In Moscow, Clinton Urges Russia to Open Its Political System

October 15, 2009

In Moscow, Clinton Urges Russia to Open Its Political System

By MARK LANDLER

KAZAN, Russia — On a day that took her from an elite Moscow university to this bustling city in Russia’s Muslim hinterland, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton paid tribute on Wednesday to religious tolerance, while also challenging Russia’s leaders to open their political system and allow more dissent.

In a speech to nearly 1,000 students at Moscow State University, Mrs. Clinton spoke far more forcefully about human rights and the rule of law than she did on a trip to China earlier this year. Russia, she said, could best fulfill its potential by protecting basic freedoms.

“That’s why attacks on journalists and human rights activists are such a great concern, because it is a threat to progress,” she said. “The more open Russia will become, the more Russia will contribute.”

As if to illustrate that point, Mrs. Clinton then traveled from Moscow to Kazan, the 1,000-year-old capital of Tatarstan, a Russian republic where Muslims, Orthodox Christians and Roman Catholics live together peacefully, with none of the violent separatism that afflicts places like Chechnya.

Mrs. Clinton was met by Tatarstan’s longtime president, Mintimer S. Shaimiev, who showed her around a mosque and an Orthodox cathedral, both of which are within the walls of Kazan’s version of the Kremlin. Mr. Shaimiev is no democrat, but he played up his ecumenical credentials.

“This is a multiethnic place,” he told her as she gazed at a shimmering chandelier in the mosque. “There are plenty of mixed marriages.”

Mrs. Clinton praised Mr. Shaimiev for being “someone who is well known for fostering religious tolerance.”

The three-hour side trip to Tatarstan captured the ambitions and limitations of Mrs. Clinton’s approach to being secretary of state, nine months into her tenure. It was driven, her aides say, by her desire to get out of capital cities, to places where she could mingle with people.

But the stop in Kazan had a rushed feel to it, and Mrs. Clinton has little time these days for even brief forays. Minutes after her plane took off from Kazan, she holed up in her cabin to take part, by secure telephone link, in the White House’s latest meeting on Afghanistan.

Mrs. Clinton has managed to keep encounters with students on her schedule. Her talk in Moscow drew noisy applause, and she was asked questions about issues like the American role in the global economic crisis and the dispute between the United States and Russia over Georgia.
Asked to name the book that had made the biggest impact on her, she singled out “The Brothers Karamazov.” The parable of the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoyevsky’s novel, she said, speaks to the dangers of certitude.

“For a lot of reasons, that was an important part of my thinking,” Mrs. Clinton said. “One of the greatest threats we face is from people who believe they are absolutely, certainly right about everything.”

From there, it was a short rhetorical leap for Mrs. Clinton to encourage Russia to open its political system.

She even struck an implicit blow for diversity when she cut the ribbon on a statue of the poet Walt Whitman at the university. Local gay activists protested because one of the Russian officials on hand to honor Whitman, a gay icon, was Moscow’s mayor, Yuri M. Luzhkov, who has made hostile statements about homosexuals and banned gay pride parades in the city.

For her part, Mrs. Clinton noted that in his writing Whitman celebrated the similarities between Russians and Americans.

Yet Mrs. Clinton’s emphasis was on the new rather than the old. She told the students that they symbolized a new Russia, one that produced innovators like Sergey Brin, who was born in Moscow and helped to start the Internet search giant Google. And she praised President Dmitri A. Medvedev of Russia for charting a vision of the country’s future based on technological innovation rather than mineral wealth.

Mrs. Clinton’s visit underscores the Obama administration’s growing attachment to Mr. Medvedev, Vladimir V. Putin’s handpicked choice to succeed him as president. Last month, the White House made much of Mr. Medvedev’s support for its tough stance toward Iran.

After Mrs. Clinton’s meeting on Tuesday with the foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, in which he ruled out threatening Iran with sanctions, she went to see Mr. Medvedev at his dacha outside Moscow. American officials said that Mr. Medvedev was unstinting in his support for the administration.

But on a visit to Beijing on Wednesday, Mr. Putin told reporters that he believed that it was too early to consider tough sanctions against Iran, suggesting that threats would poison negotiations.

Back to Top Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company