Few will dispute that the work of a human rights defender should take into account the cultural and social realities of a particular region. Yet, human rights campaigns often fail because the methodologies they use do not apply in specific sociocultural settings. In other cases, contradictions exist between the ideology of human rights and the longstanding customs and practices of a given community. However, many difficulties can be overcome with the сorrect use of knowledge and the right commitment to truth.
Historically, the regulatory mechanisms of communities comprise a mixture of customs, religion, and law, which exist in a complex hierarchical relationship. Notably, societies do not always place rights at the top of the regulatory hierarchy.
Further, in those regions where law was adopted as an “equal” regulatory mechanism to customs and religious prescriptions (for example, medieval Europe), this equalization often put the legal system in the service of an already formed religious or customary narrative. For instance, an illusory image of an “enemy” within the community might be enshrined as a matter of state policy. Thus, a human rights defender should understand that while law is a stronger mechanism than custom or religion historically, it may not always perform its regulatory function in practice.
Human rights defenders in Russia
Today, a human rights defender in Russia faces the same problem—a society in which the regulatory functions of religion, customs, and law are mixed.
In Russia, a durable form of aggressive militaristic culture has developed through the intertwining of state expansionist ideology with Messianic Orthodox Christianity, the latter of which is institutionally subordinate to the state. Within this culture, in place since the sixteenth century, the state is regarded as the only social actor.
An effective legal apparatus could not emerge from this ideology, and thus, fully serving the interests of the state, the legal practices that did develop stunted the growth of Russian social institutions. The doctrine of a single social entity (the state) sanctioned by the Orthodox Church fails to recognize the crucial role of human rights, an understanding that is necessarily opposed to the militaristic ideology that dominates Russian social and political life.
One of the common ideas within the Russian cultural model is that the rejection of freedoms and rights in favor of the state promotes honesty, as people themselves are incapable of managing freedom and will immediately be “deceived by the enemies of Russia.” At the same time, while the inefficiency of the current political machine is evident on its face, the alternative, in the form of the Western model of society, is seen as “even worse.” The negative economic experience of Russia in the 1990s is actively exploited here. By manipulating historical memory, the Russian government is once again building a militaristic identity for Russian society in which the state is prioritized above all else.
The case of the Open Society Foundations
An example of this dynamic is the history of the Open Society Foundations (OSF) in Russia after the collapse of the USSR. From 1995 to 2003, the OSF spent more than $1 billion to support Russian science, distributing grants to 64,500 teachers, professors, and students. In addition, many textbooks were released for high school and middle school—before this initiative, there were no alternatives to the propaganda-filled texts provided by the state. Supplied at a time when science in Russia was not funded in almost any way because of the severe economic crisis, this assistance effectively saved the scientific community in the country. It was assumed that the funding would help form a generation of independent researchers (primarily in the humanitarian field) focused on integration into the world scientific community.
However, after the Putin government banned the activities of the OSF, there was no organized reaction from the scientific community. There was also silence after the Ministry of Culture ordered that all books published with the support of the OSF (several thousand titles!) be withdrawn from libraries. As for scientific schools, they simply were not created—independent researchers were expelled from the country or arrested. The question arises: why was an initiative backed by such an impressive outlay of resources unable to make a meaningful impact in promoting a mass civil society in Russia?
The author interviewed in 2024 five scientists in Moscow from different fields who have good reason to thank the OSF for their scientific careers. In all cases, the attitude toward the organization’s mission and its role was the same: the OSF is an enemy of the Russian state and therefore of Russian culture, so its activities have been suspended. As for the value of researcher independence, academic freedom, and other attributes of scientific life, the interviewees do not consider them essential elements of scientific discourse, but only random facets—a “fashion” that has emerged in several Western countries.
This attitude is based on an entrenched cultural model in which the state is the sole arbiter of social relationships—freedom is limited to the permitted actions sufficient to carry out the state’s necessary functions. Of course, the nature of this problem is specific to a particular national context—in Kazakhstan, a former Soviet republic that has historically been less susceptible to intervention by Russian state institutions, the OSF’s activities have faced no such problems.
Confronting longstanding cultural models and practices
Without separate organizational and theoretical work to explain the ruinous effects of Russia’s culture and citizens’ attitude toward the state, it will be impossible to build stable social institutions. In order to organize effective human rights work in Russia, it will first be necessary to discredit, on a theoretical level, the cultural codes of reverence for militarism and the dissolution of private life in the interests of the state by mass disclosure of crimes committed by the state under the сover of this ideology, as well as the disclosure of its historical uselessness. Those opposed to the totalizing control of the state can counter political manipulation with scientific analysis, which, like any truth, will eventually prevail.
The basis for the sustained influence of militaristic culture is its identification with the public good. By debunking this connection and convincingly showing the perniciousness of this type of culture that has developed in Russia since the 15th century, we will be able to resist even the vicious authoritarian ideology and the corrupt practices it generates.
This work requires independent universities as sources of free knowledge. It is no coincidence that authoritarian governments aim to destroy the independence of universities — it is there that a significant part of social knowledge originates and is formed. Therefore, methods of institutional development and dissemination of independent knowledge should be the focus of constant attention of human rights defenders. The priority in the case of Russia should be the complete intellectual transformation of the concept of the social good in the public field and the exposure of its false identification in the common consciousness with the current practice of the Russian state.