Russia’s grassroots are more active than the West may think

Activists from the platform “Do it yourself” discuss how to organize on a small scale. Photo: Heinrich Böll Foundation in Russia (CC) www.flickr.com

Since 2012 the Russian government has repressed independent thought in society more broadly. Freedom of assembly is severely limited, while censorship has risen steeply, not just online but also in education and the arts. Organisations targeted by the law include groups that work on human rights, the environment, LGBTQ and health related issues and other groups that do polling about social issues. Russia’s justice ministry has designated as foreign agents some of the most well-known and established environmental organisations in Russia, such as Dront in Nizhny Novgorod, Ecodefense in Kaliningrad, and the Siberian Ecological Centre in Novosibirsk.

In addition, the list includes several NGOs, among them indigenous associations, a sociology research centre and human rights organisations. Some NGOs, like the Moscow-based Helsinki Group, have completely divested themselves of overseas funding and managed to survive. Many others have filed lawsuits in Russian courts that fell flat, including Memorial. “The courts believe that setting up an exhibition or a roundtable already amounts to political activity,” said Marina Koltsova, a lawyer for Memorial. Memorial is one of some 60 NGOs which have filed lawsuits with the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg.

Reconnecting to society

Despite the ambiguity of the new legal restrictions, Putin continues to espouse the rhetoric of democracy. State financing of NGOs has actually increased, though in a way that strengthens apolitical, regime-oriented organisations – known as GONGOs (government organised non-governmental organisations). It is worth noting that the Kremlin’s crackdown has not resulted in a Russian civil society that has largely gave in, but instead one that has shown an impressive ability to adapt.

In 2018 thousands of Russians took to the streets all over the country. Demonstrations have taken different forms and participants had various goals – from nationwide protests against corruption and Putin’s unfair election, to local rallies against toxic landfill and the demolition of Soviet Khrushchevka apartments, to urban LGBT-rallies and flash mobs throwing paper planes to protest internet censorship.

“It is vital to re-connect civic actors with their own societies, as well as across the whole region,” says Barbara von Ow-Freytag, an advisor with the Prague Civil Society Centre in Brussels and well-known expert on Russian civil society. According to her, protests focused on social and environmental issues remain local, while the rallies organised by the opposition leader and blogger Alexei Navalny or Telegram founder Pavel Durov are confined to younger urban elites. At the Prague Civil Society Centre, “we focus on innovation, technology and creative communications to support and empower civil society in post-Soviet countries”, explains von Ow-Freytag.

According to a report published by the Moscow-based Center for Economic and Political Reforms (CEPR) at the end of last year, Russia had hundreds more protests across the country in 2018 than in previous years. CEPR researchers recorded over 2,500 protests in 2018, compared to 1,500 protests in 2017. The study says Russia’s communist party organised more than a third of all protests that year, followed by 13 per cent organised by Navalny. St Petersburg holds the mantle as the city with the most protests, followed by the Rostov, Krasnodar and Saratov regions. Moscow comes in at number nine, four spots below the Moscow wider region.

Invisible grassroots

A fascinating wave of innovative activism is emerging across the former Soviet Union, including Russia. “What’s refreshing about these Generation Z activists is that they’ve linked up with designers, tech experts and artists to test new forms of advocacy, campaigning and storytelling,” wrote von Ow-Freytag in an article for the for the British daily The Guardian. According to her, this has led to a surge of online multimedia campaigns and interactive games on social issues, some of which “used chatbots to offer instant support to victims of human rights abuses”.

One of them is Team 29, a St Petersburg-based group defending media freedom and bringing together lawyers and journalists. It runs an information platform that provides quality reporting on court cases, new legislation and human rights violations. It produces animated digital handbooks (with such titles as “How to go to a protest and not mess it up”) as well as an online game offering advice on how to behave if you are detained. With 75 per cent of its users younger than 35, it manages to engage new audiences compared with more traditional human rights organisations.

Many Russian NGOs and new civic movements are keen to find partners (also in the West) to share know-how and connect to wider civil society networks, but they often have trouble reaching out, especially beyond the main cities of Moscow and St Petersburg. “Cross-border and -sectoral co-operation of a broader range of activists is the best way to support social change in Russia, especially in the regions,” notes von Ow-Freytag. Local activists in Russia’s regions agree.

Kaliningrad – the Russian enclave on the Baltic Sea sandwiched between two EU-member states (Poland and Lithuania) – is a good example to illustrate how hard it is to ignore that Russian civil society is still alive and more active than many in the West may think. Just recently, Daria Yakovleva from Kaliningrad started a grassroots initiative called Feminitive. The volunteers want to create a women’s crisis centre, offer courses on gender issues and support people from the LGBTQ-community. “We are looking for EU-funding and co-operation with partners in the West,” Yakovleva told me.

