RUSSIA'S SPREAD OF 'SOVEREIGN DEMOCRACY' (original) (raw)

President Bush left the NATO conference in Bucharest, Romania, this month with a couple of significant accomplishments - but one large and quite surprising failure. He couldn't persuade America's erstwhile allies in Europe to admit Ukraine and Georgia to NATO.

For once, this is not primarily Bush's fault. It's Russia's. Moscow angrily opposes the idea, and some Europeans, dependent on Russian oil, were unwilling to challenge Moscow. After all, relations between Russia and the West have already grown so poisonous that the Nikita Khrushchev era seems almost beatific in comparison.

As Sergei Markov, a Russian legislator, told an American and European audience, fairly seething with anger and resentment, the Iraq war is "criminal" and "if you don't recognize your mistake, what should we expect later? The situation and security will grow worse and worse" and lead to a new "military race."

For now, the race is political, and Russia's latest ploy is the Institute for Democracy and Cooperation, a new Russian nongovernmental organization. Moscow is opening branches in New York and Paris. NGOs of this sort typically help struggling democracies find their feet with aid and advice. Russia isn't planning to offer aid to the United States. But expect plenty of advice.

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As an example, the Russian Foreign Ministry noted recently that the United States exercises a "double standard" in dealing with other nations' human rights failings, while the United States "has essentially legalized torture, applies capital punishment to minors" and "denies responsibility for war crimes and massive human rights abuses in Iraq and Afghanistan."

Anatoly Kucherena, the Russian lawyer who says he persuaded Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, to support the planned institute, said he hopes it will be able to "identify the weak spots" in American public life. And Natalya Narochnitskaya, who heads the institute office in Paris, adds: "Our task is real; this is not just some retaliation, although this would be quite natural."

How should the United States react? Here are some ideas: Send the Internal Revenue Service in to audit the institute's books - over and over again. Dispatch thugs to beat up local children who do volunteer work for the institute. Require its officers to file quarterly reports on their activities. And then, with no notice, send police to shut the place down and expel its officers. When asked for an explanation, say the report was filed with the wrong office.

If the Russians complain, tell them: "This is not just some retaliation, although this would be quite natural."

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Does all of that sound a bit extreme? That's exactly how Russia dealt with the International Youth Human Rights Movement, a Berlin-based group. Last summer, about a dozen thugs beat up two teenagers who were active members. One of them, Sergei Fedulov, lost two teeth. Then last fall, authorities shut down the organization, explaining that it should have filed its quarterly report with its local Federal Registration Office. The group had filed in Moscow.

In 2005, Putin imposed strict regulation of the half million domestic and international NGOs based in Russia. The law allows the state to demand niggling detail about every facet of their activities. For example, the Moscow Times reported that authorities told Citizens' Watch, a Russian group, that it had to turn over every bit of correspondence with anyone - written, e-mail, fax or whatever - for the last three years or face closure.

So to the apparatchiks who will run the Institute for Democracy and Cooperation in New York, I say knock yourself out. Take comfort that the United States does not require you to file quarterly reports and turn over correspondence for the last 36 months.

Tell us everything we are doing wrong. Fire away. Join the cacophony of American voices making the same complaints - including candidates for president. We actually have three of them. Our courts have not disqualified every member of the opposition.

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In Russia, "Within a short period of time, all main democratic features of a democratic state have disappeared," Mikhail Kasyanov, the former Russian prime minister, noted last week. In January, the government barred him from running for office, even after he had collected the requisite 4,000 signatures. Russia calls the form of government that allows this "sovereign democracy."

Kasyanov and Markov were speaking at a conference in Bucharest last week put on by the German Marshall Fund. Responding, one audience member said, "The old Soviet joke comes to me: What is the difference between democracy and sovereign democracy? The same as the difference between the chair and the electric chair."

April 13, 2008

Joel Brinkley, a former New York Times reporter who won the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting in 1980, died in March of undiagnosed acute leukemia, which led to respiratory failure from pneumonia.

Mr. Brinkley was the Hearst Professional in Residence for the journalism program at Stanford University, a position he assumed in 2006 after a 23-year career with the New York Times. There he served as a reporter, editor and Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent.

He wrote a weekly opinion column on foreign policy.