Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin Speak out Against Putin’s Reforms

Soviet Union’s last president Mikhail Gorbachev and Russia’s first president Boris Yeltsin expressed criticism regarding Vladimir Putin’s proposed reforms in Russian electoral system. Statements by Yeltsin and Gorbachev were made in exclusive interviews to Moskovskie Novosti (The Moscow News) weekly, and will be published in that newspaper’s Friday issue. MosNews, which is a partner publication of Moskovskie Novosti, posted full translation of both statements on our website on Thursday.

Our common goal is to do everything possible to make sure that bills, which, in essence, mean a step back from democracy, don’t come into force as law. I hope that the politicians, voters, and the president himself keep the democratic freedoms that were so hard to obtain, — reads Mikhail Gorbachev’s statement. Soviet Union’s last president, who ruled the country from 1985 to 1992, is convinced that Russian authorities “must search for political solutions, negotiate with the middle-of-the-road militants, separating them from the unappeasable extremists”.

His successor Boris Yeltsin, whose second presidential term ended on December 31, 1999, with a surprise announcement of his voluntary resignation (

Vladimir Putin was named acting president three months before actually getting elected in March 2000), calls on the Kremlin to refrain from undermining the existing constitutional framework, despite the necessity of fighting terrorist threats.

I firmly believe that the measures that the country’s leadership will undertake after Beslan will remain within the framework of democratic freedoms that have become Russia’s most valuable achievement over the past decade. We will not give up on the letter of the law, and most importantly, the spirit of the Constitution our country had voted for at the public referendum in 1993. If only because the stifling of freedom and the curtailing of democratic rights is a victory by the terrorists. Only a democratic country can successfully resist terrorism and count on standing shoulder to shoulder with all of the world’s civilized countries, — Yeltsin says in his statement.

Boris Yeltsin’s statement is viewed as a surprise move by many observers in Moscow. Unlike Mikhail Gorbachev, who is still active on Russian political scene, Yeltsin chose to refrain from public comments about Vladimir Putin’s politics ever since his retirement. Recently Boris Berezovsky, an exiled tycoon, renowned for his criticisms of Kremlin and Putin, published an open letter to Russia’s first president, urging Yeltsin to speak up and reminding him of his responsibility for the establishment of Russian constitutional democracy. Yeltsin makes no mention of Berezovsky’s call in his statement, but some observers tend to link his decision to break silence with the exiled oligarch’s request.

Putin Moves to Tighten Kremlin's Grip Russian President's Plan Would Abolish Regional Elections in Effort to Thwart Terror

By VLADIMIR ISACHENKOV, AP

MOSCOW (Sept. 13) -- Responding to a series of deadly terror attacks, President Vladimir Putin on Monday moved to significantly strengthen the Kremlin's grip on power, with new measures that include the naming of regional governors and an overhaul of the electoral system. Putin told Cabinet members and security officials convened in special session that the future of Russia was at stake and urged the creation of a central, powerful anti-terror agency.

''The organizers and perpetrators of the terror attack are aiming at the disintegration of the state, the breakup of Russia,'' he said. ''We need a single organization capable of not only dealing with terror attacks but also working to avert them, destroy criminals in their hideouts, and if necessary, abroad.''

Putin's declaration followed a series of stunning terror attacks blamed on Chechen rebels, climaxing in the three-day school seizure in southern Russia in which more than 330 people were killed.

He said he would propose legislation abolishing the election of local governors by popular vote. Instead, they would be nominated by the president and confirmed by local legislatures - a move that would undo the remaining vestiges of the local autonomy already chipped away by Putin during his first term in office.

Putin explained his move by the need to streamline and strengthen the executive branch to make it more capable of combating terror.

His critics immediately assailed the proposal as a self-destructive effort that could fuel dissent in the provinces.

''The abolition of elections in the Russian regions deals a blow to the foundations of Russian federalism and means the return to the extremely inefficient system of government,'' said Sergei Mitrokhin, a leading member of the liberal Yabloko party.

Sergei Markov, a political analyst with close ties to the Kremlin, said the president's move against the governors could help curb corruption that has flourished in some regions.

''At the same time, it means ... a lowering of (their) general political authority and a serious lowering of political pluralism,'' Markov told Ekho Moskvy radio. In another move aimed to strengthen the federal authorities, Putin recommended eliminating the individual races that currently fill half of the seats in the national parliament and have the entire lower house filled by parties on a proportional basis.

