Russia is a country of extremes. «The Icon and the Axe», symbolically titled James H. Billington his book of «interpretative history of Russian Culture», and George F. Kennan called contradictions the «essence of Russia»: «West and East, Pacific and Atlantic, Arctic and tropics, extreme cold and extreme heat, prolonged sloth and sudden feats of energy /.../ ostentatious wealth and dismal squalor /.../ simultaneous love and hate for the same objects /.../ The Russian does not reject these contradictions. He has learned to live with them, and in them. To him, they are the spice of life /.../ The American mind will not apprehend Russia until it is prepared philosophically to accept the validity of contradiction» .
Grazhdanskoe obshchestvo (civil society) is becoming the new mantra of the Russian government and the political elite in general. The term is widely used in the contemporary Russian political lexicon. A reference to the “creation of civil society” or its “further development” is usually present in a typical set of arguments put forth by Russian policymakers endorsing certain political initiatives in the country. Work on “developing structures of civil society in Russia” is regularly discussed during meetings between President Vladimir Putin and leaders of parliamentary factions or presidential envoys, as happened, for instance, on 28 June 2001 during Putin’s meeting with envoys Petr Latyshev (Urals federal district) and Leonid Drachevskii (Siberian federal district). Even the formation of a coalition of two political parties—the pro-Putin Edinstvo (Unity), and Primakov-Luzhkov’s Otechestvo–Vsia Rossiia (Fatherland-All Russia)—was officially welcomed by President Putin because it was expected to become an “important step aimed at strengthening and developing the political system, and creating civil society.”
Stricter controls over grants and donations to Russian NGOs from foreign organizations have been long anticipated. It’s certainly a positive development. There is nothing “draconian” about it. Among other experts in the country, scholars at the Russian Government’s Institute of Legislation and Comparative Law have been speaking (and not only speaking) about the necessity of imposing such controls since the mid-1990s.
It’s not the first time that Western officials and mass media question a “free and fair” character of elections in Russia. Just 2 years ago, the U.S. “Russian Democracy Act of 2002” (P.L. 107-246) named only two “substantially free and fair Russian parliamentary elections” – of 1995 and 1999 (sec. 2(3)(B)). Fascinatingly, early drafts of the act extended the same definition to Russian “Presidential elections in 1996 and 2000”. The U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations struck down the second part of the sentence. At long last, U.S. Senators got embarrassed to call Yeltsin’s shameful reelection in 1996 “free and fair”.
Fifteen years after creation of the first non Communist proto parties (Democratic Union, «Pamyat’», etc.) and twelve years after formation of the Democratic Platform in the CPSU which triggered the collapse of the Communist h...
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