Baltimore Sun - 11.07.2004

Baltimore Sun

Putin critic more and more a lonely voice

Russia: Vladimir Ryzhkov worries as President Vladimir V. Putin amasses power, but the democratic opposition is in retreat.

By Douglas Birch

MOSCOW - Two things are striking at Vladimir Ryzhkov's legislative offices at Russia's parliament, the Duma. One is the sweeping view of the Kremlin, the Moscow River and the wedding-cake towers built by Josef Stalin. The other is Ryzhkov's framed photograph of a beleaguered lighthouse battered by a towering wave.

As metaphor, Ryzhkov's commanding view is misleading. It's the photo's message of a sentry under siege by overwhelming force that rings true.

Ryzhkov is one of a handful of deputies in the 450-member Duma willing to criticize President Vladimir V. Putin's drive to concentrate power, and after last year's electoral rout of liberals and independents, he is perhaps the senior member of Russia's democratic opposition.

"Russia is becoming more and more authoritarian," says Ryzhkov, 38, a former technocrat who once held positions of power in a party loyal to the Kremlim, and was pegged as a possible president. "And it has more and more imperial ambitions."

Ryzhkov did not change his position. Rather, the ground shifted under him.

"What has made him a much more outspoken critic of the regime and advocate for democracy is what Putin has done to Russia," said Michael McFaul, associate professor of political science at Stanford University and an expert on modern Russian politics. "Ryzhkov is not where he intended to be."

"If there's a guy who could be the leader of the next wave of democratic mobilization in society, he's definitely one who has the potential," McFaul said. "There are not many people I would identify in that category today. I'm not even sure I could name another one."

Ryzhkov has inherited the leadership of a movement in chaotic retreat.

During Putin's tenure, the Kremlin has quadrupled military spending, tripled the budget of security services, imposed de facto state control on all network newscasts and resurrected many Soviet-era symbols.

In recent weeks, the government has also moved to end the direct election of Russia's 89 governors, giving Putin the power to appoint them.

Officials have also proposed canceling the direct election of half of the candidates for the 450-member Duma. Voters instead would choose Duma members from slates of candidates proposed by political party leaders, most of them beholden to the Kremlin for patronage and for access to the media. Independent voices such as Ryzhkov's would probably be squeezed out.

Ryzhkov warns that the Kremlin is cynically using Russia's war on terror to justify resurrecting the top-to-bottom centralized bureaucratic control the country suffered under for centuries. "It's one and the same logic, to restore our imperial bureaucratic state," he said.

There are other worrisome measures, too.

The upper chamber of parliament, the Federation Council, has approved a law giving Putin authority to appoint the panel that hires and fires judges, a move that critics say would eliminate the possibility of Russia's developing an independent judiciary.

The Kremlin has proposed requiring charities and nonprofit advocacy groups to get government permission before accepting grants, a requirement that would inhibit the work of the groups that help create a civil society.

A bill being considered by the Duma would give Putin the power to appoint the president of Russia's 280-year-old Academy of Sciences, who is now elected by his peers.

"It's even worse than in czarist Russia and Soviet Russia, because the Academy of Sciences, established under Peter the Great, has always been self-governed," Ryzhkov said.

Those measures do not add up to a return to the repression of the Soviet era, with its thought crimes, blanket censorship and gulag. But critics here say Putin's policies are leading to a Russia where the freedom to criticize the government is regulated, where voters' choices are guided and where democracy is painstakingly "managed," in the expression popular here.

Ryzhkov was born in Rubtsovsk, a village in the forested, mountainous Altai region, not far from where modern-day Russia, Kazakhstan and China meet.

The son of a single mother - she was a Communist Party functionary - he graduated from Altai State University in 1990 with a degree in history and for a time was an instructor at the school.

After serving in the regional government, Ryzhkov was elected a deputy to Russia's first Duma in 1993 from his poverty-stricken Altai district. Two years later, he joined Our Home Is Russia, a party started by Viktor Chernomyrdin, a prime minister under President Boris N. Yeltsin and now head of the Russian natural gas monopoly Gazprom.

