Volume 2, Number 50
Friday, December 20, 2002

BIGOTRY MONITOR
A Weekly Human Rights Newsletter on Antisemitism, Xenophobia, andReligious Persecution in the Former Communist World and Western Europe

EDITOR: CHARLES FENYVESI
(News and Editorial Policy within the sole discretion of the editor)

Published by UCSJ: Union of Councils for Jews in the Former Soviet Union
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SOME MINORITIES ARE 'GENETICALLY DISLOYAL,' SAYS NDPR LEADER. In an interview published in "Moskovskie Novosti" on December 10, Boris Mironov, co-chairman of the recently formed far-right National Great Power Party of Russia (NDPR), acknowledged that he dislikes Jews, a feeling he justified with a rhetorical question: "What Russian person can like them after what they did to Russia?" He rejected the slogan "Russia for ethnic Russians," because it sets Russians and other "native peoples" such as Tatars and Buryats against each other. He defined "non-native peoples" as groups represented by foreign states, such as Israel, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia. Mironov advocated stripping "non-native peoples" of the right to vote, even if they were born in Russia and their ancestors lived in Russia for centuries, on the grounds that they are "genetically disloyal." Mironov was the minister of the press early on in Boris Yeltsin's first presidential term but was fired in 1994 after making statements such as, "If Russian nationalism is fascism, then I am a fascist."

RUSSIAN JUSTICE MINISTRY DEFENDS REGISTRATION OF NDPR. The Justice Ministry scrutinized the National Great Power Party of Russia (NDPR) and found no legal reason to deny its registration, Deputy Justice Minister Yevgeny Sidorenko told "Vremya MN" according to "RFE/RL Newsline" of December 13. (NDPR and its registration have been under attack in the news media, as statements by NDPR leaders are blatantly antisemitic and xenophobic.) NDPR may have odious personalities, Sidorenko said in his defense of the party's registration, but "a person's activities before a party's formation and his activities as a party leader are different things." He charged that some of the news media "distorted" the facts by quoting from alleged NDPR documents that are not the official documents submitted by the party to the Justice Ministry. According to Sidorenko, the documents singled out by the media have been referred to the Prosecutor-General's Office, since investigating "what was said and where it was said" is not in the Justice Ministry's jurisdiction.

COLONEL WHO RAPED AND KILLED A CHECHEN WOMAN DECLARED INSANE. A new chapter has been added to the murder trial that sums up Russia's war in Chechnya more poignantly than any novel or film.

On December 16, a fourth and perhaps final psychiatric examination declared Colonel Yury Budanov temporarily insane when he raped and strangled an 18-year-old Chechen woman, Elza Kungaeva, in March 2000, according to "The Moscow Times." Budanov has admitted that he killed her in a rage, thinking that she was a rebel sniper. The English-language Moscow daily quoted human rights activists to the effect that the psychiatric evaluation reflects a change in the public mood: The hostage crisis in a Moscow theater in October has strengthened the hand of those in the military and political establishments who demand an acquittal. Alexander Podrabinek, a human rights campaigner who investigates abuses in psychiatry, said that the evaluation by the Serbsky Institute was doing the military's bidding. "Serbsky has remained a citadel of punitive medicine since Soviet times, when it declared many dissidents insane," he said. "Its style is to serve the authorities, not people or justice." While the first psychiatric examination (which was not by the Serbsky Institute) found him sane, the results of the second are unknown, and the third, also by the Serbsky Institute, cited temporary insanity.

The court in Rostov-on-Don heard the psychiatric evaluation on December 16 at a hearing behind closed doors, with only the participants in the trial and the Serbsky experts in attendance. At the request of the Serbsky team, Budanov was removed from the courtroom lest listening to the evaluation affect his mental condition. The psychiatrists recommended that the court send him to a hospital for mandatory psychiatric treatment.

In the nearly two years since the trial began, Budanov has gained widespread sympathy, especially among supporters of the war. The neo-Nazi organization Russian National Unity (RNU) has repeatedly picketed the court, demanding an acquittal. But the pro-Moscow leadership of Chechnya, which has called for severe punishment, is bitter. "It will be difficult for the republic's leadership to explain to the people why Budanov, if he was really sick, was sent to command a division in the zone of the counter-terrorism operation," deputy head of the Chechen administration Taus Dzhabrailov told Interfax.

