Posts Tagged ‘the atlantic’
The Kony-ification of Pussy Riot
Pussy Riot have been found guilty of “religious hatred” for their February 21 protest at the Christ the Savior Cathedral. You can watch the offending 55 seconds that got them into so much trouble here. The case itself is troubling for many reasons. For one, Pussy Riot are clearly not expressing hatred of Orthodox Christianity, but they are protesting the Church’s close relationship to Vladimir Putin and his regime. Hating Putin is not hating religion, unless Putin is now religion in Russia.
The world wants to help, and that’s great. but that effort may actually misunderstand both Russia and its challenges in ways that are not always constructive. Pussy Riot have been turned into a cause célèbre by Western pop culture mavens. Madonna, Paul McCartney, Bjork, even Sting — who apparently learned his lessons after screwing up in Kazakhstan, where he once sold his services to a dictator — have publicly issued statements supporting the fem-punkers.
Pussy Riot are being unjustly persecuted (in a free society, they’d have been given a slap on the wrist and a fine, then let go), and that’s appropriate and good to protest. But the support movement also carries some uncomfortable echoes of the Kony 2012 campaign and its many less-infamous predecessors, repeating an unfortunate practice of activism for the sake of activism, of enthusiastic support for someone who seems to be doing the right thing without really investigating whether their methods are the best, and privileging the easy and fun over the constructive.
The Kony 2012 campaign, by an American NGO called Invisible Children, was the most successful social media effort ever. Centered around a short movie of the same name, it was meant to raise the international profile of Joseph Kony, a notorious warlord in Central Africa famous for conscripting child soldiers and other horrific atrocities. While the Western celebrity efforts around Pussy Riot don’t have the same ring of neocolonialism as the Kony 2012 videos and events — Russia was a perpetrator of colonialism and not a victim, after all — they do suffer from similar fundamental problems of commercializing political activism.
In a real way, Kony 2012 took a serious problem — warlords escaping justice in Central Africa — and turned it into an exercise in commercialism, militarism, and Western meddling. Local researchers complained about it, and a number of scholars used it as an opportunity to discuss the dos and don’t of constructive activism.
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The Rise and Probable Fall of Putin’s Enforcer
On June 4 2012, Russian reporter Sergei Sokolov was part of a press delegation accompanying the three-year-old Investigative Committee, often described as Russia’s FBI, on a trip to Kabardino-Balkaria, a republic in the Caucasus. Sokolov’s publication, Novaya Gazeta, is one of the few independent newspapers left in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, a fact ominously borne out by the five journalists who have been removed from its masthead by being murdered — among them, Anna Politkovskaya. So the 59-year-old head of the Investigative Committee, Alexander Bastrykin, might have expected a less-than-friendly audience in Sokolov, who had indeed already filed a blistering dispatch about the Committee’s bungled investigation into the murder of 12 people, including four children, in Kushchevskaya, a village in the Krasnodar region, which took place in 2010. Krasnodar is notorious for its gang violence and Sokolov was particularly incensed about what had happened to Sergei Tsepovyaz, a local state official who’d destroyed evidence in the case and whose brother was a known member of the gang that perpetrated the killings: the brother got off with a $5,000 fine. Sokolov not unreasonably alleged a state coverup and named Bastrykin and Putin as “servants” of Krasnodar gangsters. After being cornered by his quarry in Kabardino-Balkaria, however, the journalist apologized for some of his prior coverage, but Russia’s top cop was neither appeased nor amused. “I consider myself insulted,” Bastrykin replied, “and not just personally. In czarist times they would have called people out to duel over this.”
A duel wasn’t quite what happened next. The delegation, including Sokolov, returned safely to Moscow. Nine days later, on June 13, Dmitry Muratov, the editor of Novaya Gazeta, published an open letter addressed to Bastrykin, in which he claimed that Bastrykin had threatened to behead and dismember Sokolov:
“Sokolov was placed in a car by your bodyguards. He was taken without any explanation to a forest near Moscow. There, you asked the bodyguards to leave you and remained face to face with Sokolov… The hard truth is that, in your emotional state, you rudely threatened the life of my journalist. And you joked that you would investigate the murder case personally.”
