24 January 2025
by Ed Glezin
Source: Facebook [a pdf of this letter is also available at Открытое письмо Б. Ельцину]
29 years ago — on 24 January 1996 — Izvestia newspaper published an open letter from Sergei Kovalev to Boris Yeltsin.
This historic letter clearly demonstrates that the fundamental prerequisites for unchangeable power and a drift toward dictatorship had already been laid during Yeltsin’s first presidential term.
OPEN LETTER TO THE PRESIDENT OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION, BORIS YELTSIN
from Sergei Adamovich Kovalev, dissident, human rights activist, and Russia’s first Commissioner for Human Rights
24 January 1996
Dear Mr President,
For the past six years, I have considered it my duty to fully support the policies that, despite reservations, could be described as the “democratic transformation of Russia.” For a long time, these policies were closely associated with your name. You were the head of a state following a democratic path, and were initially even regarded as a democratic leader. As long as you adhered to this course, I saw myself as your ally. In cases where your actions deviated from this course, or drastically slowed its progress, I remained a loyal opponent.
Russia’s journey towards freedom was never going to be easy. Some difficulties were foreseeable, others arose unexpectedly. To overcome them, we – the government, society, and every individual – had to make difficult and even tragic decisions. The country expected two things from you: a will for change and honesty. Especially honesty. In electing you, Russia saw not just a politician prepared to dismantle the old state structures but also a man sincerely striving to change himself, his views, his biases, and his governing habits.
You convinced many, including myself, that humanist and democratic values could become the foundation of your life, work, and policies. We were not blind; we saw the persistent party-bureaucratic stereotypes in your behaviour. But after all, Russia as a whole, like a person battling a serious addiction, was struggling with itself. Even without loving you, people understood you.
However, in recent years, despite continually reassuring the public of your unshakeable commitment to democratic ideals, you have – first gradually, then increasingly drastically – changed the course of your government’s policy. At present, your administration is attempting to steer the country in a direction directly opposite to that proclaimed in August 1991. This has compelled me to publicly state my position.
I won’t list all your numerous mistakes and miscalculations – plenty of others have done that already. The issue is not specific failures but their root causes: the fundamentally flawed choice of priorities and criteria in state policy.
Since at least late 1993, you have consistently made decisions that did nothing to strengthen the rule of law in a democratic society, but instead revived the blunt and inhumane power of the state apparatus, standing above the law and the people. Your opponents claim that you did this to consolidate your personal power. But even if that is not true, the result remains unchanged.
During the tragic days of autumn 1993, despite serious internal doubts, I decided to support you; I do not absolve myself of responsibility for that support. I believed that the use of force was a fatal necessity in the face of an imminent civil war. Even at that time, I understood that the events of October could lead the supreme authority to perceive violence as a convenient tool for resolving its own problems. But I hoped for another outcome: that after overcoming the crisis of legitimacy and creating a basic legal framework for Russia, the government and the President would make every effort to strengthen the rule of law and public order, ensuring the peaceful and free development of the country.
Much of this depended personally on you, Boris Nikolaevich. I believed you would choose the latter path; I do not absolve myself of responsibility for publicly expressing that belief in your honesty and courage.
The 1993 Constitution endows the President with immense powers, but it also imposes enormous responsibilities: to be the guarantor of citizens’ rights and freedoms, to ensure their safety, and to protect law and order in the country. How have you exercised these powers? What have you done with the responsibilities entrusted to you?
You effectively halted judicial reform, which was supposed to make the judiciary truly independent from other branches of power. You openly began to preach the principle: “Let the innocent suffer, as long as the guilty are punished.”
You loudly announced to the country the beginning of the fight against organised crime. For this purpose, you granted law enforcement agencies enormous powers that go beyond the limits of rights and the law. The result? – Criminals are still walking free, while law-abiding citizens, unable to attain security, are forced to endure the abuse of those in uniform.
You declared that your goal was to preserve and strengthen the territorial integrity of the Federation. The result? – A botched and shameful civil war that has been raging in the Caucasus for over a year.
Under the guise of strengthening Russia’s defence capabilities, you suppressed all attempts at military reform that could have provided Russia with an effective and modern armed forces. The result? – The ongoing remilitarisation of the country, a military budget once again weighing heavily on our economy, and the glaring incapability and incompetence of many high-ranking military commanders. And, finally, the army itself – impoverished, starving, poorly armed; yet inflated to absurdity, and forcibly staffed through the revocation of deferrals and exemptions, practices established in all civilised countries where military service is still in place. Tens of thousands of young people go to great lengths to avoid service in this army, seeing it as the most terrible curse; hundreds of thousands of others are sent by force every year to this school of oppression, humiliation, and violence.
You speak of an open politics, of glasnost, and transparency – and at the same time, you sign secret decrees concerning the most important state matters, you create closed councils and commissions, and you classify more and more information about the work of the government and the situation in the country. The decision-making process in the presidential administration has become almost as secretive as it was during the time of the Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee. It is no secret, however, that you, like the entire pyramid of executive power that you have created, increasingly rely on the security services and their system of classified information in your decisions. Perhaps this is why you refused the radical restructuring of the security services; after all, you already had plenty of reasons to recognise that a politicised police force, for the purpose of which most of these structures were created, and on which many of the ‘professionals’ still working in them were trained, is not the best foundation for creating an effective system that would provide the country’s leaders with the necessary information in a timely and objective manner.
