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
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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
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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

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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

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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