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Video of this event will be livestreamed online at http://www.american.com/watch/aei-livestream
On December 27, 2010, businessmen and entrepreneurs Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev received the maximum sentence, fourteen years, on patently fabricated charges. This watershed
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Download Audio as MP3 event has exposed the hollowness of President Dmitri Medvedev's "liberal modernization" and "rule of law" rhetoric. It has confirmed the Kremlin's absolute ownership of the law and courts, which can be deployed against any entrepreneur who dares to meddle in politics without the explicit permission of the top authorities. The sentence may also lead to US-Russian tensions if Russia is admitted to the World Trade Organization. The United States would then have to repeal the Jackson-Vanik amendment, which denies Russia a "most favored nation" trade status, or face sanctions. Given the mood in Congress, repeal is very unlikely.
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Panelists:
DANIEL RUSSELL, Department of State
ANDERS ASLUND, Peter G. Peterson Institute for International Economics
VLADIMIR KARA-MURZA, Prodemocracy Opposition and Russian Solidarity Party
Moderator:
Adjournment
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WASHINGTON, FEBRUARY 24, 2011--Last December's second conviction of Mikhail Khodorkovsky and his maximum fourteen-year sentence highlight the need to evaluate the state of law and order in Russia, panelists concluded Thursday at an American Enterprise Institute event. While the speakers widely acknowledged that Khodorkovsky's verdict reveals the worst aspects of corruption in the Russian government, debate focused on US engagement with Russia. Opposition activist Vladimir Kara-Murza argued that the Khodorkovsky conviction has fundamentally tarnished President Dmitri Medvedev's reputation as a reformer, advocating that the US government should adopt targeted visa restrictions against Russian state officials implicated in human-rights violations. Anders Åslund warned that Russia is "too rich and too educated" to sustain its current level of corruption, explaining that US-Russian engagement and an emerging Russian middle class make a democratic breakthrough inevitable, especially if the Kremlin ever attempts reforms in earnest. Finally, Daniel Russell of the State Department outlined the achievements of US-Russian engagement, emphasizing progress on Afghanistan cooperation, various intergovernmental working groups, and arms-control conventions such as the New START Treaty and the "123" agreement on civil-nuclear cooperation.
--KEVIN ROTHROCK
Speaker biographies
Daniel A. Russell is the deputy assistant secretary of state responsible for relations with Russia, Ukraine, Moldova, and Belarus and for international security and arms-control issues in the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs. A career member of the Foreign Service, Mr. Russell served as chief of staff to Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Bill Burns from 2008 to 2009, deputy chief of mission in Moscow from 2005 to 2008, and deputy chief of mission in Almaty, Kazakhstan, from 2000 to 2003. Since he joined the Foreign Service in 1983, Mr. Russell has held positions in Washington and abroad, including director of the Office of Russian Affairs, director of the Office of European Political and Security Affairs, consul general at the US consulate in Yekaterinburg, special assistant for Europe to the under secretary for political affairs, and first secretary at the US embassy in Moscow. Mr. Russell has also worked in the State Department offices responsible for relations with the United Kingdom and Cuba and at the US embassies in El Salvador and the Dominican Republic.
Anders Åslund is a senior fellow at the Peter G. Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE) and an adjunct professor at Georgetown University. He is a leading specialist on postcommunist economic transformation, with more than thirty-five years of experience in the field. Mr. Åslund has worked as an economic adviser to the Russian, Ukrainian, and Kyrgyz governments. He is cochairman of the board of directors of the Kyiv School of Economics and chairman of the Advisory Council of the Center for Social and Economic Research, Warsaw. Previously, he was the director of the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, founding director of the Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics, and a professor at the Stockholm School of Economics. Mr. Åslund also served as a Swedish diplomat in Moscow, Geneva, and Kuwait. He is the author of ten books, including The Last Shall Be the First: The East European Financial Crisis, 2008–10 (PIIE, 2010), How Ukraine Became a Market Economy and Democracy (PIIE, 2009), Russia’s Capitalist Revolution: Why Market Reform Succeeded and Democracy Failed (PIIE, 2007), and How Capitalism Was Built: The Transformation of Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2007). He has edited sixteen books and published widely.
Vladimir Kara-Murza Jr. is a member of the federal council of Solidarity, Russia’s democratic opposition movement. He has served as campaign chairman for presidential candidate Vladimir Bukovsky (2007–2008) and adviser to Duma opposition leader Boris Nemtsov (2000–2003). Mr. Kara-Murza was a candidate for the Russian parliament in 2003, representing the Union of Right Forces and Yabloko parties. He is currently the Washington bureau chief of RTVi television network. Previously a correspondent for Novye Izvestia and Kommersant newspapers and editor-in-chief of the Russian Investment Review, Mr. Kara-Murza now writes a weekly blog, Spotlight on Russia, for World Affairs Journal. He has published op-eds in the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal and was a contributor to Russia’s Choices: The Duma Elections and After (Centre for Global Studies, 2003) and Russian Liberalism: Ideas and People (Novoe Izd-vo, 2004). Mr. Kara-Murza is the author of They Chose Freedom (2005), a television documentary on dissent in the Soviet Union. His book, Reform or Revolution: The Quest for Responsible Government in the First Russian State Duma, will be published in Moscow in 2011.
Leon Aron is a resident scholar and the director of Russian studies at AEI. He was born in Moscow and came to the United States as a refugee from the Soviet Union in June 1978 at the age of twenty-four. In addition to writing AEI’s Russian Outlook, Mr. Aron has contributed numerous articles on Russian affairs to leading U.S. and Russian newspapers and magazines. Among the topics he has covered are the political, economic, and ideological factors shaping Russian foreign policy and U.S.-Russian relations and the social, political, and economic facets of “Putinism.” Mr. Aron’s frequent television and radio interviews range from CBS News’s 60 Minutes to NPR’s All Things Considered and Talk of the Nation. He is the author of the first full-length scholarly biography of Boris Yeltsin, Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life (St. Martin’s Press, 2000), and Russia’s Revolution: Essays 1989–2006 (AEI Press, 2007). His most recent book, Roads to the Temple: Truth, Memory, Ideas, and Ideals in the Making of the Russian Revolution, 1987–1991, will be published by Yale University Press in fall 2011.
