On Monday the Freedom House organization, that estimates the level of democratic development in different countries, has published a report titled Nations In Transit-2008, summarizing the 5-year long observations over 29 states in the Eastern and Western Europe, Balkans and CIS. Our country, the main anti-democratic power in post-soviet space, was given special attention.   

The experts from Freedom House criticize Russia traditionally for the lack of democracy, while Russian authorities call the conclusions to be “absurd” or “politically committed”. This time the report turned out to be especially sharp with some passages reminding of Churchill’s Iron Curtain Speech. The report says that now, after 20 years passed since the Berlin’s Wall fell, the image of integral and free Europe is still unachievable. Considerable part of Eurasia is not free yet, and peoples living there have given up democratic aspirations that are the fundamentals of the European states.    

Against the background of relatively successful “new democracies”, the Freedom House notes about strengthening of authoritarian trends in the former soviet republics (with the exception of Baltic States and Ukraine), also about “drifting away” by Russia and her neighbors from the values shared by the western European societies.   

In expert opinion, dependence of the Western Europe on the authoritarian countries, that have great resources of hydrocarbons, is one of the reasons of the current state of things. This relates to Russia, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan above all. The authors of the report warn that the situation will be getting worse, as it is expected that next 15 years the volume of the fuel import to the EU from Russia will increase up to 70%.  

Freedom House says that oil and gas have become a real curse for Russia, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan as the superprofits have affected negatively the weak democratic regimes, which resulted in experiments with authoritarian capitalism.   

The experts called Russia leading antidemocratic force in the post-soviet authoritarian bloc. According to them, an “iron triangle” has formed in Russia consisting of the state power, heads of the industrial corporations and special services. The actions by this triangle lead to oppression of political opposition, dependency by courts, degradation of the elective process, and reduction of the space of public criticism. As for foreign policy, the high prices for oil and gas enable Russia to ignore the criticism at her address and to build relations with neighboring countries from the position of strength and, besides, to hinder the activities by international institutions like OSCE.