Putin said that the move would help foster dialogue by expanding the clout of political parties, but his opponents warned it would further increase the clout of the Kremlin-controlled parliament factions that already enjoy an overwhelming majority in the lower house, the State Duma. Vladimir Ryzhkov, one of the few opposition deputies, scorned the president's political proposals and said if they were approved, ''the next Duma will be simply virtual, it will consist of just marionette party lists and won't enjoy any authority.''

''How is it possible the president doesn't understand that it won't strengthen the country, it will further tear apart the unity of the country and tear federal organs power away from the people?'' he told Ekho Moskvy radio. ''Yes, the Kremlin's authority will be strengthened, but the country will be weakened.''

Although Putin has been criticized for strengthening his own powers in the past, three weeks of violence and the deaths of 430 people have led to increased support among the Russian people for measures to combat terrorism. Putin named one of his closest confidants, Cabinet chief of staff Dmitry Kozak, to represent him in the southern district that includes the Caucasus.

Putin said official corruption that had helped terrorists - such as the issuing of documents ''leading to grave consequences,'' should be punished with particular severity. He also signaled a possible government crackdown on Islamic groups, proposing that extremist organizations serving as a cover for terrorists should be outlawed.

A new structure called the Public Chamber would strengthen public oversight of the government and the actions of law enforcement agencies, he said. The chamber would involve non-governmental organizations and other groups in the fight against terror.

Putin said that terrorism is rooted in the North Caucasus' low living standards, in widespread unemployment, and in poor education.

''This is a rich, fertile ground for the growth of extremist propaganda and the recruitment of new supporters of terror,'' Putin said. ''The North Caucasus is a key strategic region for Russia. It is a victim of terrorism and also a springboard for it.''

Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin Speak out Against Putin’s Reforms

Our common goal is to do everything possible to make sure that bills, which, in essence, mean a step back from democracy, don’t come into force as law. I hope that the politicians, voters, and the president himself keep the democratic freedoms that were so hard to obtain, — reads Mikhail Gorbachev’s statement. Soviet Union’s last president, who ruled the country from 1985 to 1992, is convinced that Russian authorities “must search for political solutions, negotiate with the middle-of-the-road militants, separating them from the unappeasable extremists”.

His successor Boris Yeltsin, whose second presidential term ended on December 31, 1999, with a surprise announcement of his voluntary resignation (Vladimir Putin was named acting president three months before actually getting elected in March 2000), calls on the Kremlin to refrain from undermining the existing constitutional framework, despite the necessity of fighting terrorist threats.

I firmly believe that the measures that the country’s leadership will undertake after Beslan will remain within the framework of democratic freedoms that have become Russia’s most valuable achievement over the past decade. We will not give up on the letter of the law, and most importantly, the spirit of the Constitution our country had voted for at the public referendum in 1993. If only because the stifling of freedom and the curtailing of democratic rights is a victory by the terrorists. Only a democratic country can successfully resist terrorism and count on standing shoulder to shoulder with all of the world’s civilized countries, — Yeltsin says in his statement.

Boris Yeltsin’s statement is viewed as a surprise move by many observers in Moscow. Unlike Mikhail Gorbachev, who is still active on Russian political scene, Yeltsin chose to refrain from public comments about Vladimir Putin’s politics ever since his retirement. Recently Boris Berezovsky, an exiled tycoon, renowned for his criticisms of Kremlin and Putin, published an open letter to Russia’s first president, urging Yeltsin to speak up and reminding him of his responsibility for the establishment of Russian constitutional democracy. Yeltsin makes no mention of Berezovsky’s call in his statement, but some observers tend to link his decision to break silence with the exiled oligarch’s request.

Poisoned by Putin

The Guardian Unlimited ^ | September 9, 2004 | Anna Politkovskaya

It is the morning of September 1. Reports from North Ossetia are hard to believe: a school in Beslan has been seized. Half an hour to pack my things as my mind works furiously on how to get to the Caucasus. And another thought: to look for the Chechen separatist leader, Aslan Maskhadov, let him come out of hiding, let him go to the hostage-takers, and then ask them to free the children.

Then followed a long evening at Vnukovo airport. Crowds of journalists were trying to get on a plane south, just as flights were being postponed. Obviously, there are some people who would like to delay our departure. I use my mobile and speak openly about the purpose of my flight: "Look for Maskhadov", "persuade Maskhadov".

We have long stopped talking over our phones openly, assuming they are tapped. But this is an emergency. Eventually a man introduces himself as an airport executive: "I'll put you on a flight to Rostov." In the minibus, the driver tells me that the Russian security services, the FSB, told him to put me on the Rostov flight. As I board, my eyes meet those of three passengers sitting in a group: malicious eyes, looking at an enemy. But I don't pay attention. This is the way most FSB people look at me.