Bastrykin’s initial reaction, in an interview with pro-Kremlin newspaper Izvestia, was to say that he hadn’t even been in a forest “in years.” All the allegations made in Muratov’s letter, he said, were “outright lies.” However, his denial couldn’t stop an undeniably scandalous story — what Muratov later described as “bad Hollywood” — from gripping the nation’s attention. Five journalists were arrested for picketing outside the Committee’s headquarters in Moscow the day the letter was published. What then followed was unprecedented. Rather than retrench and perhaps lock up Muratov, Bastrykin invited the Novaya Gazeta editors to a meeting hosted by Interfax, another media outlet, whereupon the Committee chief issued a formal apology to Sokolov, who was by now well out of Russia, fearing for his life. (Sokolov returned a few days later.)
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How Putin Uses Money Laundering Charges to Control His Opponents
Last Thursday, Sergei Magnitsky was convicted of tax evasion. The only problem was he was not there to hear the verdict read. Magnitsky was killed in Moscow’s Butyrka prison in 2009, likely as a result of beatings and a lack of medical treatment. His crime was uncovering a $230 million tax fraud involving members of the government while working as a lawyer for William Browder (an American investor who was also convicted in absentia).
But Magnitsky’s conviction is not simply an example of the capricious nature of the legal system in Russia; it is a view into how the use of money laundering, financial laws, and Russia’s financial intelligence unit are used to control political dissent.
Recently, Putin launched a much publicized “de-offshorization” campaign aimed at fighting corruption and countering the flight of money from the country, much of it acquired illicitly. This initiative was launched in response to revelations that Russia was losing vast sums of money every year (estimated at $56.8 Billion in 2012), and that many state officials–from the heads of security agencies to the chair of the Russian Duma’s ethics committee–had significant overseas assets (including condos in Miami, worth an estimated $2 million). Much of this wealth was being sent to offshore tax havens in Europe and beyond. Russian holdings in Cyprus amounting to over $30 billion (largely the proceeds of corruption or deposited as a form of tax avoidance) also inspired this campaign. (This scheme of tax avoidance is called “round tripping,” whereby the proceeds made in Russia are registered with a shell company based in Cyprus, then repatriated to Russia avoiding taxes due to a taxation agreement between the two countries). These revelations gave Putin the expedient cover with which to launch “de-offshorization,” which included banning state officials from having overseas assets. The idea is that, by forcing Russian elites to hold their money inside the country, Putin can cement their loyalty by threatening their bank accounts.
As Russian Duma Deputy Dmitry Gorovtsov noted on the new law banning state officials overseas assets, “This law is about political, and not legal, control. It will be applied selectively and subjectively.”
The statement is particularly prescient due to the fact that corruption is an integral part of Putin’s rule, forming the foundation of his patronage system but costing an estimated $300 billion in an economy of $1.5 trillion, or 16 percent of its yearly GDP. Unsurprisingly, Russia was rated worst among countries surveyed for the perceived likelihood of paying bribes in Transparency International’s 2011 Bribe Payers Index. As NYU Professor Mark Galeotti notes, “Politics determines everything and corruption is mobilized as a weapon against enemies (and a treat for friends). Your abuses get publicized as a result of your losing influence within Putin’s court, not the other way round, reflecting the vagaries of factional politics in that court.”
Hence, Putin’s calls for action at the G8 summit in June on offshore tax havens, de-offshorization and the recent tightening of anti-money laundering laws are aimed at strengthening his ability to control the elites of the country and to shore up his political base.
But patronage is only one aspect of the tandem that underpins the stability of the Kremlin; the other is coercion. Supporters are kept in line through an implicit threat to throw them in jail and to seize their assets should their loyalty be called into question. The ability to provide financial incentives–through the acceptance of dubious business practices–acquires their support, the threat of jail and repossessing their assets ensures it. A silent agreement between Putin and business elites was reached in the aftermath of Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky being thrown into jail in 2003 for attempting to challenge Putin politically (Khodorkovsky was also charged with additional money laundering and fraud charges in 2010 as he was nearing the end of his first sentence). As William Partlett of Columbia University and the Brooking’s Institute said about the incident, “The message to other oligarchs was clear: follow the rules or face devastating legal consequences.”
