Four years on since Euromaidan, corruption is still a major problem in Kiev. Despite this, Ukraine has undergone fundamental changes since 2014. A stronger and more confident civil society is working tirelessly to uncover and prevent corruption in the capital and the regions.

The Anti-Corruption Walk in February 2018 with Rebecca Harms (MEP)

One example is ‘Anti-Corruption Walks Kyiv’, a project run by CISS and the Anti-Corruption Research and Education Centre of the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. The initiative came from a Ukrainian-German youth exchange in 2017 and saw the development of an alternative concept for city tours. Inspired by the Berlin ‘LobbyControl’ tours and the anti-corruption tours in Bogotá and Mexico City, researchers and activists take small groups on guided tours through Kiev in Ukrainian or English. The specific mechanisms of corruption are explained using factual case studies and stories. The tours help people to better understand corruption and anti-corruption measures.

Participants are taken to some of the most important memorials of corruption. One of these is the Parkowy Business Centre, better known by locals as ‘Yanukovich’s helipad’. To shorten his commute, the former president had a helicopter landing pad, complete with business center, constructed in 2010 on a perfect hillside not far from the parliament in the middle of a protected UNESCO world heritage site. Yanukovich only landed there a few times, but the official after show party of the Eurovision Song Contest was held here in May 2017. Yanukovich’s cronies who control the building through a series of shell companies netted 50,000 USD from the state budget for this party. Only after enormous public pressure was the building nationalised without further ado at the end of 2017. An investigation into the precise circumstances of the construction has not yet been announced.

‘Yanukovich’s helipad’ is a stop on the anti-corruption tour and symbolises the corruptness of the former regime. At the same time, the case shows how hard the new government is working to clean up old corruption. On the positive side, the tours also demonstrate the progress being made in the fight against corruption. This includes the creation of a new independent investigative authority, digital asset declarations by politicians and civil servants, and a digital platform for public procurement (ProZorro).

Many citizens, tourists, and experts have already taken the regular tours. For example, Rebecca Harms, Member of the European Parliament, went on a tour at the end of February 2018. The project has attracted strong media interest in Ukraine.

In 2018, Ukrainian and German activists plan to develop tours for Ukrainian schoolchildren and students and also expand to Odessa, Kharkiv, and Lviv. Despite the slow progress, many activists are far from ready to give up on the fight against corruption.

This article was published in April’s issue of the Diplomatic Magazine.

At the beginning of July, 17 German/Russian participants traced the history of these developments. In cooperation with Yugra State University, CISS organised an excursion financed by the German Federal Foreign Office, which started in Tyumen on 2 July and ended in Surgut on 14 July 2017. The participants visited ten locations „in the Tyumen Oblast, the Khanty–Mansi Autonomous Okrug and Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug“ and covered 3,500 kilometers by bus, train and ship. The goal of the trip was to meet on site with contemporary witnesses and their relatives, experts and activists in order to find out more about what the locals recall of the various aspects of the terror that took place under Stalin. The participants were particularly interested to learn how the memories of the locals match up with the broader narrative of Russia’s recorded history.

In a recent interview with Oliver Stone, President Putin criticised the “excessive demonization” of Stalin in the West, referring to it as an “attack on the USSR and Russia”. The latest surveys conducted by the independent Levada Center in June 2017 also show that most Russians regard Stalin as the most important historical figure of Russia, ahead of Putin and Pushkin. The exact numbers are still disputed, but historians estimate that 15 to 30 million Soviet citizens lost their lives under Stalin. Historians and contemporary witnesses told the group how the forced resettlement sank to new depths during the ‘Great Patriotic War’, as they referred to World War II. The Volga and Black Sea Germans, along with many other ethnic groups such as the Tatars, Kalmyks and Chechens, were forcibly displaced under suspicion of collaborating with the Nazis.