Your staffing policy is becoming increasingly distinct with each passing day. In the beginning, your ‘team’ included many competent and selfless people. But from the very start you did not hesitate to keep in your inner circle those whose only virtue was personal loyalty to you. Gradually, this Soviet, party-based principle became the main criterion for your selection of staff; those who did not possess this quality to the required extent were removed from your administration and other government bodies. Today, only a few remain. Worse still, even within the narrow circle of your ‘loyal without flattery’ trusted officials, a kind of natural selection takes place: those who advance furthest in their careers are the ones who, as is evident to the entire country, pursue their own personal, selfish, and (it’s fortunate if not) criminal, interests. Those who accrued neither property, wealth, nor titles while in your service were the ones you sacrificed first: at first with regret and an inner struggle, and now with ease. The result? – Take a look at the faces of your current associates. If you have not yet erased from your memory your own brief experience as a disgraced advocate against the omnipotent and soulless bureaucratic apparatus, and if you have not started to see matters through the eyes of a provincial party secretary who suddenly received a substantial promotion, then you will cease to be surprised why the country does not trust your appointees, and, consequently, does not trust you.
However, neither you, nor any high-ranking government officials, following your example, care about public opinion. In times of crisis, instead of open and honest explanations, you, and the leaders of government departments appointed by you, serve us such blatant and feckless lies that it is simply astonishing. The fragile bridge of trust between society and those in power, built with great difficulty against a century-old tradition, is once again destroyed.
All the things I mentioned above – the incapacity, mendacity and cowardice of your administration – found their ultimate expression in the Chechen war, which was unleashed with your personal involvement only a year and a bit after the October events in Moscow, which, as many (myself included) hoped, had put an end to the bloody history of the Russian state’s war against its own people. The disregard for the law, the violation of the Constitution, the demoralization and collapse of the army, the blatant incompetence of the security services, the untalented careerism of the top brass of governmental bodies, the clumsy and cynical lies voiced by the top officials of the state – all of this was fully manifested in Chechnya. But in this crisis another characteristic of the regime being recreated by your policy was also vividly manifested: a complete disregard for human life as such. Twenty or thirty thousand people – civilians, militants, Russian soldiers – have died: and so what? We do not even know exactly how many have died. Blood has always been cheap in Russia, especially under the Bolsheviks. But you have introduced a new, “democratic” element into this shameful domestic tradition . You tried to use this blood to benefit your election campaign. I don’t think this approach will find favour among the people.
The latest episode in the Chechen drama is the events in Pervomayskoye. You did not hesitate to publicly call the disgraceful failure of the operation “a decisive victory in the fight against terrorism”. Do you really think that anyone believed you?
Did you and those fools who pushed you into the Chechen war realize that the spilled blood would spur intolerance, revenge, lies, and violence? And that this malignant growth will overcome the useful things you have done for Russia?
I am far from laying all the blame on you alone. The totalitarian system, which has been dealt a serious but perhaps not fatal blow, defends itself by traditional methods of self-preservation: reproduction of crises, corrupting the populace, undermining of social values. Your personal fault is that you not only did not prevent these tendencies, but stimulated them.
Perhaps you think you are building a Great Russia for the benefit of her citizens? No, your current policies are only capable, and in the shortest possible time, of recreating a state open to lawlessness.
In other words, you are restoring the old Stalinist-Brezhnev swamp, only the communist phraseology has so far been replaced by anti-communist rhetoric. Your successors will correct this defect as well.
Your personal transformation has already been completed.
You began your democratic career as an assertive and energetic fighter against official lies, and you end it as a weak and gutless mouthpiece for the cynical and self-serving liars in your inner circle. You swore to build a state of the people and for the people, but you have built a pyramid of bureaucrats over and against the people.
At the same time, you, having abandoned democratic values and principles, never ceased to mention democracy, so that some naive people still think that “democrats” are in power in the Kremlin. Your policy has compromised the very word “democracy”, and if democracy is destined to live in Russia, it will live not thanks to you, but in spite of you.
In August 1991 you – I am sure, sincerely – mourned three dead young men. They died defending their country, whose inhabitants wanted to become citizens, not slaves. You betrayed their memories. How many tears would it take for you today to mourn all those who died because of your fault, defending a few talentless or self-serving officials from a well-deserved retirement?
For me personally, it is also bitter that you betrayed yourself. I believed (and continue to believe) that even the Secretary of a regional party committee is capable of becoming a man. In some periods it seemed to me that you almost succeeded. You turned down this opportunity – but you needn’t have.
You made your choice. Soon we will choose too. Today you present yourself as the only alternative to Zyuganov and Zhirinovsky. In vain: there are more similarities between you than differences. And if we have to choose between you, our voting will most resemble having to choose between different criminal rackets for protection. Some will give their vote to the one from whom they expect a little less extortion and danger. I myself instinctively reject both “red” and “brown”. But I won’t vote for you either. And I advise other decent people to do the same.
I considered it my duty to remain, albeit “on a voluntary basis”, in my positions within the bodies of government as long as this status allowed me to oppose, at least in some cases, the anti-legal and anti-human tendencies in government policy. Perhaps, even now these opportunities are not completely exhausted. But I can no longer work with the President, whom I consider neither a supporter of democracy nor a guarantor of the rights and freedoms of citizens of my country.
I inform you that as of this day I am no longer the Chair of the Human Rights Commission under the President of the Russian Federation, nor a member of the Presidential Council, nor a member of other presidential structures.
I think that you will not regret my departure. Neither will I.
Sergei Kovalev, Deputy of the State Duma
Izvestia, 24 January 1996
Translated by James Lofthouse, Annabel Pedgley and Simon Cosgrove