The plane takes off. I ask for a tea. It is many hours by road from Rostov to Beslan and war has taught me that it's better not to eat. At 21:50 I drink it. At 22:00 I realise that I have to call the air stewardess as I am rapidly losing consciousness. My other memories are scrappy: the stewardess weeps and shouts: "We're landing, hold on!"

"Welcome back," said a woman bending over me in Rostov regional hospital. The nurse tells me that when they brought me in I was "almost hopeless". Then she whispers: "My dear, they tried to poison you." All the tests taken at the airport have been destroyed - on orders "from on high", say the doctors.

Meanwhile, the horror in Beslan continues. Something strange is going on there on September 2: no officials speak to the relatives of hostages, no one tells them anything. The relatives besiege journalists. They beg them to ask the authorities to give some sort of explanation. The families of the hostages are in an information vacuum. But why?

In the morning, also at Vnukovo airport, Andrei Babitsky is detained on a specious pretext. As a result, another journalist known for seeing his investigations through to the end and being outspoken in the foreign press is prevented from going to Beslan.

Word comes that Ruslan Aushev, the former president of Ingushetia, rejected by the authorities for advocating a settlement of the Chechen crisis, suddenly walked into negotiations with the terrorists in Beslan. He walked in alone because the people at the special services headquarters responsible for the negotiations were unable for 36 hours to agree among themselves who would go first. The militants give three babies to Aushev and then release 26 more kids and their mothers. But the media try to hush up Aushev's courageous behaviour: no negotiations, nobody has gone inside.

By September 3, the families of hostages are in a total news blackout. They are desperate; they all remember the experience of the Dubrovka theatre siege in which 129 people died when the special services released gas into the building, ending the stand-off. They remember how the government lied.

The school is surrounded by people with hunting rifles. They are ordinary people, the fathers and brothers of the hostages who have despaired of getting help from the state; they have decided to rescue their relatives themselves. This has been a constant issue during the past five years of the second war in Chechnya: people have lost all hope of getting any protection from the state and they expect nothing but extra-judicial executions from the special services. So they try to defend themselves and their loved ones. Self-defence, naturally, leads to lynching. It couldn't be otherwise. After the theatre siege in 2002, the hostages made this harrowing discovery: save yourself, because the state can only help to destroy you.

And it's the same in Beslan now. Official lies continue. The media promote official views. They call it "taking a state-friendly position", meaning a position of approval of Vladimir Putin's actions. The media don't have a critical word to say about him. The same applies to the president's personal friends, who happen to be the heads of FSB, the defence ministry and the interior ministry. In the three days of horror in Beslan, the "state-friendly media" never dared to say aloud that the special services were probably doing something wrong. They never dared to hint to the state duma and the federation council - the parliament - that they might do well to convene an emergency session to discuss Beslan.

The top news story is Putin flying into Beslan at night. We are shown Putin thanking the special services; we see President Dzasokhov, but not a word is said about Aushev. He is a disgraced former president, disgraced because he urged the authorities not to prolong the Chechen crisis, not to bring things to the point of a tragedy that the state could not handle. Putin does not mention Aushev's heroism, so the media are silent.

Saturday, September 4, the day after the terrible resolution of the Beslan hostage-taking crisis. A staggering number of casualties, the country is in shock. And there are still lots of people unaccounted for, whose existence is denied by officials. All this was the subject of a brilliant and, by present standards, very bold Saturday issue of the newspaper Izvestia, which led with the headline "The silence at the top". Official reaction was swift. Raf Shakirov, the chief editor, was fired. Izvestia belongs to the nickel baron Vladimir Potanin, and throughout the summer he was trembling in his boots because he was afraid to share the fate of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Russia's richest man, who has been arrested on fraud charges. He was doubtless trying to curry favour with Putin. The result is that Shakirov, a talented newspaper manager and a generally pro-establishment man, is out of the game, a latter-day dissident - and this for deviating ever so slightly from the official line.

You might think that journalists staged an action of protest in support of Shakirov. Of course not. The Russian Union of Journalists and the Media Union kept mum. Only a journalist who is loyal to the establishment is treated as "one of us". If this is journalists' approach to the cause that we serve, then it spells an end to the basic tenet that we are working so that people know what is happening and take the right decisions.

