Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin Speak out Against Putin’s Reforms

Soviet Union’s last president Mikhail Gorbachev and Russia’s first president Boris Yeltsin expressed criticism regarding Vladimir Putin’s proposed reforms in Russian electoral system. Statements by Yeltsin and Gorbachev were made in exclusive interviews to Moskovskie Novosti (The Moscow News) weekly, and will be published in that newspaper’s Friday issue. MosNews, which is a partner publication of Moskovskie Novosti, posted full translation of both statements on our website on Thursday.

Our common goal is to do everything possible to make sure that bills, which, in essence, mean a step back from democracy, don’t come into force as law. I hope that the politicians, voters, and the president himself keep the democratic freedoms that were so hard to obtain, — reads Mikhail Gorbachev’s statement. Soviet Union’s last president, who ruled the country from 1985 to 1992, is convinced that Russian authorities “must search for political solutions, negotiate with the middle-of-the-road militants, separating them from the unappeasable extremists”.

His successor Boris Yeltsin, whose second presidential term ended on December 31, 1999, with a surprise announcement of his voluntary resignation (

Vladimir Putin was named acting president three months before actually getting elected in March 2000), calls on the Kremlin to refrain from undermining the existing constitutional framework, despite the necessity of fighting terrorist threats.

I firmly believe that the measures that the country’s leadership will undertake after Beslan will remain within the framework of democratic freedoms that have become Russia’s most valuable achievement over the past decade. We will not give up on the letter of the law, and most importantly, the spirit of the Constitution our country had voted for at the public referendum in 1993. If only because the stifling of freedom and the curtailing of democratic rights is a victory by the terrorists. Only a democratic country can successfully resist terrorism and count on standing shoulder to shoulder with all of the world’s civilized countries, — Yeltsin says in his statement.

Boris Yeltsin’s statement is viewed as a surprise move by many observers in Moscow. Unlike Mikhail Gorbachev, who is still active on Russian political scene, Yeltsin chose to refrain from public comments about Vladimir Putin’s politics ever since his retirement. Recently Boris Berezovsky, an exiled tycoon, renowned for his criticisms of Kremlin and Putin, published an open letter to Russia’s first president, urging Yeltsin to speak up and reminding him of his responsibility for the establishment of Russian constitutional democracy. Yeltsin makes no mention of Berezovsky’s call in his statement, but some observers tend to link his decision to break silence with the exiled oligarch’s request.

"What did he do that was "evil" and what did he do that was Soviet? Like I said - you are delusional."

Let's ask the Christian Science Monitor that question...I'm sure they're delusional also:

Putin battles political fallout of Chechnya fight Suicide attacks against the pro-Russian government of Chechnya claimed a total of 75 lives this week.

By Fred Weir | Special to The Christian Science Monitor, 16 May 2003

MOSCOW - Resurgent violence in Russia's breakaway region of Chechnya, which has seen two devastating suicide bombings this week, is likely to cast a cloud over President Vladimir Putin's annual State of the Nation report to parliament Friday.

For Mr. Putin, who hopes to win full control of parliament and his own reelection in polls due within a year, limiting the political fallout from the 3-1/2-year-old conflict may be crucial.

Experts predict that his hour-long speech will stress his achievements in creating modest economic growth and his ambitious plans to overhaul Russia's bloated state bureaucracy. His brief statements on Chechnya, they say, will be upbeat and cast Russia's military campaign in the breakaway region as part of the global war against terrorism.

"Formally, there are some achievements for Putin to talk about," says Nikolai Petrov, an expert with the Carnegie Endowment in Moscow. "He will say that the military phase of the conflict is over and that the peace phase has begun. Unfortunately, recent events and the general situation in Chechnya do not provide supporting evidence for these achievements."

The Kremlin plan involves granting Chechnya limited self-government and turning over most combat operations against the rebels to a recently recruited 11,000-man Chechen paramilitary militia. The first step was a March referendum, in which Chechens overwhelmingly adopted a constitution that ties the mainly Muslim republic permanently to Russia.

Though many experts question the Soviet-style 96 percent vote in favor of the plan, even some critics of the Kremlin say it reflects the Chechens' exhaustion and powerful desire for peace after more than a decade of war, anarchy, and terror. "The voting process is highly suspect, but the result is probably real: Chechens desperately want peace, even if they must remain part of Russia," says Sergei Khaikin, a sociologist with the Validata public opinion agency who specializes in Chechnya. "But the wish for peace is not enough as long as conflict remains the real state of affairs."

