[lbo-talk] 'Other Russia' speaks out

[Michael Givel]

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nationworld/bal-te.russia13jul13,0,2144582.story?coll=bal-news-nation

Baltimore Sun


nation/world
'Other Russia' speaks out
Opposition groups from left, right meet ahead of G-8 summit
By Erika Niedowski
Sun foreign reporter
Originally published July 13, 2006

MOSCOW // They spoke of political repression, compliant courts, stifled news 
media, institutionalized corruption and human rights lapses - all the 
elements of a society that is not free.

The most prominent figures in Russia's political opposition gathered 
yesterday and Tuesday to deliver a message that they are resigned to having 
drowned out when the summit of the Group of Eight industrial nations opens 
in St. Petersburg on Saturday: There is not one Russia, but two.

"One is the official Russia, which is like a big Potemkin village," said 
Andrei Illarionov, President Vladimir V. Putin's former economics adviser, 
who has offered some of the harshest criticism of the administration. "The 
other Russia is the Russia of citizens. Today, there is a threat to the 
other Russia."

"The Other Russia" was also the name of the forum, which served as a kind of 
anti-G-8 organized by some of the Kremlin's most enthusiastic, eloquent and 
persistent critics.

Former world chess champion Garry Kasparov, who retired from the game last 
year to devote himself to opposition politics, said that Putin "should stop 
pretending that he is the leader of a democratic country."

"There is a completely different Russia that wants its voice to be heard," 
he said.

The forum was hastily arranged and held in a Moscow hotel ballroom too small 
to accommodate all the participants and the journalists wanting to attend, 
which, predictably, did not include reporters from newspapers or TV networks 
controlled by the Kremlin.

The meeting brought together the political left and the right, united by 
circumstance alone, producing some striking incongruities. The head of the 
Russian Communist Workers Party, Viktor Anpilov, spoke of both democracy and 
Marxist theory; one of Putin's former prime ministers, Mikhail Kasyanov, all 
but embraced the leader of the National Bolshevik Party, whose supporters 
had once thrown eggs at Kasyanov.

The forum touched on such issues as the centralization of government, the 
nation's heavy dependence on oil and authorities' hostility to even quiet 
expressions of dissent. Olga Kudrina, 21, spoke to the audience by videotape 
because she is in hiding after a Moscow court sentenced her in May to 3 1/2 
years in jail for hanging a banner on a hotel near Red Square that said, 
"Putin, Quit Your Job."

What the conference perhaps did best was to confirm that Russia's opposition 
remains scattered and disorganized.

"Nobody was planning to unite here," Illarionov said. "It's a conference to 
discuss different views by different people."

Putin's foes seem to have a bleak future, as polls give the president an 
approval rate of nearly 80 percent, and clear majorities say they favor him 
serving a third four-year term, despite a constitutional requiriement to 
step down in 2008.

In an open letter, conference organizers implored the leaders of the G-8's 
seven other nations to question Putin about "the increasingly autocratic and 
repressive policies of the Russian government."

Osman Boliyev, head of the human rights group Romashka, arrived at the 
conference from the southern Russian republic of Dagestan, where he said 
authorities detained him last year for three months after falsely claiming 
to find him in possession of an illegal weapon. He urged members of the 
various opposition parties to unite - lest they perish.

But Ilya Yashin, leader of the youth wing of the liberal Yabloko party, was 
skeptical. "I don't think anything exceptional will come next," he said. "If 
the authorities hadn't been so hysterical about the conference, nobody would 
have even noticed it."

Yashin was referring to comments by Putin's envoy to the G-8, Igor Shuvalov, 
who declared that the presence of any foreign officials at the forum would 
be viewed as an "unfriendly gesture."

Authorities made some unfriendly gestures of their own. Riot police amassed 
outside the hotel on the opening day. And, according to organizers, many 
would-be participants from regions outside Moscow were prevented from 
arriving.

In Yashin's view, the problem with the summit was that it "combined the 
uncombinable," referring to the polar-opposite ideologies of some of the 
participants.

"They all have different 'Other Russias,'" he said of Kasparov, Anpilov and 
Eduard Limonov of the National Bolshevik Party. "There are three 'Other 
Russias.'"

There may, in fact, be a fourth: the Russia of the masses, those who are 
neither involved in politics, nor want to be. "Unfortunately, that is 
Putin's Russia," Yashin said. "It's the main basis for any authoritarian 
regime."


erika.niedowski at baltsun.com