The charges carry a prison sentence of up to 20 years. If the court accepts the notion of Budanov's temporary insanity, it may reduce the sentence or send him to a hospital instead. But the court may surprise the nation by disagreeing with the Serbsky psychiatrists and decide that the colonel was in full possession of his senses when killing the woman.

PUTIN PLEDGES REFUGEES WILL NOT BE FORCIBLY RETURNED TO CHECHNYA. President Vladimir Putin pledged that Chechen refugees will not be forced to return to the region against their will, Lyudmila Alexeyeva, a member of Putin's human rights commission and chairwoman of the Moscow Helsinki Group, told the Associated Press last week. The UN, the U.S. government, the European Union, and human rights organizations have accused Russian authorities of forcing Chechens to leave refugee camps in neighboring Ingushetia and return to Chechnya. Alexeyeva said she told Putin that his subordinates were lying to him by claiming that refugees were returning of their own free will. Last week, Russian officials announced the shutdown of the Iman camp that housed 1,500 refugees and said they will close down the remaining camps in Ingushetia in the coming weeks.

"What does 'voluntary' mean, when they visit you at the camp and tell you bulldozers will tear your tent down on December 20 and you will be left in the cold?" Alexeyeva asked. She added that Putin agreed to her suggestion to create a joint commission of migration officials and human rights advocates to study the situation and report back to him.

NEW RUSSIAN MIGRATION POLICY IS REPRESSIVE, HUMAN RIGHTS LEADERS SAY. Russian human rights organizations charge that laws currently in force represent the main danger to the human rights of migrants and that the new laws on citizenship and the legal status of foreign citizens in Russia are making it even more difficult for migrants to find work in Russia and defend their rights. The debate took place in hearings on December 9 at the State Duma entitled "On the Draft Concept for the Regulation of Migration Processes in Russia," according to the Moscow newspaper "Kommersant."

Colonel-General Andrey Chernenko, head of the Federal Migration Service, rushed to reassure the human rights representatives, "Kommersant" reported. He spoke in support of the draft concept, but noted that it will be examined by the government only "as a kind of baseline document," that it will not be ratified in its current version, and that work on the concept continues "with the active participation of those who are criticizing us today." Listening to Chernenko, Memorial Foundation Chairwoman Svetlana Gannushkina whispered to the "Kommersant" reporter that this was all just talk and that "the version that the left hind leg of some presidential aide wants will nonetheless be adopted."

Gannushkina told "Kommersant" that the draft concept, submitted by Viktor Ivanov, deputy director of the Presidential Staff, had generated "a mass of complaints" and that promises were made that the complaints would be taken into account, but those promises were not kept. According to her, the proposed draft refused to take into account a key proposal: granting automatic Russian citizenship to former citizens of the USSR.

The hearing, held under the chairmanship of Valentin Nikitin, head of the Duma Committee for Nationalities Affairs, was designed to sum up the results of years of effort to draw up the concept. Work began in 1998, "Kommersant" noted, and the text has been passed from one official to another and now "nobody remembers any more what the initial draft looked like."

The opponents of human rights representatives -- Chernenko and nationalist Dmitry Rogozin, chairman of the State Duma International Affairs Committee -- said that the tightening of controls over migration processes envisaged in the draft is a priority. Those present found their arguments convincing and voted to adopt the draft, which recommends that migration policy spell out more clearly the rules governing the acceptance and processing of applications for Russian citizenship from immigrants and the mechanism for registering and finding work for immigrants who have lived in the country for quite a long time, including former citizens of the USSR. Moreover, the rules should reflect the "situation and features of the state regulation of migration processes in the North Caucasus region, including processes linked to the resolution of the crisis in the Chechen Republic." The draft document is scheduled to be submitted to the Federation Council on December 19.

RUSSIAN COMMUNISTS AND ORTHODOX CHURCH JOIN FORCES. The Russian Union of Orthodox Citizens and the National Patriotic Union of Russia (NPSR), an association comprising most Russian left-wing political parties, have agreed on holding joint political actions, Interfax reported on December 13. The decision was made at a recent meeting between Chairman of the Union of Orthodox Citizens Valentin Lebedev and NPSR leader and Communist Party boss Gennady Zyuganov. Among their plans is to join forces in roundtables and street demonstrations in support of the reunification of Russia and Belarus and to organize early next year a major international conference on fighting terrorism.

