Civil society development in Russia faces a great number of problems. The Carnegie Moscow Center hosted a roundtable on the problems and prospects for civil society, coinciding with the latest meeting of the McFaul-Surkov working group on civil society.

The United States was represented at the roundtable by Michael McFaul, special assistant to the U.S. president for national security and senior director for Russia and Eurasia at the U.S. National Security Council; Daniel Russell, deputy assistant secretary of state for Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova; John Beyrle, U.S. ambassador to Russia; and members of the U.S. embassy staff.

Russian participants included heads of civil society organizations and members of the expert community. Among the Russian panelists were Igor Averkiyev, chairman of the Perm Civic Chamber; Elena Kovalevskaya, director of the Civil Society program at the Open Society Institute; Ivan Ninenko, deputy director of Transparency International Russia; Ida Kuklina, co-chair of the Union of the Committees of Soldiers’ Mothers of Russia and member of the Presidential Council for Civil Society Institutions and Human Rights; Olga Romanova, representative of the Business Solidarity movement; Sergey Kanayev, head of the Moscow office of the Federation of Russian Car Owners; Igor Zadorin, director of ZIRCON research group; Alexander Kynev, head of regional programs of the Foundation for Information Policy Development; Lev Gudkov, director of Levada Center; and Valery Kalinin, member of the coordinating council of stakeholders in the Moscow’s condominium Western Gate of the Capital. The event was moderated by Nikolay Petrov.    

Civil Society in Russia 

It is hard today to speak of a common and well-formed civil society in Russia. Civil society exists, but it is fragmentary and divided across both horizontal and vertical sections of the population. The participants agreed that Russian civil society as it exists today is basically a collection of different groups with different interests, different motives for participation, and varying organizational forms.  

Structure of Civil Society 

Civil society can generally be classified according to the following parameters:

  • Experts and Activists: There is a divide between the community of experts on human rights issues and the human rights activist movements. The expert community, in turn, is split between liberals and supporters of the authorities, with a big and unbridgeable gap between the two sides.  
     
  • Public Organizations: At their most basic level, public organizations can be divided between those which cooperate with the authorities and the protest organizations that do not. Zadorin identified three main categories of public organizations, beyond the split as to their relationship with the authorities:

    1. local groups protesting over a specific issue;
       
    2. ethnic- and immigrant community-based organizations;
       
    3. and organizations with a criminal past. 

Interaction Between Human Rights Activists and the Authorities

The authorities have built a strict structure for their relations with human rights and public organizations over the last decade. A space for dialogue has been established, but with notable limits.   

  • Areas of Cooperation: There are currently two scenarios for civil society engagement with the state: the open zone of constructive cooperation, and the marginalized or taboo zone. In this second situation, the state is not ready for dialogue and consciously reduces the space for it, imposing restrictions and prohibitions which sometimes contradict the law.
     
  • Possibility for Influencing the State: The existing instruments for dialogue with the state do not always produce results. Human rights activists thus often try to resolve individual problems by submitting individual complaints.  
     
  • Nature of Relations: Interaction between human rights activists and the authorities, which should take place through existing institutions, is instead personalized (focused around relations with specific individuals in the state bodies). It is therefore unstable and ineffective in the long term.
     
  • Protest Movements: The state has not yet managed to organize relations with the protest movements defending human rights. These protest movements, meanwhile, continue to expand their numbers of supporters, despite their limited resources.
     
  • New Space for Dialogue: A new space for dialogue is in the process of being created: the state initiates setting up consultative councils, opening offices to receive the public, and organizing social organizations and activist movements.

Recent Trends

  • Politicization: Overall, recent years have seen the politicization of the human rights and public movements in Moscow and across Russia. This process, which has gone hand in hand with increasing divisions between the different political forces, has led to even greater fragmentation in Russia’s civil society.
     
  • Public Perceptions: Negative state propaganda has recently helped to discredit many public organizations in the eyes of the Russian public. These organizations have come to be seen as either pursuing concealed commercial aims, or acting as conduits for “Western” influence. The actions by the authorities to suppress coordination between protest NGOs and the population only make the situation worse.

During the discussion McFaul also shared some views on the way civil society in the United States operates, and talked about the activities of the U.S.-Russian working group on civil society.

Texts from the discussion and the analysis of the questionnaires filled in by the participants are published in the form of Working Papers by the Carnegie Moscow Center (in Russian).