From Desperation to Democracy?

For 70 years, the people of the Soviet Union were prevented from creating independent organizations; millions were imprisoned or killed for trying to organize. As a result, in the republics of the former Soviet Union, there is very little experience in organizing for change, facilitating meetings, empowering people for action, or making democracy work.

I've recently returned from three weeks in Moscow as part of a team sponsored by Nonviolence International doing nonviolence training with Living Ring, an organization of 10,000 people who had so courageously surrounded the Russian parliament building and nonviolently faced the tanks during last year's attempted coup. From their experience last August, they had learned about the power of nonviolence--and they wanted to learn more and better prepare themselves in case of another coup attempt.

Living Ring invited a team of nonviolence trainers to come to Moscow to give training in nonviolent civilian-based defense--a nonviolent way of defending against coups d'etat, dictatorship, or outside aggression. We also focused on how to develop nonviolent campaigns to help assure that food gets to the people in the cities and elsewhere who so desperately need it.

The problems in Russia and the other former republics today can seem overwhelming. Everything that held the society together and made it work is gone. Tens of thousands of soldiers and military officers are being laid off with no pension. People receive almost no pay for jobs: at the official rate of exchange, about $2 to $6 a month. There is very little to buy in the stores. People are faced with a severe lack of food, medical care, clothes, furniture, and services.

Signs of Hope

IN THE MIDST OF all these problems and deficiencies, some very hopeful and creative things are going on. In our workshops and our many strategy sessions with people in the military, with members of Living Ring, and with groups from various sectors of society, we saw many signs of hope for the future.

Living Ring is working to defend against another possible coup and has organized workshops on the power of nonviolence to bring about change. Members of Living Ring are organizing a nonviolent campaign around the question, What is keeping food from getting to the people of Moscow? They are also sending trucks into the countryside to buy food from small farmers and bring it into Moscow--sometimes having to confront the Mafia and its guns on the way into the city. Within Living Ring, a sense of community has developed and many have found new purpose and meaning in their lives.

Memorial is a human rights organization that is documenting the abuses under Stalin and the totalitarian state. It is also sending peacemaker/reconciliation teams into hot spots such as Nagorno-Karabakh between Azerbaijan and Armenia.

Golubka, which means "peace dove" in Russian, is offering nonviolence training and empowerment workshops. Members of Golubka worked with us in our workshops on nonviolent defense and are now offering workshops on nonviolent campaign building, nonviolent defense against dictatorship and coups, as well as empowerment workshops.

Soviet veterans who fought in the Afghanistan war, like many Vietnam veterans in the United States, understand the horrors of war. In addition to developing new economic enterprises as means of livelihood for many of their people, they are organizing nonviolent initiatives to try to stop war and killing. For example, veterans of the war in Afghanistan recently placed themselves as a nonviolent interpositionary force between the soldiers and the national guard who were shooting each other in Georgia and Ossetia.

Some of the veterans have met with the mujahedeen, their former enemy in Afghanistan, to seek ways to end that senseless war. I met with a man from Afghanistan who reported that the mujahedeen are still hitting Kabul with about 35 rockets a day, killing about 100 people daily. He appealed to me to try to get the United States to stop all munitions shipments to the mujahedeen.

Quakers and others are trying to work for the rights of conscientious objectors in Russia and the other republics. If the conscientious objector law is passed, they say one-third of those who are drafted might apply for CO status--more than one million people! And already, throughout the former Soviet Union, many young men are refusing induction into the military.

After soldiers were ordered to shoot and killed 14 civilians in Lithuania in January 1991, many in the armed forces decided that they would never again shoot their own people. This decision by many soldiers was crucial in the defeat of the August coup.

The Mothers of Soldiers, one of the best organized groups in Russia, is educating and organizing to stop the age-old practice of senior officers in the army beating up on younger officers and younger officers beating up on young recruits. This practice results in about 6,000 deaths of Russian soldiers each year (even in peacetime).

The Nevada-Semipalatinsk movement, made up of people who live near the main Soviet nuclear weapons test site in Kazakhstan, has successfully organized to close the site permanently. It has also pressured the Russian government to declare a one-year moratorium on nuclear testing and is now working to end nuclear testing throughout the world.

People such as Alexander Kalinin, a member of the Moscow city council, have worked valiantly for those who will fall through the cracks as Russia shifts to a market economy--especially the elderly, those on fixed incomes, and children. Kalinin estimates that 2.2 million pensioners in Moscow could die of starvation if the present rate of escalation of prices and lack of food continues. He and others are trying to ensure that the privatization of the economy is done justly and according to law, rather than by all state property being sold to the highest bidder.

Many people in the former Soviet Union are working to assure that women play a fair and equitable role and feminist values are incorporated in the new society. People such as Valentina Konstantinova, who says that "democracy without women is not democracy," are organizing informal women's groups and networking among these groups across the country.

The Russian Peace Society, the Tolstoy societies, and the "Dukabors" are groups committed to nonviolence and peace and to helping their society unlearn its commitment to violence. They are developing a center for nonviolence in Tula (near Tolstoy's home), and they are organizing an international conference on nonviolence in August, the anniversary of the defeat of the coup.

More than 100 churches in Moscow have reopened. They are being renovated and are vibrant with activity, including church services, Sunday schools, and community activities.

The budding democracy in Russia and the other republics is both partial and fragile, very much like the democracy in Germany in the late 1920s and early '30s, especially because of the terrible economic situation there. As one veteran of the war in Afghanistan said to me, "Bread in the stomach is not separate from the democracy question." Moral, political, and economic assistance from the rest of the world is essential if the people of the former Soviet Union are to succeed in building democratic institutions and converting to a peacetime society.

David Hartsough, a Quaker, nonviolence trainer, and former long-time staff member of the American Friends Service Committee in San Francisco, had recently returned from his second visit to Russia and the former Soviet Union when this article appeared.