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The Man Behind Putin’s Adoption Ban Once Tried to Investigate Russia’s Spy Agency
Children’s ombudsman Pavel Astakhov is now the face of Putin’s Magnitsky retaliation law, but in a past life he was an anti-FSB advocate.
For a man known as Russia’s Judge Judy, Pavel Astakhov has had more luck causing a diplomatic crisis than any family court judge ever had. Appointed Russia’s child right’s commissioner in 2009 by former President Dmitry Medvedev, Astakhov’s domestic and international profile has risen steadily since, culminating in his patronage of the new state law banning U.S. citizens from adopting Russian orphans and describing his critics as “pedophiles” who are either “blind or stupid.”
The measure is built right into the so-called “Dima Yakovlev Law,” the Duma’s broad answer to the newly passed Magnitsky Act, which blacklists and sanctions Russian officials credibly accused of gross human rights violations. Dima’s Law has been hysterically presented in the Russian state-controlled media as a necessary corrective to a spate of American adoptive parents mistreating or even killing their wards, with Astakhov taking center stage as a Cassandra against the “export” of the some 60,000 native sons and daughters who’ve found homes in the United States since 1991.
Yet Astakhov’s peregrinations from post-Soviet legal eagle and intellectual celebrity into spokesman for Vladimir Putin’s most frivolously nasty anti-American measure is particularly fascinating given the fact that he doesn’t quite fit the prototype of Kremlin flack. He formerly defended Vladimir Gusinsky, the first billionaire oligarch and media mogul to have his empire confiscated by the state, under the direct threat of arrest or worse by a then-new-minted President Putin; he also represented Edmond Pope, an American businessman and retired naval officer, who was convicted of espionage, then pardoned.
Best known for his Court TV-style reality series (where the defendants are played by actors), a constant stream of self-help books on teaching Russians all about property rights, real estate and family law, and another constant stream of Grisham-esque legal thrillers, Astakhov has a Masters of Law from the University of Pittsburgh, making him one of the few top state officials to be partially educated in the United States. (Like most state officials, his eldest son studied in Britain and then New York City.) He was on these shores when al-Qaeda attacked on September 11, and has since taken to referring to America as his “second motherland.” He certainly has favorite holiday destinations. A few months ago, Seven Days magazine (think People) ran a J. Crew ad-cum-puff piece about Astakhov and his attractive family, explaining how his wife Svetlana not only gave birth to their youngest son in Nice, but then had the child baptized in Cannes. In what would have been cosmopolitan heresy for any other Russian official, Astakhov favorably compared the French Riviera’s ob-gyn and neonatal systems to those of his first motherland: “We really had the largest ward in the hospital: three rooms, a parental bedroom, a children’s room and a guest room. But all this, including the medical care, cost three times less than what it would cost in an elite Moscow hospital.” Even the food, he said, was better than back home.
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Corruption and Cover-Up in the Kremlin: The Anatoly Serdyukov Case
At the World Economic Forum at Davos on Wednesday, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev was asked the inevitable question about Sergei Magnitsky, the Russian attorney who exposed a $230 million tax fraud perpetrated by organized criminals and Russian state officials, only to then be blamed for the crime himself. He died in prison in 2009, when Medvedev was president, after being tortured and denied medical attention, as Medvedev’s own Presidential Human Rights Council concluded. Magnitsky’s name has since been woven into US human rights law following the passage and presidential signing of a bill that would sanction and blacklist Russians complicit in his persecution as well as any other individuals credibly accused of “gross violations of human rights,” such as, say, Chechen dictator Ramzan Kadyrov. This legislation has driven the Kremlin to paroxysms of anti-American hysteria, culminating in the Duma’s recent ban on American adoptions of Russian orphans.
Nevertheless, the Russian prime minister was unimpressed. Although he professed to feel “pity” for Magnitsky, Medvedev described him as no ” truth seeker,” just “a corporate lawyer or an accountant and he defended the interests of the people who hired him” — a reference to Magnitsky’s former client, William Browder, whose investment fund, Hermitage Capital, was used as the vehicle for transacting the tax fraud. (Browder is almost singlehandedly responsible for turning the plight of his slain lawyer into an international human rights scandal and, consequentially, an American law).
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