Putin’s Russia Is ‘Not Free,’ Survey Finds

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The New York Sun

For the first time since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia has been rated “not free” by Freedom House, America’s oldest human-rights organization.


In the “Freedom in the World” survey for 2005, released yesterday, Freedom House rebuked Russia with a “6, 5” ranking for the past year. Nations are rated under the categories “political rights” and “civil liberties” on a scale of 1 to 7, with 1 indicating the greatest level of freedom.


Freedom House divides countries into three categories: free, partly free, and not free. The 6 grade on political rights sealed Russia’s slide from partly free status into the ranks of the not free.


Russia’s freedom downgrade came as President Bush announced plans to meet with President Putin February 24 in Slovakia, according to the Associated Press. The AP reported that in a news conference yesterday, Mr. Bush said he enjoyed “a vital and important relationship” with the Russian president.


And the AP reported that Secretary of State Powell said Friday at a press conference: “There has been considerable improvement in Russia since the days of the Soviet Union. Human rights have improved. They do have open elections, not perhaps as open as we’d like.”


Mr. Powell added: “The Cold War is not coming back. And we want to encourage President Putin and our Russian colleagues to keep moving in the right direction to build their democracy on a sound foundation, and that includes free access to media, respect for human rights, and to keep moving in the direction they had been moving.”


Since 1972, Freedom House has issued the “Freedom in the World” report – which has become the standard in the human-rights community – to gauge the levels of political and civic freedom in independent nations and disputed territories, based on criteria drawn principally from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.


Other nations with a 6 rating include Cambodia, Egypt, Pakistan, Rwanda, and Iran.


In a statement yesterday, Freedom House’s executive director, Jennifer Windsor, explained the downgrade. “Russia’s step backwards into the Not Free category is the culmination of a growing trend under President Vladimir Putin to concentrate political authority, harass and intimidate the media, and politicize the country’s law-enforcement system,” the statement said.


A senior scholar at Freedom House and an authority on Ukraine, Adrian Karatnycky, said Mr. Putin’s control over the press was one of the greatest sources of concern when considering the level of freedom in Russia.


“It’s no longer a question of whether they’re just unbalanced in favor of the government. They’re basically constructing an alternate view of the world,” Mr. Karatnycky, who wrote the analytical essay summarizing the results of “Freedom in the World,” said.


“Part of that view,” Mr. Karatnycky added, “is a higher degree of anti-Americanism, higher suspicion of the motives of the West – a broader sense that there’s an external and internal enemy around; that Russia is being encircled.”


Three months ago, following the September 1 terrorist massacre of schoolchildren at Beslan by Russia’s Islamist enemies, Mr. Putin consolidated authority by ending the free election of local governors by popular vote. In addition to that power grab, Mr. Karatnycky said, the absence of real political opposition in Russia is worrisome. Despite “a facade of competitive, civilian politics,” the three main opposition parties are controlled by security and military leaders, he explained.


He added that Russia’s 6 ranking and its not-free status do not include Chechnya, for which a separate ranking was issued.


The executive director of the New Atlantic Initiative at the American Enterprise Institute, Radek Sikorski, agreed with Freedom House’s assessment.


“I think it’s a recognition of reality,” Mr. Sikorski, a former dissident against Soviet control in Poland, said, “and it’s somewhat overdue.”


“When I now speak to my Russian friends in Moscow, they are afraid again of talking to foreigners. They are speaking in hushed tones, afraid of authority figures,” he reported.


“People who even two years ago were in the mainstream of liberal Russia tell me they feel like dissidents again,” he added.


Mr. Sikorski explained that Russia has now returned to a restrictive system of “internal passports” that existed with the tsars and in Soviet days, under which Russians must register with authorities if they travel outside their areas of residence for more than a few days.


“What does that tell you about the nature of that regime?” he asked.


While acknowledging the slide into authoritarian tendencies, Mr. Sikorski said he is not concerned about a return to full-blown totalitarianism.


Mr. Putin and his associates, he said, are “very corrupt” but lack the fanatical idealism of Soviet leaders and other totalitarians. “This is more a sort of Mussolini-like regime,” Mr. Sikorski said, in that the desire for control is very present but an ideological obsession is lacking.


Dissenting from Freedom House and Mr. Sikorski, a historian of Russia, Richard Pipes, said the ranking was “probably too strong.”


Russia “is not at all in the category of Cuba, or North Korea,” Mr. Pipes, a Harvard professor emeritus, said. “People can travel freely. They can own property. There’s a semi-free press.” Also, Mr. Pipes was optimistic about the effects Ukraine’s “Orange Revolution” would have on Russia’s internal politics.


“You may see some stirring in Russia,” Mr. Pipes said, “because Russians may learn from Ukrainians that they don’t have to take things lying down, that they can stand up to the government.”


The director of Russian studies at the American Enterprise Institute, Leon Aron, likewise found the Freedom House ranking excessively harsh.


“The downgrading declaring Russia ‘not free’ shows that we really need more categories to define the absence or the presence of liberty,” Mr. Aron said.


“I understand that Freedom House wanted to react to a new sort of authoritarian brand in Russian politics after September 1, and it’s definitely there,” Mr. Aron said. “But at the same time, it lands Russia – where the press is free, where demonstrations are possible, where one can say anything, where dissidents simply don’t exist … it puts Russia in the same category as Libya, Egypt, Zimbabwe, Belarus, where none of those things are possible.”


A spokesman for the Russian Embassy, Yevgeniy Khorishko, joined in objecting to Freedom House’s ranking. “We do not agree with the conclusions of this report. It seems to us that this report is biased and politically motivated,” Mr. Khorishko said.


Despite the decline in Russian liberty, 26 countries experienced increases in freedom while only 11 became less free, according to the new report. Gains were made in Middle Eastern and North African countries, owing particularly to women’s-rights and civic activism.


Nineteen countries, however, received the lowest possible ranking,”7,” for political rights. Among “the worst of the worst,” Freedom House found, are Cuba, China, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, Sudan, Libya, and Iraq.


The New York Sun

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