[Congressional Record Volume 149, Number 153 (Tuesday, October 28, 2003)]
[Senate]
[Pages S13373-S13374]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                       AUTHORITARIANISM IN RUSSIA

  Mr. McCAIN. Mr. President, the arrest of Russian businessman Mikhail 
Khodorkovsky by Russian security agents last weekend is of grave 
consequence to U.S.-Russia relations. It caps a chilling and aggressive 
turn toward authoritarianism in Vladimir Putin's Russia. It is past 
time for all friends of Russia, and all who support strong U.S.-Russia 
relations, to speak out about the ascendant role of the Russian 
security services in the Kremlin, President Putin's suppression of free 
media, the government's politicized prosecutions of its opponents, 
continuing and grievous human rights violations at the hands of the 
Russian army in Chechnya, and increased Russian meddling, intimidation, 
and harassment of its sovereign neighbors. American policy must change 
dramatically as a result of these developments, which have been in 
evidence for several years, for there can be no stability in U.S.-
Russian relations, to say nothing of any strategic partnership, as long 
as Russia is moving away from the values of freedom and democratic 
progress so many Russians celebrated when the Soviet Union fell 12 
years ago. I will have more to say on this matter, but for the moment I 
wish to draw my colleagues' attention to an incisive opinion article by 
Bruce Jackson entitled ``The Failure of Putin's Russia,'' published 
today

[[Page S13374]]

in the Washington Post, and an accompanying Post editorial entitled 
``Pedaling Backward.''
  I ask unanimous consent that these articles be printed in the Record.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

               [From the Washington Post, Oct. 28, 2003]

                     The Failure of Putin's Russia

                         (By Bruce P. Jackson)

       Every so often the arrest of one man involves more than the 
     charges he may face and his fate before the court. In these 
     rare instances, the legal proceedings are a distraction from 
     the larger moral and strategic implications, and so they are 
     intended to be. The arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky by Russian 
     secret services in Siberia over the weekend is one such 
     arrest.
       The ``crimes'' of Khodorkovsky are considerable in the eyes 
     of the special prosecutor and the new regime of former KGB 
     officers who now surround President Vladimir Putin. As 
     chairman of Yukos Oil, Khodorkovsky is a successful 
     businessman who built the largest privately held company in 
     Russia from the wreckage of the Soviet energy sector, 
     converted his firm to Western business practices and entered 
     into merger discussions with American corporate giants. This 
     conduct alone might, in today's Russia, be considered a 
     threat to the state, but the real charge behind the arrest 
     contains much more.
       This has been a year in which independent media and major 
     independent business owners in Russia have been put out of 
     business by the strong-arm tactics of the special prosecutor 
     and the newly vigilant Federal Security Service (FSB), the 
     agency that succeeded the KGB. In a climate that progressive 
     Russian business executives compare to the fearful period of 
     the 1950s, Khodorkovsky made the fatal mistake of expressing 
     political opinions and having the temerity to provide 
     financial support to opposition parties.
       While this alone is insurrectionary behavior in the 
     increasingly czarist world of President Putin, Khodorkovsky 
     had the additional misfortune of being the last surviving 
     oligarch. For those who have not kept up their Russian, 
     ``oligarch'' is a term of art for ``rich Jews'' who made 
     their money in the massive privatization of Soviet assets in 
     the early 1990s. It is still not a good thing to be a 
     successful Jew in historically anti-Semitic Russia.
       Since Putin was elected president in 2000, every major 
     figure exiled or arrested for financial crimes has been 
     Jewish. In dollar terms, we are witnessing the largest 
     illegal expropriation of Jewish property in Europe since the 
     Nazi seizures during the 1930s.
       Unfortunately, the implications of Khodorkovsky's arrest go 
     beyond the suppression of democratic voices and the return of 
     official anti-Semitism. This arrest must be seen in the 
     context of increasingly aggressive, military and 
     extrajudicial actions in Ukraine, Moldova, the South Caucasus 
     and Chechnya. In the past month, Putin has demanded that 
     Ukraine sign a concessionary economic treaty; Russian 
     intelligence services have been detected behind election 
     irregularities in Azerbaijan and Georgia and in influence-
     peddling in Moldova and Abkhazia; and Russian gunboats have 
     confronted the Ukrainian Coast Guard in an illegal attempt to 
     seize a valuable commercial waterway.
       For the balance of his first term, Putin has skillfully 
     taken advantage of America's necessary preoccupations with 
     the war on terrorism and the liberation of Iraq. Now Moscow 
     and the capitals of Eastern Europe are watching carefully to 
     see how Washington responds to this latest crackdown. If the 
     United States fails to take a hard line in response to such a 
     high-visibility arrest, chauvinists in the Russian Ministry 
     of Defense and the FSB will correctly conclude that there 
     will be no meaningful response to the reestablishment of a 
     neo-imperial sphere of influence in the new democracies to 
     Russia's south and west. In addition to the expected Cold 
     War thuggery and opportunistic financial seizures, we 
     should expect that the new powers in Russia will rig the 
     crucial elections in Ukraine and Georgia next year and 
     continue to prop up the brutal dictatorship of Alexander 
     Lukashenko in Belarus.
       Finally, the incarceration of one man in Moscow's notorious 
     Matrosskaya Tishina Prison poses painful questions for U.S. 
     policy. It is now impossible to argue that President Bush's 
     good-faith efforts at personal diplomacy with Putin have 
     produced democratic outcomes. Indeed, each of Putin's visits 
     to the Crawford ranch and Camp David has been followed by the 
     cynical curtailment of democratic freedom inside Russia. 
     While it remains unclear what positive qualities Bush 
     detected in Putin's soul during their famous meeting in 
     Slovenia, it is abundantly clear that this is the ``soul'' of 
     a would-be Peter the Great.
       If anyone should pay a price for the pursuit of thuggish 
     policies, it is Putin. It's difficult to see why the U.S. 
     Senate would even consider repealing the Jackson-Vanik 
     Amendment, the 1974 legislation under which Russia still must 
     receive an annual waiver from the United States to maintain 
     normal trade relations. On the contrary, Congress should 
     probably consider additional sanctions. The FSB-led attack on 
     Russian business has already cost American shareholders 
     multiple billions in their savings. These losses will 
     undoubtedly continue until some element of the rule of law 
     returns to Moscow.
       The arrest of one man has sent us a signal that our well-
     intentioned Russian policy has failed. We must now recognize 
     that there has been a massive suppression of human rights and 
     the imposition of a de facto Cold War-type administration in 
     Moscow. It is not too soon to wonder if we are witnessing the 
     formal beginning of a rollback of the democratic gains we 
     have seen in Central and Eastern Europe, in Ukraine and 
     elsewhere since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
       Obviously, there will be some in Washington who will argue 
     that all the oligarchs are probably guilty of some 
     unspecified crime or another. And that we would be wise not 
     to jeopardize our relationship with Putin for the sake of one 
     man or one company. But there are some who are probably still 
     waiting for the facts of the Dreyfus case before jumping to 
     conclusions. The rest of us already know that we have been 
     played for fools.
                                  ____


