SAKHAROV'S PRAGMATIC LEGACY

C O N F I D E N T I A L SECTION 01 OF 03 MOSCOW 003034 SIPDIS E.O. 12958: DECL: 12/13/2019 TAGS: PREL PGOV PHUM KDEM RS SUBJECT: SAKHAROV'S PRAGMATIC LEGACY Classified By: Ambassador John Beyrle for reason 1.4 (d) ¶1. (C) Summary: Twenty years after his death, at a December 14-15 conference in Moscow, approximately 100 human rights leaders discussed the legacy of activist and Nobel Laureate Andrey Sakharov. Given the numerous blows dealt the Russian human rights community during the past several years, many activists have become embittered and pessimistic. Included in this group is Sakharov's widow, Yelena Bonner, who harshly criticized the current crop of activists for their ineffectiveness. In word and deed, albeit with different accents, Sakharov's successors in Russia's human rights community are grappling with the constraints of a political system that gives little attention to their work. However, human rights and governmental contacts with whom we discussed Sakharov's legacy generally struck a more hopeful and pragmatic tone, deflecting Bonner's attacks and pointing to Sakharov's own nimbleness, pragmatic savvy, and indomitable spirit as a model for their work. End Summary. Sakharov's strategic link: rights and security -------------- - ¶2. (SBU) On December 14, the twenty-year anniversary of Andrey Sakharov's death, the Sakharov Center convened approximately 100 human rights leaders and representatives of foreign organizations and Embassies to discuss the legacy of Sakharov's three-part manifesto: "Peace, Progress, and Human Rights." The event gave those who strive to carry on Sakharov's legacy an opportunity to take stock of the current state of Russian civil society, and the extent to which Sakharov's ideals have come to fruition, if at all. The Ambassador attended a special commemoration in the evening, where, during recollections by Sakharov's fellow activists from the Dissenters' Movement, he offered his own brief personal respects for Sakharov and his human rights work. ¶3. (C) Despite its numerous attempts to backslide on its human rights commitments, the GOR has not been able to escape the linkage that Sakharov made in his 1975 Nobel Prize acceptance speech promoting the sections of the recently signed Helsinki Final Act devoted to the defense of human rights. The December 14 conference began with a statement from President Medvedev -- read by Russian Federation Human Rights Ombudsman Vladimir Lukin -- which cautiously offered greetings and support to the event's participants, while attempting to emphasize the security portion of the security-rights equation. (Note: Unlike Medvedev, Prime Minister Putin has never publicly acknowledged Sakharov's legacy. End note.) Yuriy Dzhibladze of the Center for Human Rights and Democracy, who is a member of the Presidential Council on Human Rights, told us on the margins of the event that he was pleased that Medvedev had acknowledged the event, even if only tepidly. The optimistic Dzhibladze noted that it was an improvement over Medvedev's thorough snub of the July Civil Society Summit between U.S. and Russian activists, and hence "a possible sign of progress." Sakharov and glasnost: working with the system -------------- - ¶4. (C) Just as Medvedev has shown apparent ambivalence in his attitude towards current leading rights activists, Mikhail Gorbachev had an equally complicated relationship with Sakharov, though no ambivalence came through in Gorbachev's prepared statement for the event. In his statement, read by Olga Zdravomyslova, Executive Director of the Gorbachev Foundation, Gorbachev called the death of Sakharov a "huge loss" for Russia, lamenting that Sakharov did not live long enough to see the positive effects of glasnost and perestroika (by coincidence, the twenty-year anniversary of Sakharov's death came only five weeks after the twenty-year anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall). Gorbachev went on to say that people like Sakharov were "an example for others," and "come along only rarely in a generation." (Note: Some might have felt that Gorbachev was laying it on a little too thick. In an unrelated December 14 meeting, Professor Aleksey Stukanov of Tomsk State University, who also works for Tomsk Municipality, reminisced about watching Gorbachev cut off Sakharov's microphone during a particularly impassioned defense of democratic reforms in the Congress of People's Deputies. End note.) ¶5. (SBU) Zdravomyslova nonetheless claimed that "a deep understanding" existed between the two men, and this is plausible, as both Gorbachev and Sakharov were ultimately pragmatic reformers. That Sakharov, after nearly two decades of persecution by the KGB, ran for the (still Soviet) Congress of People's Deputies in 1989 showed that he saw work from within the system as the most efficacious way of accomplishing his goals of expanding respect for human MOSCOW 00003034 002 OF 003 rights. As Polish Solidarity veteran Adam Michnik noted during the event, Sakharov "began with belief in reforms and persuasion, in peaceful co-existence and convergence." Different approaches: the pragmatists and the "angry" camp -------------- -------------- ¶6. (C) Ironically, this attitude stood in contrast to the harsh attack leveled at Russian rights