Translated material
Third act
I have a problem: I'm an optimist. For six years now I have been trying to tell the city and the world about the amazing and good things that are happening to Russian civil society. It turns out bad. For a small but fundamental reason: by all accounts, there is simply no civil society in Russia. And not only civil society, and not only society: we also have no private property, no institutions, education, medicine, fair trial - nothing. Never was and never will be. And what can we say about civil society, if there is not even a bottom in Russia.
Denial is our local version of recognition, honed to perfection by the Soviet regime, which denied not only sex, but also reality as such. Neither living examples, nor practical stories, nor statistical data, nothing can overcome this denial - the optics have developed, and it does not allow us to see the elephant. But, well aware that the pessimists will stick to their guns (and public depression cannot be cured by texts), I will try once again to tell you about the amazing and good things that are still happening to Russian civil society, which not only exists, but also feels itself from year to year. year is getting better and better.
Every year the Ministry of Justice registers about 15 thousand new public organizations. In total, at the beginning of 2017 , there were more than 223 thousand of them in the Ministry of Justice register. Some of them are dead, legal entities not conducting real activities, and some are pseudo-civil organizations or corrupt transit points. But some of the old and new organizations are real: people don’t donate money to shells and business structures. According to estimates by the KAF Foundation for the same 2016, Russians annually donate about 143 billion rubles to non-profit organizations (NPOs), and half of the adult population of the country makes charitable donations. The statistics of the crowdfunding platform Planeta.ru look modest against this background, but these are not estimates, but facts: since the beginning of 2012 , 2,382 projects have raised more than 672 million rubles , and 623,956 people use the service.
What kind of civil society is this, which is seen not only by the Ministry of Justice, but also by living people?
Only a small part of it, the third sector, has a clear definition: it is not the state (first sector) and not business (second sector). Civil society itself can be defined as a set of social institutions and practices that create the conditions for the third action. Similar to the third place (which is between home and work), the third action is one that people do not to earn money or satisfy other personal needs, including gaining and maintaining power, but for the benefit of the community as a whole. The first action is about personal benefits, the second is about political struggle, the third is about public good. (Empirically observed reality is much more complex than theoretical constructs, but about the intertwining of the three sectors - somehow separately.)
The Russian government openly considers civil society its enemy: the prosecutor’s office and the Ministry of Justice declare NGOs that receive grant funding from international foundations “ foreign agents ”, and the foundations themselves are included in the list of “ undesirable organizations ”, cooperation with which is punishable under criminal law. It is no coincidence that the phrase “shrinking space for civil society” has become an obsessive cliche accompanying any discussion of Russian reality in the West: NGOs, primarily human rights and environmental ones, are under heavy pressure in the form of endless inspections, fines and the threat of liquidation.
Pressure from the state is the first sign of the growing strength of Russian civil society. Any repression is a reaction to political risks, and the developing civil society really threatens the existing political regime. Corruption, election fraud, police brutality, censorship, instrumental use of the judicial system - all this is possible only if society is passive. The opposite is also true: a change of power occurs according to different scenarios, but a democratic rule-of-law state is unimaginable without a strong civil society.
There are other objective signs of the civic maturity of our society: for example, the success of crowdfunding (according to KAF estimates, in 2016, 9.2% of citizens donated to human rights organizations alone; in 2014 - 2.9%) or the popularity of volunteering (in 2016 5% of respondents volunteered in NGOs, in 2014 and 2015 - 2%).
For me, subjective feelings are much more important. Having immersed myself quite deeply in the third sector, every year I see more and more amazing and original initiatives around me and, more importantly, more and more people enthusiastically dedicating their time to the third action. In other words, with my own eyes every day I observe the growth of this very civil society.
But this growth is quantitative. Optimism noticeably decreases when you think about quality. What is quality and how to calculate it is a rather complex question, but here are three indicators that I use for practical purposes.
Influence - what kind of successes and results does civil society have, how much society as a whole accepts/rejects its civil part (in other words, everything that lies behind the controversial concept of “efficiency”).
Sustainability - whether civil initiatives are institutionalized and whether new institutions necessary for the third action are created within society.
Values - whether general principles promoting cooperation emerge in the civil sector, or whether narrow corporate interests dominate.
A quick inspection gives the impression that there is nothing to brag about. Efficiency? The already mentioned corruption, falsification, censorship - all these phenomena characteristic of a weak civil society are still with us. Institutionalization? Due to new restrictive laws, more and more registered NPOs are abandoning legal entity, and new initiatives are not seeking to obtain it. Solidarity, transparency, trust? Not exactly the principles that guide civil activists and NGO employees in their daily work.
The picture is really quite sad: if quantity turns into quality, it does so extremely slowly. But again, the picture depends on the optics. We do not exist in the hothouse conditions of already developed democracies, with which we are compared in all kinds of indices of freedom and human rights. The third action in Russia grows through reinforced concrete slabs left over from Soviet times and smaller tiles, which our new autocracy has been covering any free space for 17 years now. Evaluating our civil society according to the Hamburg account, comparing it, for example, with the German or American context is inadequate to the actual tasks of understanding its current situation. The third action in autocracy requires special optics, which, by and large, have not yet been developed.
The good news is that the tiles are constantly crumbling, and civil society, albeit slowly, is cementing itself. This means, to the delight of optimists, there is someone and why to discuss the qualitative problems that accompany these processes, and to develop optics that allow us to see these processes.