The events in Beslan have shown that the consequences of an information vacuum are disastrous. People dismiss the state that has left them in the lurch and try to act on their own, try to rescue their loved ones themselves, and to exact their own justice on the culprits. Later, Putin declared that the Beslan tragedy had nothing to do with the Chechen crisis, so the media stopped covering the topic. So Beslan is like September 11: all about al-Qaida. There is no more mention of the Chechen war, whose fifth anniversary falls this month. This is nonsense, but wasn't it the same in Soviet times when everyone knew the authorities were talking rubbish but pretended the emperor had his clothes on?

We are hurtling back into a Soviet abyss, into an information vacuum that spells death from our own ignorance. All we have left is the internet, where information is still freely available. For the rest, if you want to go on working as a journalist, it's total servility to Putin. Otherwise, it can be death, the bullet, poison, or trial - whatever our special services, Putin's guard dogs, see fit.

The Putin putsch

By Helle Dale

Governments react differently to acts of terror. President Bush took the war against terror on the offensive, to Afghanistan and Iraq. He chose to meet force with force, and the United States — thankfully — has not been hit by acts of terrorism since September 11, 2001. In Spain, the newly elected government chose to react to the Madrid train bombings with appeasement, withdrawing Spanish troops from Iraq. This will most certainly make Europe less, not more secure, in the future.

In Russia, President Vladimir Putin has reacted to the Beslan school massacre by taking yet another step in centralizing political power in the Kremlin, as announced on Monday. To the foreign observer, tightening the country's political structures does not make a lot of sense in terms of improving Russia's dismal record on protecting the safety of its citizens. It does, however, make a lot of sense if the purpose is rolling back the democratic gains that were made in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union. This is a response that seems designed to take us back to the Soviets, possibly even to the era of the czars.

The occasion certainly deserved a very forceful response. Even with the horrors of September 11 still fresh in our minds here, the depraved, inhuman brutality that was visited on small town of Beslan, when Chechen terrorists grabbed hold of some 1,200 hostages on the first day of school, is unspeakable. As a result, Beslan is now mourning the slaughter of over 350 and more than 700 wounded — children, parents and teachers. Just thinking about what happened there breaks your heart.

The Russian government's initial response, however, was not promising. News agencies greatly underreported the number of hostages, and the unfolding drama was kept out of the news. It was a classic Soviet-style treatment, reminiscent of the days when any untoward event, from earthquakes to airline crashes to the Chernobyl nuclear reactor meltdown, was hushed up. Mr. Putin has also been blamed for not reacting quickly enough, remaining silent for two days and having taken insufficient security measures to protect the schools.

So, improving security in public buildings and strengthening anti-terrorism legislation and intelligence capabilities within the security services would be the first order of business, one would think. That's pretty much where we began in the United States on September 12, 2001. Russia's previous record on domestic terrorism has left a lot to be desired. From the Moscow apartment bombings, to the theater hostage drama, the murder of Chechen President Akhmad Kadyrov and the explosion in late August that brought down two passenger jets, killing 89 people, Russia is facing a massive if so far unacknowledged terrorist crisis, deriving mainly from the war in Chechnya.

In this context, Mr. Putin's threatened version of pre-emptive strikes against terrorist strongholds abroad is understandable, if somewhat nerve-racking given the Soviet record of assassinations over the years. Terrorism is terrorism, whether Chechens, al Qaeda or Hamas are involved, and must be fought. The United States itself reserved the right to strike pre-emptively at terrorist targets after September 11.

Yet, others of Mr. Putin's responses have been very troubling — for instance, Mr. Putin's pointed attacks on the governments of the United States and Britain for harboring Chechen terrorists. These are Chechens who have sought political asylum because of the brutal war renewed in 1999 by Mr. Putin himself against separatists in the small autonomous region of Chechnya.

And according to Monday's announcement on political restructuring, gone are the popular elections for Russia's 89 regional governors, some of whom grew in popularity to be rival power centers to the Kremlin. The Russian parliament, the Duma, also received the president's attention. Elections will now be based solely on party lists, which will restrict the formation of new political parties. Meanwhile, there has been no cabinet reshuffle to suggest that blame is being assigned. Should not someone — a Russian George Tenet? — be held accountable for the security failures and the chaotic law-enforcement situation that aggravated the Beslan tragedy?

All of this seems highly opportunistic, hardly designed for "internal security" as Mr. Putin stated, but part of a long-term strategy for authoritarian political control. Under the chaotic Boris Yeltsin, Russians in the 1990s gained many political freedoms to which they can now gradually wave goodbye. It is the biggest rollback in Russia's democratization process in a decade, and does not bode well for the future.

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