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Lyudmila Alexeyeva: Civil Society in Russia Strongly Emerging

Currently there is more civil action in Russia than one might think, the recognized Russian human rights defender Lyudmila Alexeyeva said yesterday at the public discussion organized by the Open Estonia Foundation. She predicts that due to wide public opposition the Moscow authorities will drop their plan to display posters of Stalin in the city during the celebrations of Victory Day in May this year. At the same time Alexeyeva considers Russia to be far from democracy.

“Although civil society in Russia is deformed as a result of the government’s pressure, civic movements occasionally succeed in resisting the authorities,” Alexeyeva noted. She said a large part of civil action is not reflected in the statistics because Russian laws have made the registration of NGOs extremely difficult. Therefore interest groups and movements often operate as free networks, using the internet to distribute information. Alexeyeva compares the internet to samizdat, the Soviet-time underground dissident literature, and believes it is a powerful tool for democratic forces. “If the Soviet authorities couldn’t put an end to samizdat, the Russian authorities today will never manage to restrict the spread of internet,” she said, joking that the KGB used to work far more effectively than the FSB does today.  

Despite her belief in the emergence of civil society, Alexeyeva is convinced a genuine civil society is not possible in a situation where poverty touches almost 80 per cent of the population: “People whose daily concern is to find means to buy clothes for their children and send them to school, have no time to think about civil rights.” An additional obstacle to civil society is the fact that the majority of the population is informed only via government-controlled mass media channels.  

The human rights activist and former Soviet dissident Lyudmila Alexeyeva visited Estonia at the invitation of the Open Estonia Foundation. Yesterday’s discussion was the first in the Russian Voices series, dedicated to analyzing the political and human rights situation in Russia through the minds of Russian intellectuals, civic activists and human rights advocates.  

The summary of the discussion (in English, Estonian and Russian) is available at the Open Estonia Foundation’s website www.oef.org.ee/venemaa.