By the end of 1941, at least 900,000 Germans had been deported to Siberia and Central Asia. Several contemporary witnesses spoke of how they were taken to sparsely populated parts of Siberia with just a few tools, no winter clothing to speak of, and left to their fate. One of the highlights of the trip was an excursion to the abandoned gulag camps along the Salekhard–Igarka Railway, an enormous, failed infrastructure project of the USSR. The deserted camps along the 1,300 kilometer route are well preserved in some areas and bring to mind the harsh prison conditions of the inmates, who were forced to work on the railway under extreme weather conditions with winter temperatures reaching as low as minus 60 degrees.

Within the historical context, the accounts provided by the contemporary witnesses allowed the group to gain insight into the tragic fates of individuals. Interestingly, few of these witnesses and their relatives were critical of Stalin. The trip also revealed that although a commemoration is held locally, tolerated and also supported to some degree by the state, only a few contemporary witnesses and their relatives see a connection between the system behind it and their fate. This is in line with the official narrative of the Russian state, according to which the dark sides of the Stalinist system, such as the gulags, were a necessary evil to conquer the Nazis, as a skeptical church representative told the group in Novy Urengoy.

This article was published in the September 2017 issue of the Diplomatic Magazine.

After having arrived in Tyumen, the capital of the oblast, the night before, Tobolsk is the first real stop of our excursion „Memory as a tool for change: Forgotten places in Siberia”. In total, our journey will take us to ten cities and villages in three different Oblasts of Western Siberia, with more than 3000 kilometers of travelling by bus, train and ship lying ahead of us.

The goal of the excursion is to meet with local experts, activists and contemporary witnesses as well as their relatives in order to find out more about how locals commemorate the various aspects of the Stalinist terror, ranging from deportations and executions to forced labour.

In that respect, Tobolsk, the former capital of Tsarist exile, is the ideal starting point. Withstanding the heavy rain, our guide takes us to the kremlin to introduce us to the history of the city. Founded in 1587, Tobolsk was one of Russia’s first Asian outposts and later became both capital of Siberia and hub for those exiled to the most remote corners of the Russian empire. Until the late 19th century, prisoners exiled to Siberia marched the 2100 km from Moscow to Tobolsk and were then dispersed to other places in Siberia. The prison, located opposite of the city’s marvelous stone kremlin, is arguably one of its kind. Over the years, it received many famous prisoners. Among them were prominent figures of the Decembrists and, most famously, the novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, who spent a brief stint here in the mid-19th century on his way to a four-year sentence of hard labor in the city of Omsk.

Interestingly, even a church bell got banished to Tobolsk. In the late 16th century, the Volga town of Uglich saw a short-lived uprising against the rule of Tsar Boris Godunov. The Tsar exiled not only the rebels to Siberia, but also found the Uglich church bell they were ringing to start the protest guilty. It was subsequently sent to Tobosk, where it stayed in one of the cathedrals until 1892.

In the lower parts of the city, we pass the home of Dmitri Mendeleev, the Russian eminent chemist. Born in Tobolsk in 1834, he rose to global prominence for designing the periodic table. The city has numerous places that bear witness to its history of exile. We stop at a Polish church built by the once large Polish community consisting of deported Poles who resisted Tsarist rule in Poland in the 18th century. Further into the old town we stop at the house where the last Tsar of Russia, Nikolas II, was held during the civil war from August 1917 to April 1918 before he and his entire family were brought to Yekaterinburg, where they were all killed.

Our second day is spent exploring the Tobolsk prison. Built between 1838 and 1855 and closed in 1989, it housed about 2,500 inmates and was considered to be stricter than other prisons. Today, the premises feature a museum as well as a hostel, where we spent our first night sleeping in former prison cells.

Interestingly, the prison facilities also host the the Association of Deported Volga Germans, which we visit in the afternoon to learn more about the history of deported Germans in the region. The all-female representatives of the Volga Germans all have German ancestry = at least one of their parents or grandparents were deported. Along with many other ethnic groups such as the Tatars, Kalmyks and Chechens, the Volga and Black Sea Germans were forcibly displaced by Stalin, suspected to collaborate with the Nazis. By the end of 1941, at least 900,000 Germans had been deported to Siberia and Central Asia.

The members of the association present us their small German exhibition documenting the history of Germans in the region. Over coffee and tea, we learn more about their small projects through which they try to maintain German culture, such as old German folk-songs, participating in song-contests and upholding German holidays, such as Easter, Christmas or the Day of German Unity.