Another project from the same region can be found in a small town called Chernyakhovsk. Arina Smirnova, a local activist who initiated several projects including Veranda – a non-formal cultural space in the small town which aims to motivate and educate locals to initiate positive urban transformation – also works as an advisor to the mayor of the Chernyakhovsky District. “Many Russian small-scale grassroots including Veranda apply for grants, however mostly grants from the Presidential Grant Foundation for Civil Society Development which is oriented towards Russian NGOs that fulfil social needs,” Smirnova says, also adding, “we are looking for all kinds of international cooperation and partnerships”.

The platform for urban initiatives “Do it yourself” (Делай Сам) organizes an annual festival in which actors of civil society from all over Russia meet. Last year, the participants ranged from NGOs in St Petersburg dealing with women’s and LGBTQ rights to small groups of eco-activists from Perm fighting against climate change. Another event with the aim to find partners, share know-how and to connect to wider civil society networks is the EU-Russia Civil Society Forum.

Playing by the rules

In recent years, large US funders of Russian civil society have pulled their support, leaving the EU as the main foreign donor. Foreign embassies in Russia have developed grant programmes to substitute foreign foundations that have fled the country. Embassies and consulates cannot be labelled as undesirable and have some degree of freedom in supporting social causes, thereby forming new nodes of support. Russian NGOs previously funded by USAID and other departed donors have started to apply to alternative sources of financial support. These NGOs are adapting their projects to fit the rules of the game and the requirements of new donors, such as donors from the EU. In turn, EU grant programmes have become more flexible, adjusting their eligibility criteria and rules to minimise the risks to their grantees of being designated foreign agents.

For example, “the EU has accepted that several Russian NGOs moved to EU-member states and proceed with their work on and even in Russia from there, so they can apply for grants for Russia-based projects in the same way as other Russian organisations or their western partners”, said Stefan Melle, the director of the Berlin-based organisation German-Russian Exchange (DRA), an NGO that fosters dialogue between Russian, Ukrainian and other European actors of civil society. Several western donors, including the EU, which once distributed grants for projects in Russia, now give grants to for-profit NGOs that have re-registered themselves from their non-profit status to avoid falling under the jurisdiction of the foreign agent law. The EU has also eliminated the requirement that NGO grant recipients distribute mini-grants to smaller NGOs. Prior to the law on foreign agents, grants often required recipient NGOs to inform government officials on the outcomes of their projects in order to influence policymaking.

In a 2018 draft, the European Parliament stressed the importance of continued political and financial support for civil society activists, human rights defenders, bloggers, independent media, investigative journalists, outspoken academics, public figures and NGOs; the draft also calls on the European Commission to provide more ambitious financial assistance to Russian civil society from the existing instruments. However, in a policy brief published by the Wilfried Martens Centre for European Studies, von Ow-Freytag, the author, argues that “Despite efforts in the commission to experiment with instruments to include Russia, basic funding for the country has not been significantly increased since 2016 and remains too low.” According to her, out of the entire budget for the European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights (EIDHR) of 1.3 billion euros for 2014–20, only three million a year has been earmarked for grants to Russian civil society. Neither the EU nor Russian civil society can afford to let so much potential go untapped. As Russia’s civic space continues to shrink, funding provided through EIDHR will be crucial.

In reaction, Russian officials and lawmakers have repeatedly said that western states, whether individually or via inter-state institutions (such as the EU and NATO), have increased their financing of organisations spreading pro-western propaganda in Russia, including NGOs, media and social networks. In June of last year, the Russian parliament’s upper house established a commission on state sovereignty protection to monitor and address these attempts to influence the country’s internal politics.

According to von Ow-Freytag, recent proposals by the European Commission to merge its core programme for EU democracy and human rights support with other programmes into a single external instrument risks weakening direct EU funding for Russian groups. She suggests that “In general, instruments lending support to civil society groups should become smaller, more flexible and easier to access for Russian partners, not more convoluted and unwieldy.”

Just like Russian politics, its civil society is controversial. At a time when Europe’s relations with Russia are frozen, co-operation with and support for Russia’s civil society is Europe’s best opportunity to gain influence and rein in Putin’s authoritarian behaviour. Recognising that social change is a bottom-up process, one likely solution would be to build a diverse “ecosystem” of civic networks that connect Russian civic activists with partners not only in the EU, but also across the entire post-Soviet region and beyond.

Andreas Rossbach is a Russian-German journalist who covers human rights, social issues and politics in Russia and its neighbouring countries. In February this year, he began working with Correctiv – the first non-profit newsroom in the German-speaking region.

civil society, Russia