activists by Sakharov's widow, Yelena Bonner. In a statement at the opening of the conference read by Bonner's daughter Tatyana Yankelevich, Director of the Sakharov Program on Human Rights at Harvard University, Bonner lashed out at Russia's current crop of human rights activists for what she perceived as their insufficient elan in confronting the GOR, while taking a swipe at the West for "forgetting about" Russia and Sakharov. Dzhibladze and the Sakharov Center's Director Sergey Lukashevsky both waved away this criticism when speaking to us, adopting bemused expressions and noting, as Lukashevsky gently put it, that "Yelena Bonner is not known to be an easy person to please." (Note: Dzhibladze also expressed bewilderment at Bonner's focus, in more than half of her speech, on defense of Israel against what she perceives as unfair treatment in the global human rights community. End note.) ¶7. (C) Given the numerous blows that the Russian human rights community has received in the past several years, it would be easy to become embittered and to conclude, as did political scientist Andrey Piontkovsky of the System Analyses Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, that "in a certain typological sense we are today again in December 1989," and that all of Sakharov's efforts have come to naught. On December 14, in connection with the anniversary of the Russian Constitution, Moscow Helsinki Group leader Lyudmila Alekseyeva wrote an open letter to Medvedev in which she decried authorities' arrest of participants in the Dissenters Marches now held on the 31st of every month (to remind Russians of Article 31 of the Constitution, providing for freedom of assembly),and claimed that the current GOR attitude towards opposition is worse than during the regime of Leonid Brezhnev. Aleskeyeva has also decried the bilateral "reset" in U.S.-Russian relations for what she considered a potential abandonment of human rights. By contrast, in past conversations with us, Dzhibladze has advised U.S. officials promoting human rights to adopt a more conciliatory and respectful tone. ¶8. (C) The difference in approach between activists such as Dzhibladze and those such as Alekseyeva or Bonner indicates that Russia's current human rights community can be divided roughly into two camps, which we may refer to as the "pragmatic" camp and the "angry" camp. On December 8, Ombudsman Lukin bestowed human rights awards on five different activists in honor of the December 10 anniversary of the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. As Lukin is a GOR official, by definition his event embodied the "pragmatic" camp, but this by no means discredited the event. As a founding member of the liberal opposition Yabloko party, Lukin brings a solid democratic biography to his position; just like Yelena Bonner (and countless other Russians),he was orphaned by the 1937 Stalinist purges. Rights activists consistently refer to Lukin as an ally and an effective intermediary between them and the government. At the December 8 ceremony, Lukin awarded not only people who had worked for Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (a safe choice),but also posthumously awarded activists Natalya Estemirova and Maksharip Aushev, both of whom were murdered this year for their defense of human rights in the North Caucasus. Lukin lavished praise on all of the awardees, and paid tribute to them with video montages showing their words, life, and work. ¶9. (C) By contrast, a December 10 gathering of nationwide representatives of Lev Ponomarev's NGO "For Human Rights," which took place in a cramped, dingy room on the outskirts of town in an old Intourist hotel, featured speaker after speaker yelling into a microphone, airing a litany of grievances without finding a coherent theme. There appeared to be virtually no attendees under the age of 50. The overall effect gave the impression that Russia's human rights movement is in a dismal state, with little future. It would be unreasonable to blame either Ponomarev or his attendees for this state of affairs; the marginal nature of the conference was clearly the result of insufficient support either from officialdom or from society at large. However, one cannot help but contrast Ponomarev's approach with Lukin's. (Note: This contrast was also not lost on at least one of the sponsors of the Sakharov conference, who arranged for an additional breakaway session at the conclusion of the main conference to discuss updating the Sakharov image to MOSCOW 00003034 003 OF 003 make him and his work more attractive to younger Russians. According to a Levada Center poll, 31 percent of people aged 16-29 interviewed had never even heard of Russia's Nobel Peace Prize laureate, and most of those who did know of him remembered him as the father of the Soviet nuclear bomb. End note.) Comment -------------- ¶10. (C) Like other human rights giants, Sakharov possessed the rare ability to take a brave moral stance and "speak truth to power," while at the same time working pragmatically to ensure that the "power" was listening to the truth that he was telling. This combination is all too rare among activists, both in Russia and worldwide. As Sakharov wrote, "In the end, the moral choice turns out to be also the most pragmatic choice." Beyrle