Interestingly, only one of the representatives still speaks German. The others have either never learned German or forgotten how to speak it overtime.

After meeting the group, on the late afternoon of July 4, full of historical knowledge about the early Tsarist system of exile and impressions of our talks we leave Tobolsk towards Khanty-Mansiysk.

This article was published as part of CISS’s ‘Memory as a tool of change – Forgotten Places in Siberia’ Impact Group.

]]> 2016/09/11/why-care-about-the-duma-elections-this-year/ Sun, 11 Sep 2016 21:17:51 +0000 http://beta.ciss.eu/?p=10341 Leonid Bershidsky, a Bloomberg columnist, this July provocatively stated that ‘Russia Has the Most Boring Election of 2016’, especially when compared to the immense spectacle of the U.S. presidential and senate elections. Despite the fact that the upcoming state Duma election is the first election since the 1990s that is taking place during an economic downturn, few aspects point to changes in the composition of the Duma or any major effects for the general Russian political system. Nevertheless, the elections might give insights into the general mood of the population and the Russian political theater.

First and foremost, the motto of this year’s election seems to be to avoid the repeat of the disastrous 2011 vote, which international observers, such as the OSCE, have criticized as not meeting international standards. After vote-rigging, massive protests erupted and protesters eventually demanded Putin’s resignation. In response, a series of punitive laws were passed to avoid further protests. After 2011, the Economist Intelligence Unit even downgraded Russia in its democracy index from a ‚hybrid regime’ to an ‚authoritarian regime’. In 2016, the new draconian anti-protest law was passed to allow state security services to open fire on crowds and grant the “right to withhold any warnings of their intention to use weapons, special means or physical force.”

No wind of change

The question as to whether the Duma election will have a major effect on the composition of the Russian parliament seems unlikely. In fact, this year 14 parties are competing for Duma seats (seven more than for the last election). According to the latest Levada polls from late August, the same four parties, that make up the current Duma, will pass the five per cent threshold. Polls suggest losses for United Russia and some marginal gains for the formal opposition parties in parliament, also known as the ‘systemic opposition’. The same polls also show that about 55 per cent of people intend to vote. Of the 14 parties three relatively liberal parties are running, but none has more than 1 percent support. Infamous anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny is barred from the election.

A more equal playing field?

To avoid the impression of another systematic vote-fraud, Ella Pamfilova, a former human rights activist who previously served as the Russian Human Rights Ombudswoman from 2014 to 2016, was appointed head of the Russian Central Election Committee. Thesurprising appointment signaled a move towards a fairer vote on September 18.

However, the playing field is by no means equal. The electoral commission reduced the number of observers for the upcoming election and limited their ability to spontaneously visit different polling stations. Furthermore, media monitoring of the elections will be similarly confined, with only accredited outlets and reporters allowed to cover the polls.

According to observers, the vote was moved forward to mid-September to avoid a prolonged election campaign. A lot of people spend their summer break outside the metropolitan areas on their Dachas away from politics and the daily life in the cities.

Restricted media

Besides the timing and relative short-length of the campaigns, the tightly controlled media do not signal a wind of change either. The main sources of media consumption, according to a Deloitte Study in 2015, are the internet and the television. Whereas the latter is the most important source of news, it is also most tightly controlled by pro-Kremlin media outlets. Freedom House in their 2016 report listed the Russian press as ‘not free’ and the Russian internet only as ‘partly free’.

It remains to be seen how the elections play out and how the non-systemic-opposition will react. However, no or little protests are expected despite the dire economic situation for most Russians.

Elections as measure of the political climate?

Nevertheless, (international) observers are interested in how the elections are conducted and how they play out in terms of political equality as well as whether the electorate (against current polling) will punish the ruling party United Russia (Yedinaya Rossiya) for the steadily declining standards of political freedom. Most importantly, however, the vote could give a rare glimpse into the Russian political climate and its discourse. This is especially relevant given Given Russia’s clout in the context of the Ukraine or the Syria crisis.