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.Kasparov s alliance with Limonov epitomises the right-wing PEOPLE: PARTIES, UNI ONS AND NGOs 155liberals failure to mount any effective challenge to Putin.The OtherRussia was formed in the run-up to the 2007 parliamentary elec-tions, and the heavy police intimidation of the Dissenters Marchesthat it organised highlighted state intolerance for public opposition.But Kasparov s project only came to the foreground and gainedan inordinate amount of attention from western journalists afterrepeated setbacks for the two established right-wing liberal parties,Yabloko and the Union of Right Forces.Both campaigned stronglyon political and media freedom, and both linked these issues to economic freedom.The Union of Right Forces advocates freemarket and in some cases extreme neoliberal economic policies,while the Yabloko leader Grigory Yavlinsky has taken a socialdemocratic line on economic issues under Putin.The liberal partiesfailure to enter Parliament in 2003 and 2007 was mentioned inChapter 6.Russia has a small but vigorous antinationalist left, consisting ofsocialist, Trotskyist, anarchist and new left groups and networks.This left has no national leadership, which some of its participantsregard as a virtue, and little national coordination although since2005 social forums , inspired by similar events in the west, havebeen held.Its strength is its geographically and politically diversecollection of activists, and the wide variety of local campaigns inwhich it collaborates with trade unions, anti-fascist groups andcommunity movements.In the early 2000s, some sections of theextraparliamentary left campaigned consistently against the war inChechnya, working closely with human rights activists and lead-ers of Chechen communities.Although only small numbers wereinvolved, such action demonstrated the possibility of politicalopposition free of the nationalism that corrodes much of Russia sso-called left.MOVEMENTS FOR HUMAN RIGHTS AND THE ENVIRONMENT,AND OTHER NGOsRussia s human rights movement, like its political opposition, bearsthe stamp of the recent Soviet past.In the 1960s, when civil rightsmovements of blacks in the US southern states and Catholics inNorthern Ireland were at their peak, the USSR s human rightsmovement comprised minute groups of students and intellectuals,for whom the potential cost of each demonstration organised orbulletin distributed was years in a penal colony.For example six 156 CHANGE IN PUTI N'S RUSSIApeople who protested in Red Square against the Soviet invasionof Czechoslovakia in 1968 were arrested after five minutes, andsentenced to between two and four years in prison or exile.So1986 88 was a historical turning point: almost all Soviet restric-tions on the rights of free speech, assembly and movement werelifted.Political exiles, most notably the physicist Andrei Sakharov,returned home.After years of trying to carve out space for legal,civil, political, industrial and social rights in the Soviet system, thehuman rights defenders (pravozashchitniki) could suddenly workopenly.The early Yeltsin years split the pravozashchitniki.Some promi-nent figures moved into politics.For example Lev Ponomarevand Sergei Kovalev became leading democratic parliamentarians,continuing to support Yeltsin even when he ordered the shellingof Parliament in October 1993, although not for long afterwards.Others kept a sceptical distance.The first Chechen war in 1995 96,and the accompanying onslaught on human rights, was a water-shed.Yeltsin had crossed a Rubicon that will turn Russia back intoa police state , Yelena Bonner, Sakharov s widow, declared.Afteropposing the war, Kovalev was sacked by parliament as Russia shuman rights ombudsman.Yeltsin turned on him and shut downa presidential human rights commission he headed.The Chechentragedy also brought back into the limelight the soldiers mothersmovement, one of the most high-profile human rights groups ofthe Gorbachev period, formed by mothers searching for their sons,or the corpses of their sons, who had been conscripted and sent tofight, first in Afghanistan, then in Chechnya.History has given the very concept of human rights a widermeaning in Russia than it generally has in the west.Here, mostpeople understand by it political and civil rights freedom ofspeech and assembly, the right to equality before the law, and so on whereas the Russian pravozashchitniki assume a much closer linkbetween these rights and economic, social and cultural rights, suchas rights at work and in the field of housing, health and education.*This is probably partly a legacy of Soviet times, when ordinary* The background to the narrower meaning sometimes given to the term human rights in the west is a dispute that erupted, after the UnitedNations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948,over how these rights would be written into binding covenants.Thecontroversy was aggravated by the cold war.The western powers, inopposition to the Soviet bloc, insisted that political and civil rights betreated separately from social and economic rights. PEOPLE: PARTIES, UNI ONS AND NGOs 157people who stood up for economic and social rights had to crossswords with local bureaucrats and in the absence of effectivetrade unions or NGOs might come straight into conflict with thestate
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