owns Chelsea FC]. Putin’s system is more like Mafia than democracy.” Sounds like the time is ripe for another Russian Revolution.

Corinna Lotz
AWTW secretary

Putin rehabilitates Stalin

There are few families in Russia today untouched by the horrors of the Stalin period. Nearly everyone has a story to tell about a relative who suffered in the forced collectivisation and the purges that consumed up to 20 million people. So when Vladimir Putin, the ex-KGB man who is now president of Russia, sanctions a rewriting of history that eulogises Stalin and glosses over his regime’s crimes, it amounts to a warning to opponents of today’s Kremlin. Several critics of Putin’s government have met with untimely deaths, including the campaigning journalist Anna Politkovskaya. Only yesterday, a member of an opposition group led by the former chess champion Garry Kasparov was released from a psychiatric clinic after being held against her will for 46 days. Larisa Arap, 48, was forcibly taken to hospital in Murmansk after exposing alleged abuse of children in a local psychiatric hospital.

New laws give the Putin government sweeping powers over the content of school textbooks and a series of “patriotic” history books are set to be unveiled in the new school year. A handbook for teachers calls Stalin a "contradictory" figure, and states that while some people consider him evil, others recognise him as a "hero" for his role in the Great Patriotic War (the Second World War) and his territorial expansion. Stalin is described as “the most successful leader of the USSR". The book skates over the purges, declaring: “Political repression was used to mobilise not only rank-and-file citizens but also the ruling elite." Putin himself admitted that "problematic pages in our history exist" but "we have less than some countries”. He compared the Great Terror of 1937, when 700,000 people were murdered in a purge by Stalin's secret police, to the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

This sickening reverence for Stalin because he allegedly made the country strong is a complete travesty of history and an insult to all those who died or suffered at the hands of his regime. In fact, the Stalinists left the Soviet Union at the mercy of Nazi Germany and their policies added to the build-up of World War II. The cream of the Red Army was purged in 1937 and a non-aggression pact struck with Hitler lulled the USSR into a false sense of security. When Nazi Germany invaded in June 1941, no one was more surprised than Stalin to the extent that he refused to believe the reports and prevented border troops from opening fire until it was too late. "In the official state view of history, the main event of the 20th century is the victory in the Second World War," said Boris Dubin, an expert at the Levada Centre think tank and polling agency. "The Holocaust is hardly taught at all in Russia, nor is the history of the gulag system. The rehabilitation of Stalin is connected to the emphasis on the war victory."

Far from being a great “war leader”, Stalin was compelled to hand control over military affairs to generals like Zhukov because of political paralysis in the Kremlin. In the end, the Soviet Union defeated Nazi Germany in spite of and not because of Stalin’s “leadership”. Putin is building his own authoritarian state, this time based on the capitalist oligarchs that now own Russia as a result of the counter-revolution of the early 1990s. But thanks to the perestroika and glasnost period of the Gorbachev period, the truth about the Stalinist regime is available to the Russian people. Putin’s attempt to rewrite the last 90 years of his country’s turbulent history to suit himself is, like the Stalinist regime itself, doomed to failure.

Paul Feldman, communications editor
A World to Win