Despite repeated Kremlin promises of military withdrawal, some 80,000 Russian troops continue to handle most security and counterinsurgency operations in the republic. About a dozen Russian personnel die weekly in combat with the rebels. Over the past year, rebel fighters have adopted suicide tactics seldom seen in Chechnya before, directing their attacks as much against local pro-Moscow Chechens as against the Russians.

On Monday a suicide squad detonated a huge truck bomb inside a government compound in Znamenskoye, northern Chechnya, killing 59 people, mainly pro-Moscow Chechens working for the local administration and the FSB security service. Two days later two female bombers struck a religious festival organized by the pro-Kremlin Unity Party in a village near Grozny.

Sixteen people died in that attack but the intended target, Chechnya's Kremlin-appointed leader Akhmad Kadyrov, escaped unharmed. Russian officials say the Chechen nationalist movement, which led the victorious 1994-96 war for independence from Russia, has been taken over in recent years by Muslim extremist groups from abroad, such as Al Qaeda, who have brought with them ruthless terrorist tactics that mainly target innocent civilians. President Putin was quick to charge that a terrorist attack against foreigners in Saudi Arabia this week, which killed 34 people, bore "exactly the same signature" as Monday's truck bombing in Chechnya.

That message, frequently repeated by the Kremlin since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, may have helped to mute Western criticism of alleged Russian human rights abuses in Chechnya. But some Russian experts say the connection between Chechen rebels and outside terror groups is tenuous and mainly for foreign consumption. "The Chechen resistance is not an Al Qaeda import, and never was," says Pavel Felgenhauer, an independent security expert. "Some Chechen groups may have accepted help from outside, but the resistance is based internally, by a big part of the Chechen population who continue to support the rebels."

Human rights groups also charge that Russian security forces have employed terror tactics to compel Chechens to accept Kremlin-authored terms of peace, including the use of death squads to remove even moderate Chechen oppositionists. "All our information gives us grounds to say that within the federal forces there is a special group whose task is to kidnap, torture, and then kill Chechens," says Oleg Orlov, chairman of Memorial, the only Russian human rights group to maintain a permanent presence in Chechnya.

Salambek Maigov, a representative of rebel Chechen president Aslan Maskhadov, told the liberal daily Kommersant that the suicide bombings are probably the work not of international terrorists, but of embittered relatives of people murdered by death squads. "Violence begets violence," he said. "What do you expect in a situation where more than 150 Chechens disappear every month."

Putin's War by Matt Bivens, Sept 2003

As Vladimir Putin and George Bush sit down today at Camp David, back in Russia Putin's government is driving women and children who had fled the fighting in Chechnya back into the war zone.

Of the conflict's 220,000 displaced persons, about 11,000 sit conveniently concentrated in tent camps just east of Chechnya. The Kremlin has for years pursued an on-again, off-again policy of trying to herd these refugees "home." It's about sweeping dirt under the rug: Putin insists there's sufficient calm and order in "pacified" Chechnya to hold a presidential election in two weeks. Tent camps filled with refugees shrieking that they won't go back because there's a war under way don't agree with that pretty picture, so the refugees and tent camps must go.

So while this week's spotlight is on the diplomatic dance between Putin, Bush and the United Nations over Iraq, there's been little notice of desperate refugees being driven out by harassment. The Associated Press reports that a 1,150-person tent camp has suddenly been closed to journalists and rights activists. Residents of the camp have snuck out word that police and government officials have arrived and begun to cut off electricity and gas and to remove latrines--a nice touch, that--and that two desperate women who tried to stop them were beaten severely enough to need hospitalization. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees is alarmed, human rights groups have put forward thorough documentation of these crimes against humanity as a long-running Kremlin policy--and now the American President is sitting down across the table from the Russian President.

Moreover, the American President is armed not just with intelligence from the human rights crowd but from his own State Department. In blistering and detailed testimony before Congress last week, Assistant Secretary of State Steven Pifer asserted that "the daily reality for the people of Chechnya has been bleak and deteriorating." He laid much of this at the door of Chechen terrorist groups. But he also--in a new breath of common sense for Washington--insisted that large portions of the Chechen resistance could not be considered terrorists. And he harshly slammed Russia's conduct of the war.

