McAuley, Mary Human Rights in Russia: Citizens and the State from Perestroika to Putin (review)

Abstract

SEER, 94, 2, APRIL 2016 380 McAuley, Mary. Human Rights in Russia: Citizens and the State from Perestroika to Putin. I. B Tauris, London and New York, 2015. xiii + 353 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Dramatis Personae. Further Reading. Index. £68.00. There are few people more qualified to write about the evolution of the human rights movement in post-Soviet Russia than Mary McAuley, director of the Ford Foundation’s Moscow office for seven years from 1995–2002. Her book, Human Rights in Russia: Citizens and the State from Perestroika to Putin traces the history of various strains of the human rights movement from the early years of perestroika to the state-led attack on non-government organizations in 2013. Part memoir, part scholarly inquiry, it is a book written for students, scholars and a broader readership interested in human rights questions in Russia, as well as themes that relate to the global human rights regime. It is a contribution that complements more recent publications by Samuel Greene and Valerie Sperling on the role of Russian social movements in a transitional regime. McAuley’s key arguments circle around three themes. Firstly, she questions the extent to which the Russian human rights community has been able to act collectively in the face of political and social challenges. Secondly, she analyses whether the community has influenced politics and policy making over the course of the past twenty years. Finally, she aims to determine whether any particular historical legacies have made the task of defending human rights in Russia unusually difficult. The search for a common purpose among the human rights community in Russia and the debates surrounding it are central to McAuley’s book. As she argues, ‘as disillusionment with the politicians grew, the defence of human rights became the ground on which people of very different persuasions set up their tents’. The important aspect of McAuley’s contribution is the historical chart she provides of the arguments around this challenge and the various strategies that were adopted. The first attempt to find a common purpose was pioneered by the Moscow Helsinki Group (MHG) when it sought to strengthen the relationship between large Moscow-based entities and regional organizations. Clearly, McAuley’s knowledge of the regional landscape makes this section particularly important, as well as illustrating that while the structures may not have been long-lasting — regional organizations gained a great deal from access to Moscow-based seminars, workshops and grant making bodies, as well as professional experience in reporting. These early attempts by MHG to coordinate the centre with the regions also illustrates how anathema MHG was to vertical power structures, preferring more democratic forms of governance, a reality that complicated subsequent attempts to work with the Russian state. REVIEWS 381 Of course, this search for collective action has been challenged not only by the regional differences that define Russia, but the very question of the relationship between the state and civil society itself. Undoubtedly, getting agreement on what constitutes a ‘right’ and moving away from the civil/political rights dynamic to a more-inclusive understanding of the scale of rights issues in Russia has been a victory for the community itself. Yet McAuley shows how conflicted many activists have been around promoting cooperation between government bodies and civil society organizations while key activists, such as Ludmilla Alekseeva, have led the charge, arguing for the importance of cooperation with the state, however marginal the effects might be. McAuley’s coverage allows us to witness how formidable the personal and professional obstacles to productive cooperation have been, showing first the Civic Forum of 2001 in which civic activists and government officials sat down very tentatively to discuss issues and plan dialogue for the future. The question, over time, became less about the morality of cooperation, but more about ensuring proper representation on such bodies as the President’s Council for the Advancement of Civil Society and Human Rights, set up in 2004, and the Civic Chamber, set up in 2005, each of which opened very slight cracks in the door for discussion with state officials. Much of this relationship between civil society and the state has emerged as a result of the marginalization...