Vladimir Putin held the annual meeting of the Presidential Council for Civil Society and Human Rights (SPCh). A few years ago, this was one of the more uncomfortable fixtures on his calendar. Council members used to put genuinely tough questions to the Russian president: political repression, political prisoners, environmental disasters, social injustice. The council still included real human-rights defenders, prominent activists and independent experts. Many of them have since been branded foreign agents, jailed, or labelled extremists and terrorists in the new Putin era.
Today, with the rare exceptions of film director Alexander Sokurov and Moskovsky Komsomolets journalist Eva Merkacheva, the council is packed with people who are entirely loyal to the Kremlin; quite a few can fairly be described as ultra-patriots. Even before the war the focus of the meetings had shifted from human rights to «social issues.» After the full-scale invasion began, support measures for the military and their families started to dominate the agenda completely. The loyalists on the council understood perfectly well what the president likes to talk about and dutifully follow his lead.
This year’s session was overwhelmingly about the war. It opened with a report by council chairman Valery Fadeyev on «crimes committed by the Ukrainian armed forces.» Other members raised housing for soldiers’ families, benefits for wounded veterans, «Russophobia» in the West, and school places for repatriated compatriots. The only moment that briefly recalled the old-style SPCh meetings was an unscheduled intervention by Alexander Sokurov. He tried to confront the president with genuinely painful social problems: sky-high utility bills and the fact that budget-funded university places are now being taken en masse by war veterans and their children.
«I fully understand the political logic of the decision,» Sokurov told Putin. «But from the point of view of educational standards and fairness, some balance is needed. The number of state-funded places has fallen dramatically. Many universities are already saying that next year they will have literally no budget places left.»
Sokurov also touched on censorship (something he has experienced personally) and even on the foreign-agent law. He gave Putin an example the president ought to understand: the classic Soviet war film Ballad of a Soldier could not be made in Russia today because of current censorship rules. He got nowhere.
«I can assure you,» Putin replied, «that the children of our heroes — the men taking part in the special military operation — are in no way intellectually inferior to other applicants for higher education. The issue is how we work with those young people.»
Utility-bill hikes, the president explained, were simply inflation. On the foreign-agent legislation his remarks suggested either that he is genuinely unfamiliar with the latest amendments and how they are enforced, or that he decided to misrepresent the facts in public (though the lie would have been too brazen). «I know your position on the foreign-agent law,» Putin said, «but we didn’t invent it — it goes back to the United States in the 1940s. It wasn’t us. Over there, breaking that law can mean prison; here it doesn’t.» In reality Russian courts now hand down real prison sentences for violations of the foreign-agent rules with monotonous regularity.
Sokurov’s was the only tense moment. Everyone else either stuck to military or patriotic themes or asked for relatively trivial things (one member wanted clearer rules for electric scooters and bicycles on urban pavements). Sharp social problems — price inflation, factories moving to short-time working, cuts to regional social budgets — were not raised at all. Clearly no one wanted to spoil the president’s mood.
That the Human Rights Council has finally mutated into something closer to a Soviet-era social-security office (sobez in popular parlance) became unmistakable after Valery Fadeyev gave an interview to RBC. He happily discussed «social» issues but brushed off anything sharper — for instance the blocking of messengers — with the line: «Against the background of a serious war with the entire West, these are mere bagatelles.»
This new «human-rights sobes» has a distinct bias: it is primarily interested in the rights of soldiers and veterans. The rights of ordinary citizens interest it rather less; if anything, it is ready to curtail them when the interests of the state demand. The council even tries to play «bad cop» while pretending to be the good one. Fadeyev himself has just discovered a fashionable new cause: the alleged abuse of self-employed status.
«The whole point of the self-employment regime,» he said, «was to bring irregular incomes — nannies, tutors, creative workers — out of the shadows and broadly speaking that aim has been achieved. But it must remain the citizen’s free choice whether to be on a company’s staff or to work with it as a self-employed contractor with the corresponding rights. Instead, people are being told: we will only hire you as self-employed, sign here.» Fadeyev proposed giving the labor inspectorate the power to raid companies and demand that courts reclassify such contracts as normal employment.
The Crackdown on Communists Continues
In Altai Krai the authorities are waging a systematic campaign against Communist Party (KPRF) deputies in the regional legislative assembly. Deputy Lyudmila Klyushnikova and her assistant Yulia Kerber have been arrested on suspicion of fraud — the usual claim that the assistant was fictitiously employed. The same charge is reportedly being prepared against the assembly’s Communist vice-speaker, Yuri Kropotin (he has already been questioned about his own assistant). Another deputy, Andrei Chernoby, had his phone seized in an attempt to revive an old case over an «unauthorized picket.»
The Altai branch is one of the strongest Communist organizations in the country. Its leader, Maria Prusakova, won a State Duma seat in single-mandate voting at the last election — a rare competitive victory. The KPRF faction in the regional assembly has 18 members (United Russia has 34). In November, Artawazd Oganesyan, a Communist deputy in Primorsky Krai’s legislative assembly and one of the main financial backers of the regional party, was also jailed.
We have previously written about pressure on Communist branches in various regions, but those cases were usually linked to local conflicts with governors or mayors. What is happening in Altai and Primorye looks more like coordinated, centralized work. In Altai the targets are prominent, popular deputies who could have campaigned effectively ahead of the next Duma election and improved the party’s national result. In Primorye the blow is aimed at a key donor, which will seriously hamper the branch’s operations.
The Kremlin no longer bothers to conceal its desire to push the LDPR into second place in the next parliamentary election and to marginalize the Communists. Targeted strikes against the party’s most successful regional organizations are one element of that strategy. Arresting well-known deputies and sponsors disrupts normal party structures and makes campaigning much harder. It would be no surprise if other strong Communist branches — in Irkutsk or Novosibirsk regions, for example — soon find themselves in the firing line. By using the security services to knock popular local figures and funders out of politics, the Kremlin is pulling the rug from under the KPRF and trying to turn it into an empty, fully controllable project run out of the presidential administration’s political department.