               [From the Washington Post, Oct. 28, 2003]

                           Pedaling Backward

       Speaking to his cabinet yesterday, Russian President 
     Vladimir Putin dismissed the speculation sparked by last 
     weekend's arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Russia's richest 
     man. ``Everyone should be equal under the law,'' President 
     Putin said, ``irrespective of how many billions of dollars a 
     person has on his personal or corporate account.''
       Would that it were true. Whatever he may or may not have 
     done, Mr. Khodorkovsky, chairman of the Yukos oil company, 
     has not been arrested solely because he may have committed 
     crimes. If the Russian government were to hold all wealthy 
     businessmen to account for the laws they broke while 
     accumulating capital over the past decade, far more people 
     would be under arrest. In fact, Mr. Khodorkovsky's arrest has 
     been widely understood in Russia as a political act--and 
     possibly the beginning of a real change in official Russian 
     attitudes toward private property and capitalism itself.
       Mr. Khodorkovsky stands out in Russia because he has made 
     his company and its books more transparent than had any of 
     his rivals. Though the origins of his empire are shady, he 
     is, in some ways, Russia's first real capitalist--and like a 
     real capitalist, he hasn't hesitated to participate openly in 
     the democratic system by donating money to political parties, 
     including those who oppose Mr. Putin. Putting him under 
     arrest sends a clear signal to other Russians that no one is 
     safe from arbitrary prosecution, or from the political whims 
     of the Kremlin.
       It's also a signal that the Russian government cares far 
     more about destroying its rivals than it does about genuinely 
     improving the Russian economy. In recent months, there were 
     signs that capital flight from Russia had stabilized, as 
     Russian businessmen slowly began to feel more confident in 
     the country's legal system. Following Mr. Khodorkovsky's 
     arrest, the stock market crashed and the Russian ruble 
     plunged, as rumors of new capital flight abounded. Large 
     investors, including Western oil companies, may be confident 
     they have enough Kremlin connections to stay in the country, 
     but smaller investors are now more likely to stay away.
       The Bush administration's reaction to this arrest may 
     determine whether it sticks. Just a few weeks ago, President 
     Bush endorsed ``President Putin's vision for Russia: a 
     country . . . in which democracy and freedom and rule of law 
     thrive.'' It's hard to see how President Putin's ``vision'' 
     can include the rule of law if it also includes arbitrary 
     prosecution. Certainly there are some within the 
     administration who believe that a Russian strategic decision 
     to start rolling back democracy and the rule of law will 
     undermine the Russian-American relationship. But the 
     president himself must now recognize that that is what now 
     may be happening. Mr. Bush may be unable to persuade his 
     friend Vladimir to behave differently, but it is vital that 
     he try. The preservation of democracy in Russia is more than 
     an ideal; it is a crucial U.S. interest.

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