An Orthodox-Communist alliance, as strange as it may seem to outside observers, has been bruited about for some time, and it now appears that a demand for it is by no means limited to marginal elements in both camps. The first joint action, a prayer rally in support of teaching the fundamentals of Orthodox culture in Russian schools, took place on Sunday, December 15, the Union of Orthodox Citizens informed Interfax (see below). Next, the two organizations will present a bill in the State Duma on social partnership of the state and the Orthodox Church. NPSR member and co-chairman of the Union of Orthodox Citizens Sergey Glazyev drafted the bill.

The meaning of the moves is "socio-political partnership" rather than a change in the Union's attitude toward Bolshevism, press secretary of the Union of Orthodox Citizens Kirill Frolov told Interfax. "The Russian social mentality reveals a distorted system of notions," Frolov explained. "Those who call themselves rightists have abandoned a role the right-wingers play in the West, where they act as conservatives, defenders of the state's interests, and supporters of a strong Church. Therefore, the Orthodox need dialogue with forces understanding the important role of the Church and supporting Russia's unconditional sovereignty in foreign politics and the restoration of its positions in the former USSR, which is a canonical territory of the Moscow Patriarchate."

SUPPORTERS OF RUSSIAN ORTHODOX EDUCATION IN SCHOOLS RALLY. On Sunday, December 15, hundreds of people, most of them elderly, demonstrated in downtown Moscow to express their support for a plan to introduce Orthodox religious education in public schools, the Associated Press reported. Carrying icons and crosses, the demonstrators chanted prayers and endorsed the initiative of the Education Ministry, which last month sent instructions to the country's schools outlining an optional course called "Fundamentals of Orthodox Culture." (See Bigotry Monitor, November 22, 2002.) Valentin Lebedev, head of the Union of Orthodox Citizens, which organized the Sunday rally, told the crowd that those objecting to the course were violating the right of the Russian people to know their own culture. (Opponents of the plan include many teachers and human rights advocates who protest antisemitic and racist elements in the recommended textbook.) Lebedev declared: "Orthodoxy is everything in our country. The Orthodox education of our children is the future of a great Russia."

BELARUS: HOW MANY FAITHFUL CONSTITUTE AN ILLEGAL MEETING? Though the Belarusian government's Committee for Religious and Ethnic Affairs claims that a "mass" religious meeting requiring state approval constitutes one with at least 100 people, the senior religious affairs official in the capital Minsk, Alla Ryabitseva, has declared that if more than ten people gather together for a religious meeting without official permission they would be committing a crime, Keston News Service reports. She also declared that religious meetings without prior permission in private homes are illegal.

"The uncertainty surrounding the norms of the religion law allows local officials to give their own interpretation of the law, which in certain situations leads to the direct limitation of the rights of citizens," Dina Shavtsova, a Minsk-based lawyer who has been involved in religious liberty cases, said on December 12. She noted that when the new law was discussed, Protestant leaders pointed out that Article 25 of the law would allow local officials to arbitrarily restrict believers' rights to meet for worship. "They persuaded us then that nothing like this would happen, that this was an invented problem," she said. She pointed out that the restrictions on religious meetings in private homes violate Article 31 of the Constitution, which sets out the right to confess a faith individually or with others. "Home groups represent one form of the joint confession of religion." She added: "Thanks to Ryabitseva's efforts, a whole range of Evangelical churches which don't have their own church buildings have been deprived of the right to rent halls in Minsk. They can now only meet in home groups, though even this possibility is now dependent on the whims of one or another bureaucrat."

* * * QUOTE OF THE WEEK * * * "Eliminating the current educational disadvantage of the Roma created by segregated schooling must be addressed as a matter of urgency," wrote Dimitrina Petrova, director of the Budapest-based European Roma Rights Center in the magazine "Roma Rights," in the issue dated 3-4/2002. "We do not believe in teaching tolerance first and applying the knowledge only after the lesson is learned. Societies as well as individuals will not learn to be more tolerant before they start to act as if they are. The best project of ethnic tolerance training is the lived experience of the enforcement of anti-discrimination laws and policies."

U.S. RETURNS TO RUSSIA DOCUMENTS OF SOVIET REPRESSION
"The Smolensk Archives" Helped American Scholars Change the Image of the Stalin Era

In an unusual gesture underscoring the importance of historic violations of human rights and their documentary evidence, on December 13 U.S. Ambassador Alexander Vershbow handed over to Russia's Minister of Culture Mikhail Shvydkoy one of the 541 file boxes housing documents of the Smolensk Oblast Committee of the All-Union Communist Party, originally captured by the German army during their invasion of the Soviet Union. The retreating Wehrmacht took the files to Bavaria, where they fell into the hands of the U.S. occupation forces. "The Smolensk Archives" cover events from the beginning of the Bolshevik victory in 1917, and they document Stalin's brutal collectivization drive, the bloody purges of the 1930s, the waves of mass arrests, and the rapid growth of the gulag.