The party, critics said, lacked an agenda except that of Chernomyrdin and the Kremlin. But Ryzhkov treated it as a vehicle for seeking moderate reforms.

After the collapse of the ruble in 1998, Yeltsin named Ryzhkov one of four deputy prime ministers. The next year, Ryzhkov eloquently defended Yeltsin during impeachment hearings, saying that the charges against him "rest on sand." The impeachement effort failed.

When Yeltsin appointed Putin prime minister in August that year, Ryzhkov helped ensure that the Duma approved the choice. Putin won with 233 votes, barely more than the 226 required.

Neither did Ryzhkov object when Putin began the second war against separatists in Chechnya in October 1999. A month later, the legislator predicted that the Kremlin would never stage a full-scale assault on the Chechen capital, Grozny. But Russian forces did so, and thousands of civilians were killed.

Our Home Is Russia merged with the pro-Kremlin Unity faction early in 2000 as part of Putin's patient consolidation of power. In July 2000, Ryzhkov was kicked out of the combined Unity party after abstaining on a bill granting Putin the power to appoint members of the upper house of parliament.

Putin's latest political vehicle, the United Russia party, controls two-thirds of the seats in the Duma. It also can count on the Duma's other major factions, two nationalist and populist parties, for support on most issues.

The opposition consists of the Communists, with about 10 percent of seats, and Ryzhkov's tiny democratic faction.

In an interview in February, Ryzhkov said the new parliament was in thrall to the Kremlin.

"When I talk to others about their views, they shrug and say, 'Everything will be decided from above,'" he said. "They are like children in kindergarten."

In the spring, Ryzhkov caused a stir when he debated a member of Putin's hand-picked Federation Council on the NTV television network's K Baryery! which translates roughly as "Let the Duel Begin!"

Network officials probably didn't anticipate it, but callers to the show overwhelming backed Ryzhkov's stinging criticism of Putin.

As Ryzhkov's profile has risen, he has become a bigger target for critics. Alexei Pankin, editor of the media magazine Sreda, ridiculed the lawmaker as someone who wanted to be a Westerner.

"A 'democrat' is someone who views Russia in much the same way that foreigners do," Pankin wrote. "But while Russians respect foreigners, they have little sympathy for homegrown knockoffs."

Ryzhkov's criticism of the Kremlin isn't limited to its policy of political consolidation at home. He is increasingly worried, he says, that the Kremlin is drifting toward an aggressively anti-Western foreign policy.

He cited a Sept. 29 Komsomolskaya Pravda interview with Vladislav Surkov, deputy chief of the Putin administration. Russia's erstwhile friends in the West, Surkov charged, "consider the nearly bloodless collapse of the Soviet Union their own achievement and seek to continue their victorious crusade. Their objective is to destroy Russia and to populate its vast expanses with numerous ineffective quasi-states."

Surkov didn't limit his attack to Westerners. "The enemy is at the door," he said, charging that a "fifth column" of Russian liberals threatens the survival of the nation.

"They have the same sponsors of foreign origin and the same hatred for Putin's Russia, as they put it, but, in fact, for Russia per se."

Ryzhkov dismisses Surkov's vision as a Kremlin fairy tale, albeit a dangerous one. "I think that in the West, many politicians underestimate the scale of the conflict that could come in the future between Russia and the West," he said.

For the legislator, the risks aren't just political. Opposition figures have been killed or have died mysteriously here. Ryzhkov is among those who have doubts about official explanations of these deaths.

His tenure as Russia's most prominent elected opposition democrat might be short-lived, said McFaul at Stanford: "Putin's reforms have made the Duma inconsequential, and with the new electoral law, if all goes as planned, a guy like Ryzhkov is going to have no role at all."

For now, his prominence proves that democratic ideals remain alive.

Ryzhkov strongly rejects the frequently heard argument that Russia might benefit from an authoritarian government similar to those once in power in Chile and South Korea, which evolved into democratic states.

"Such thoughts are cynical," Ryzhkov said. "What about the fate of Russian children who will live under a dictatorship, like their fathers and grandfathers?"