Sergei Roy, editor of intelligent.ru:
Democracy and Human Rights.
Democracy and respect for human rights, just as for all the other liberal values, go together — this seems to be the accepted wisdom. A careful student of the spreading of democracy, however, can easily prove that this is a mere fallacy, an assumption that just does not square with facts. Not in the Soviet Union or Former Soviet Union, anyway.
In the post-Stalinist period, the Soviet Union remained an extremely undemocratic, totalitarian country, an evil empire, to quote Ronald Reagan. Freedom of speech, zero. Freedom of political associations, ditto. Freedom of conscience, ditto. Freedom of travel, ditto. We all know the list of those iniquities. But, consider the ultimate human right — the right to live. When did this right enjoy greater respect — before or after the democratic revolution, the overthrow of communism, and the collapse of the “evil empire’?
Don’t tell me; let me tell you. In May 1987 I paddled in a seven-foot-long kayak along the western coast of the Caspian, starting at Samur on the border between Dagestan and Azerbaijan and finishing in Sumgait. I traveled solo, spending the nights on the beach, sleeping in the kayak and feeling absolutely safe, though sometimes my sleep was disturbed by sturgeon poachers. In the daytime they were not averse to taking a pot shot at a strange boat apparently heading for their nets, but I had the sense to paddle straight for the shooters, to show them how tiny my ridiculous boat was, and how innocuous the solitary wanderer. They then remembered that a traveler is the Prophet’s gift to the faithful, and treated me accordingly. The trip was tough but great, and I promised myself to start next year in Sumgait and continue southwards.
Well, I never did, nor am I ever likely to do. Next year “Sumgait” became a word that dripped blood and inspired horror as it hit the world's papers and TV screens. At that time Azerbaijan and Armenia were already at each other’s throats over the disputed territory of Nagorny Karabakh, with Popular Fronts, the first shoots of democracy, so to speak, active on both sides. In February, Azeri mobs rampaged through the streets of Sumgait, killing, raping, maiming, beating up Armenians and plundering their homes. Horror stories quickly reached Moscow of pregnant women's bellies being ripped up, and similar atrocities. Some 30 people were reported dead, and 197 wounded and beaten up. The Azeri police let the pogrom run its bloody course for three days, before unarmed federal troops were sent in — only to be attacked by mobs armed with knives and iron bars. There were more casualties, this time among the troops. Russians, mostly.
And that is the whole thing in a nutshell. The lifting of totalitarian, imperial order, the rise of “democratic” Popular Fronts all over the outlying regions of the Soviet Union aroused the basest instincts in the “demos” of those lands, varying only in the degree of bestiality. The nice phrase to describe those feelings was “aspirations of sovereignty.” In sordid fact, it was bestial nationalism; it was pure Nazism. If you did not belong to the “titular nation” or ethnic group, you had no human rights at all. Certainly not the ultimate human right, to live.
Ask Meskhetian Turks. In 1989, just as the First Congress of People’s Deputies, then the highest achievement of democracy in the Soviet Union, was winding up, a murderous conflict erupted in the Fergana Valley in Uzbekistan between the local population and the Meskhetian Turks deported there during the Second World War. Sixty thousand of them had to be flown out of Uzbekistan, leaving behind about a hundred killed by the Uzbeks, and taking with them about a thousand injured. Their original homeland was in Georgia, on the border with Turkey — but could they be brought back to Georgia, which was then staging mass rallies and hunger strikes in support of democracy? Even vague rumors of such a move nearly sparked violent protests among the local Georgian population. So the Turks had to be scattered over the vast, long-suffering Mother Russia, many of them in Krasnodar Territory. Here, they are not treated by the local Cossacks with exquisite courtesy, that is true, but pogroms? Killings? Not on your life. Still, their plight is laid at the door of Russia, and there is a lot of noise about a hundred of them being resettled in the US. Not in their native Georgia, though. Their native Georgia is a beacon of democracy now; a democracy that stops short of permitting these people to go back to their ancestor’s land. It would be a good idea for Amnesty International to inquire into the matter, but somehow I feel certain it won’t.
