Russia races Backwards

Thomas S. Axworthy, the chair for the study of democracy at Queen’s University in Canada, writing in the country’s Finanicial Post:

Twenty years ago [last Monday], one of the twentieth century’s most glorious events unfolded to an astonished world — the Berlin Wall came down on Nov. 9, 1989. The holes punched in that wall also punched holes in the Soviet Union’s European Empire, and ultimately in the Communist Party’s empire in the Soviet Union itself.

But, rather than being a time of jubilation, the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall inspires instead a feeling of lost opportunity as Russia races backwards toward authoritarianism and the free world does its best to avert its gaze.

Journalists and human rights activists are routinely murdered in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Putin’s party, United Russia, recently convened a special meeting with senior Chinese Communist officials to explore how best to run a one-party government. As reported in The New York Times, Aleksandr Zhukov, a deputy Prime Minister and senior Putin aide, declared at the Oct. 9 meeting that “the accomplishments of China’s Communist Party in developing its government deserve the highest marks.”

United Russia soon demonstrated that it knew a trick or two on its own. On Oct. 11, United Russia swept more than 7,000 local elections but only after independent candidates were not registered and vote rigging was so brazen that the opposition in Russia’s National Parliament staged a walk out. Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader who ushered in glasnost (and allowed the Berlin Wall to fall) denounced the election as a mockery of democracy.

As Putin steadily reverses Russia’s brief chance for democracy in the 1990’s, he has skillfully persuaded many democracies, especially in Europe, to ignore his transgressions. In a particularly

cringing display former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder even called Putin “a lupenrein (flawless) democrat” (Schroder, of course is now chair of a German-Russian pipeline project). Energy dependence, it seems, silences human rights ardour. Russia supplies 40% of Germany’s oil and natural gas imports, and across Europe as a whole Russia is responsible for a quarter of Europe’s supplies. As one local critic of Germany’s pro-Russian advocacy within the European Union and NATO has said, Germany’s approach is “keep quiet and gas.”

Another 20th anniversary is fast approaching too — that of the December 1989 death of Andrei Sakharov, the great Russian physicist and dissident. Returning from his exile in Gorky at the invitation of Gorbachev, Sakharov became a member of the Soviet Union’s First Congress of People’s Deputies and was leading the battle to eliminate the Communist Party’s monopoly on political power when he died of a heart attack.

Raised to the summit of Soviet science because of his work on the H-bomb, in 1968 Sakharov wrote one of the seminal democratic essays of our time, Progress, Co-Existence and Intellectual Freedom. Soon he was standing in silent vigil outside of Soviet court rooms protesting the persecution of political prisoners. He even urged the U.S. Congress to pass the Jackson amendment to force the Soviet Union to allow Soviet citizens to emigrate. You cannot trust a regime, he said, that does not trust its own people.

Sakharov also had advice for the West. In a 1975 essay on The Liberal Intelligentsia of the West; Its Illusions and Responsibilities, Sakharov lashed liberals who turned a blind eye to the abuses within the Soviet Union. Human rights are universal, he wrote, and ignoring them even in powerful countries is “a dangerous illusion and an immoral one.” Sakharov loved his country but knew it could only thrive if it changed course. He loved the humanistic tradition of the West but worried about our hypocrisy in selectively applying our values. In this year of anniversaries we should honour the memory of Sakharov by not giving Vladimir Putin such a free ride.