According to the Associated Press, Vershbow noted that the United States was transferring the files as part of an international effort to track down cultural assets seized by the Nazis and return them to their pre-war owners. Press accounts pointed out that in the 1960s, the U.S. government offered to hand over the files but the Soviets refused, claiming that they were forgeries. But today's Russian news media explained that the real reason had to do with the highly unfavorable information the files contained.

From 1947 on, American scholars and public officials studied the papers, recognizing that the microcosm of Smolensk, a regional center halfway between Moscow and Minsk, offered glimpses of the Soviet world, characterized in the early 1950s by the Central Intelligence Agency as "a black hole of information." The minutes of party meetings, letters denouncing the enemies of the regime, reports on restive populations, and orders issued by the party exposed the sordid realities of life under Stalin, once called "Uncle Joe" by President Franklin Roosevelt who also declared: "I like Uncle Joe."

In the early 1950s, Professor Merle Fainsod of Harvard relied on the papers to write "Smolensk Under Soviet Rule" and "How Russia Is Ruled," two books then considered basic to the study of the Soviet Union and now regarded as classics. A fair-minded synthesizer, Fainsod presented a dark picture that proved accurate as the Soviet Union opened up and dissidents offered more and more details on the mechanisms of repression. Fainsod found plenty of similarities in the practices of Nazism and Communism.

The Smolensk papers shored up George Kennan's famous 8,000-word telegram from Moscow in February 1946 that condemned Stalin's dictatorship as aggressive and dangerous, and called for a firm U.S. stance to contain further Soviet expansion then threatening Western Europe. Kennan's bold position paper and Fainsod's meticulous research helped to change the American assessment of the Soviet Union, a country acclaimed during World War II as a loyal ally and a fellow democracy.

One of Fainsod's research assistants was graduate student Zbigniew Brzezinski, later national security adviser during the Carter administration and now counselor to the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. He told "The Washington Post" how "The Smolensk Archives" gave "a truly authentic worm's-eye view of the social and institutional ugliness" of life at the local level. "We had shelves and shelves of this stuff," he recalled. "Yellowing paper with poor typing and handwritten notes scrawled in the margins. Minutes of meetings where neighbors were encouraged to denounce each other as 'enemies of the people.' Judgments of the 'troika' of local NKVD officials who would order arrests and executions and shipments to the gulag, particularly during the great purge years of 1935-1940." For Brzezinski, the documents proved how the Soviet bureaucracy and its relentless purges and ceaseless witch hunts "encouraged, administered, and fed off the worst weaknesses of human nature until they acquired a life of their own. There was no redeeming social feature."

Brzezinski told "The Post" that he welcomed the return of the files. "I hope President Putin enjoys reading it all," he said. "You know, his grandfather was one of Stalin's security guards. And Putin was very close to his grandfather."

There is a postscript. One of the obstacles delaying the repatriation of the documents was the refusal of the Russian State Library (formerly named after Lenin) to return the thousands of books belonging to the fifth Lubavitcher rebbe, Yosef Yitzchak Schneerson, confiscated in the course of the Bolshevik war on religion shortly after the revolution. For decades, the Lubavitcher movement asked the Russians for the books, and influential U.S. politicians -- especially Al Gore -- repeatedly pressed the Russians on the issue, but the Russians balked and voiced strong objections to the idea of a trade or conditionality. Sources close to the negotiations told this newsletter that the State Department, which had for years argued for the return of "The Smolensk Archives," might have negotiated a smart compromise: The two returns would not be officially or publicly linked, but the Russians will send back to the Lubavitcher community in Moscow at least a token package of Schneerson books once the U.S. National Archives ships the Smolensk files to Moscow. On December 13, the files were sent off and the U.S. ambassador ceremoniously delivered one symbolic file box to the Russian culture minister. According to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, on December 16, the Lubavitcher synagogue on Bronnaya street celebrated the arrival of 16 books from the Schneerson collection. One of them was a 200-year-old prayer book that was once the first Lubavitcher rebbe’s, and Rabbi Shlomo Kunin proceeded to use it in reciting the evening prayers.

A knowledgeable source outside the Jewish community predicts that other books will follow.
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