Translated material
Democracy Grant
There will be no well-known human rights activists among the recipients of public funds
The recruitment of the first batch of contractors for the construction of civil society in Russia is officially completed. Yesterday, representatives of the competition commission of the Public Chamber, which for several months had been selecting non-profit organizations worthy of state support, announced that 617 non-profit organizations had won the tender to spend half of the 500 million rubles allocated in the 2006 budget “to support democracy and civil society.” In the coming days, the list of recommendations will be sent to President Vladimir Putin, who will affix it with his autograph as a general contractor.The list has not yet been made public, but it was known in advance that it would not include many authoritative non-governmental organizations that have differences with the authorities in their views on the structure of civil society. Although, as Alexander Adamsky, a member of the Public Chamber who was a member of the competition commission, assured the Vremya Novostey correspondent, “criteria such as loyalty were not considered at all.” But independent social activists, especially those specializing in human rights activities, apparently have not yet been able to overcome their mistrust of the Kremlin and its initiatives. Moreover, over the past six months, the power skating rink has pretty much gone through the disloyal ones - from the notorious spy scandal in the winter to the State Duma sent in September, literally on the eve of the end of the Public Chamber competition, a request to the Ministry of Justice about the volume of grants received by Russian NGOs from the territory of foreign countries that do not understand the term "sovereign democracy".
In a situation of mutual distrust (after all, Vladimir Putin has more than once publicly denied the right to classify himself as a civil society to organizations whose task “was to receive funding from influential foreign foundations or serve dubious group and commercial interests”), the Public Chamber had to choose from less “promoted” NPO.
“Youth and children’s organizations turned out to be the most active,” said Sergei Katyrin, chairman of the competition committee of the OP. According to him, the minimum application for a grant was only 23 thousand rubles, and the maximum was 604 million. That is, it even exceeded the amount allocated by the State Duma at the initiative of United Russia to the 2006 budget.
When choosing winners from 3.5 thousand applicants, members of the competition commission, according to Mr. Adamsky, focused primarily on organizations that have their own tasks of forming and developing regional networks of civil initiatives. Therefore, preference was given to NPOs with an annual budget of 1 million rubles or more. “They, as a rule, already have the opportunity to become a resource center for other civil organizations, provide them with information, legal and methodological support, and develop regional networks,” he explained to Vremya Novostei. -- The country now faces an acute problem of professional development of employees of non-profit organizations. Thus, federal funds will be used to structure civil society into more professional NGOs.”
What will be the criteria for assessing the fulfillment of the state order by “professional NGOs” for building a civil society, and what the authorities will require for the money allocated from the budget is not yet known. But today, many constant opponents of the authorities from among public activists still do not exclude the possibility of further cooperation with the state in the future, when the competitive distribution of grants becomes regular.
“Such competitions are interesting to us, as, I believe, to most non-profit organizations,” Anastasia Aseeva, administrative and financial director of the Moscow Helsinki Group, explained to Vremya Novostey. “After all, grants and sponsorships are the few sources of our existence.” According to Ms. Aseeva, the MHG did not take part in this competition, but it was “not a political demarche - they simply did not qualify according to a number of formal criteria.” President of the Holocaust Foundation Alla Gerber also considers the initiative to support public organizations by the state to be correct in principle. “The main thing is that in return they do not demand to sacrifice freedom,” she emphasized in a conversation with a Vremya Novostei correspondent. According to Ms. Gerber, during the entire existence of the organization, the foundation has not applied to the state for money. “We asked for moral support, not financial, for specific programs of the foundation, but we were never given it,” she complained. In addition to the question of the compatibility of views on democracy and the meaning of the existence of civil society, the possibility for NGOs applying for state support to maintain relations with foreign donor organizations remains unclear. “Our foundation also works with Western grants,” says Alla Gerber. “Some people in power may not like this, but I believe that it is impossible not to take advantage of the support of charitable foundations of the European community in a variety of areas for the benefit of our citizens.”
Alexander Adamsky assured the Vremya Novostey correspondent that during the current competition the origin of the funds that make up the budgets of the applicant NGOs was not taken into account. But one cannot help but notice the rather painful reaction of the authorities to the flow of funds into the non-profit sector from abroad, and in volumes that are tens of times greater than domestic Russian “investments” in civil society. Vladimir Putin has already accused some NGOs of deliberately not noticing “the most acute problems of the country and its citizens,” because “they simply cannot bite the hand with which they feed.” Now State Duma deputies intend to understand in more detail what kind of hand this is. “We are interested in how our internal civil processes are influenced by foreign forces,” explained Boris Kibirev, one of the initiators of the lower chamber’s recent request to the Ministry of Justice, a deputy from the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, to Vremya Novostei. “Taking into account that among these forces there are those who treat us kindly, and, on the contrary, malicious forces.” Deputies hope to receive an answer on the volume of foreign funding for Russian NGOs within a month. And then take some action. Including during the discussion of the budget, which will again certainly include expenses for maintaining democracy and civil society.