OK, Meskhetians are a small people. Now, what about the fate of millions of Russians and Russian speakers (who could belong to any of the 100 plus nationalities of the Soviet Union) in areas where those ethnic Popular Fronts were active? Was Amnesty International ever interested in those millions? I doubt it — yet their human rights were abused routinely and most horribly. Many lost their lives or were maimed during pogroms. Many more lost their jobs, their apartments, and all their property, as they fled for their lives from lands where their ancestors had often lived for generations. Still, all that was in a good cause, the overthrow of communism and the destruction of the Soviet Union, so presumably Amnesty International had no business poking its nose in these laudable processes.
Chechnya is the classic case, of course. In 1991 Ruslan Khasbulatov, a Chechen himself and at the time Yeltsin’s right-hand man (later mortal enemy), supported the “democratic” General Dudayev's coup against the local “partocrats” in the hope of creating a puppet — and produced a Frankenstein monster. The rape, plunder and murder of anyone passing through Chechen territory had begun already in 1990, but with the coming of Dudayev it all became institutionalized. Dudayev’s first edict was on the right of every Chechen to carry arms, and an out-and-out ethnic cleansing was carried out immediately forthwith. Several hundred thousand non-Chechens — those, that is, who hadn’t been shot out of hand or hadn’t had their throats cut — scattered through the vastness of Russia, their misery totally unrecorded by any Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International. Then came the long series of massive hostage takings and pillaging in adjacent Stavropolye by Chechen bands; the raid on Budyonnovsk in 1995, with Basayev’s gunmen shooting people in the street for fun, like partridges, then taking a thousand patients hostage in the town hospital and using women nearing childbirth as human shields — literally lifting them on windowsills and shooting at the troops between their legs; Raduyev’s raid on Pervomayskoye, with another bunch of hospital patients taken hostage and dozens dying; the 1999 attack on Dagestan, and the residential blocks blown up in Buynaksk, Moscow, Volgodonsk in the same year; the commuter trains blown up near Kislovodsk; the Dubrovka siege in Moscow in 2002; the later spate of bombings in Moscow; the Beslan school atrocity in September 2004. Not to mention little things like the slave markets and zindans, holes in the ground for keeping slaves in, in virtually every Chechen village; the beheadings of Russians, New Zealanders, or any other infidels who have no human rights at all in the eyes of these subhumans. Careful, Roy — the politically correct West is chary of calling them terrorists, even. No, they are merely “separatists,” or their own proud self-appellation, “mujaheddin.”
Do we hear much about the human rights violations by these “separatists”? God forbid. Whenever human rights and Chechnya come up in Western discourse, it is always about the awful human rights record of the Kremlin, and of Russians generally, against those angelic Chechens.
No doubt about it — human rights watchers are very selective in deciding what to watch and what to let go unnoticed. In the above, I touched only briefly on the human right to live and the way it fared in the transition to democracy. There is yet another big chapter in this odyssey — how the human right to a dignified life was trampled on in the course of the plunder that transition to a market economy turned out to be; how the lives of millions of people degenerated and were cut short by the privations which that process entailed. Again, do we hear much from the human rights watchers about these violations of the rights of millions? No, but we hear a great deal about the sufferings of one of those plunderers; the billions he had stolen clearly weigh more than the sufferings of millions on the peculiar scales used by our honest human rights watchers. And no wonder — democracy is at stake! Putin is backtracking on democracy!
You know, lots of people here wish he backtracked some more. In America, that was called stepping on the corns of “the comparative few who seek to retain or to gain position or riches or both by some short cut which is harmful to the greater good.” The numbers of Russia’s billionaires are growing alarmingly — which means that the plunder goes on. So if Putin is serious about backtracking in the FDR spirit, he ought to, for starters, do something about Russia’s tax system, which some people call the most barbarous and anti-social in Europe. Such a move would show that he really respects the right of human beings, his fellow-countrymen, to live in dignity, not squalor. And it would be approved by about 90 percent of Russia’s population.
That’s democracy enough for me.
Nu, zayats, pogodi!
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