"Credible human rights organizations" continue to report "atrocities, disappearances, torture, and extrajudicial killings committed by Russian federal forces.... Chechens picked up in [federal] raids disappear, most often permanently; in some cases corpses are later found.... disappearances continue on virtually a daily basis."

Ben Nighthorse Campbell, the Republican senator from Colorado, calls this "the picture the Kremlin does not want us to see...a wasteland dotted with mass graves, villages depopulated of men--young and old--and unspeakable crimes committed against civilians."

Unspeakable crimes, Russian federal death squads, "disappearances," civilians herded into a war zone--is this reason enough for the American President to sternly register his displeasure with the Russian President?

Probably not, because the Russian President has a handy reply. When American journalists recently asked Putin about his government's rights abuses in Chechnya, he parried by asking us about Iraq. "Are you sure everything is OK with human rights there?" he said. "Or Afghanistan. Are you sure everything is OK there on human rights?" And what about down in Guantánamo Bay, Putin added, what about human rights there? America is holding children as terrorists in a place called Camp Delta; so from what moral high ground do we speak when we complain that Russia is abusing babushkas in a place called Camp Bella?

"Commentators have begun to urge Bush to chastise Putin for abandoning many of the democratic reforms that Russia so recently adopted. Unfortunately, it looks less and less likely that Bush will do any such thing...[because] increasingly the United States seems to be adopting policies that at an earlier time we would have condemned as antidemocratic," writes Russia expert Marshall Goldman. "[Bush and Putin] may find they have even more in common than they initially assumed. This is unfortunate not only for the Russians, but for those of us in the USA who fear that we are becoming more like what they, rather than what we, used to be."

Putin's man wins in Chechnya but critics question his lack of rivals

The Scotsman, Tue 7 Oct 2003

CHECHNYA’S Kremlin-backed leader yesterday won a landslide victory in the presidential elections, prompting claims the vote was marred by a lack of rival candidates.

With more than three- quarters of votes counted, the acting president, Akhmad Kadyrov, had won more than 80 per cent of the ballot.

But the lack of independent observers and the withdrawal from the race of Mr Kadyrov’s two main rivals before the election have led some to question the ballot.

The election was widely criticised after two candidates who rated higher than Mr Kadyrov in early opinion polls disappeared from the ballot - one withdrawing to become an adviser to the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, and the other barred from running by the Chechen supreme court.

Six virtually unknown candidates ran against Mr Kadyrov, who was once allied with the rebels. Last night, NATO’s secretary-general designate, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, said the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), a human rights and democracy watchdog he chairs, had not been able to monitor the vote in Russia’s rebel region.

Mr de Hoop Scheffer - the Dutch foreign minister who will become NATO’s secretary general in December - said: "It is regrettable that in the run-up to the elections there was a lack of real pluralism among candidates.

"The absence of independent media as well as a continued climate of violence gives reasons for concern."

Mr de Hoop’s views were last night echoed by British government ministers who expressed "strong concerns" over the way the election had been conducted.

The foreign office minister, Bill Rammell, said it was imperative the new president worked to promote reconciliation, an open political process and human rights.

Mr Putin, hailed the high turnout - more than 86 per cent of the country’s 561,000 electorate - as proof of support for the Kremlin’s peace plan.

"The high turnout shows that people are hoping for a better life and positive changes in the life of the republic," he said.

Russian officials have promised Chechnya will have a high degree of autonomy after the election, but the specifics have yet to be determined. Stanislav Ilyasov, Russia’s minister for Chechen affairs, said Russian and Chechen officials would sign a treaty outlining the regional authority’s sphere of control by the end of the year.

Mr Kadyrov said he would ask the Russian parliament to renew an amnesty that was offered to rebels during the summer and expired in September.

He said 171 fighters had surrendered under the amnesty and that many of them were now serving in his security service, headed by his son, Ramzan.

Separatist guerrillas have dismissed the election as pointless and say the fight goes on to end Russian dominance and turn their homeland into an independent state.

And many Russian commentators have expressed doubts the election will bring a quick end to the bloodshed which has often spread far beyond Chechnya’s borders.

Timur Daudov, 35, who voted for Mr Kadyrov, said: "Hope is always the last thing to go. So we still hope things will get better." Asked why he voted for Mr Kadyrov, he replied: "From two evils you choose the one that is slightly better."

Tens of thousands have died in Chechnya since Moscow sent in troops in December 1994 to snuff out a drive for independence.

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