I won't ever forget reading this strange and wonderful piece:
April 20, 2002
THE SATURDAY PROFILE
A Russian Rights Crusader, Made by Mary Kay
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
LYUSSA, Russia
ANYA Vanina is an unlikely troublemaker. She worked for years as a police officer and later peddled makeup for Mary Kay. But in this small Russian village, tucked in a forested corner of northwest Russia, she causing a stir.
Take, for instance, Mariya Kozlova, a farmer from a nearby village. One Saturday in March, she made the hourlong bus trip to Ms. Vanina's tiny civil liberties center to map out her next move in a legal battle to save her youngest son. He deserted the army in St. Petersburg last autumn after he was beaten repeatedly by officers.
Ms. Vanina wrote letters that won him a new medical examination, and she is making a case for his exemption from the army for health reasons. Army commanders have come looking for him twice. If he is caught, he could be imprisoned.
"My daughter told me there is one person who can help — Anya," said Ms. Kozlova, who sat wedged in between a table and a bookshelf in a back room of Ms. Vanina's log cabin house. "He was terrorized."
Ms. Vanina, a refined but steel-willed 39-year-old with a soft voice and dainty features, is fighting the power of the Russian state. She is part of a new generation of Russian dissidents who are raising their voices against injustices that have arisen from the economic decay so pervasive in today's Russia.
The Moscow Helsinki Group, an umbrella organization that ties together regional human rights groups, reports that their numbers have increased fortyfold, to more than 2,000, since 1996.
The rest of the world remembers Russian dissidents from Soviet days: Courageous intellectuals struggling against repression. They lived in cities. They rebelled from their kitchens, copying banned books by hand for circulation as samizdat.
But what toppled Communism is poorly suited for an era of casino capitalism. Economics have replaced politics. The crush of poverty has left many unable to defend their new rights. Lawyers are expensive. There are no public defenders. The state, deeply decayed, can no longer cover all its costs.
Ms. Vanina takes on those problems in ways that may seem small to outsiders, but loom large in the lives of villagers. Like the woman from a neighboring town who lost part of the roof of her state-owned apartment in a windstorm: Ms. Vanina helped her take the government to court.
"Not taking action means accepting what I see around me," Ms. Vanina said, over a bowl of potato stew at her kitchen table. "I cannot do that."
So she set up a civil liberties center in a postage-stamp-sized room in her house three years ago. Two small Western grants paid for a copy machine, a computer and one of the only Internet connections in this village of 4,000, where small, garden-rimmed wooden houses are interspersed with sagging two- and three-story apartment buildings.
MS. VANINA herself knows the press of poverty. She was a widow at 23. Seven years later, full of romanticism about the country and an aching desire to own her own house, she left the comforts of pricey St. Petersburg for a cabin with no running water.
She raised goats and a cow. She gardens to get by. These days she works almost free: People pay her in jars of milk and bags of vegetables.
She is the daughter of working class parents, welders in a St. Petersburg factory. Before embarking on her campaigns against the authorities, she worked for the autorities: for 11 years, she was a police officer.
It was an adolescent dream to be different, Ms. Vanina explained. All her friends wanted to become doctors and teachers. She preferred catching criminals. Instead, she worked with homeless children as an officer in the St. Petersburg police force.
It was not until she settled here in Plyussa that she tried her hand at chasing thieves. But by then, Russia's economy had collapsed, and rogues and thieves were part of the local government, she says. As a detective in charge of the region's rich timber industry, she uncovered clues linking large shipments of stolen wood to the head of the local administration and the police.
Her police chief told her to drop the case. She refused. He then threatened to commit her to an insane asylum. There were menacing phone calls. A Molotov cocktail was thrown at her house. In the end, she gave up the case, something she still regrets. Soon after, she quit the force.
"It was a whole web, a system, and it was directly connected with criminal groups," she said.
Corruption among the authorities, she added, "is a big problem, but it would be less of one if people weren't afraid to talk about it. They aren't ready yet."
Ms. Vanina's activities have vexed the local powers, past and present. But she has never been jailed or harassed. The current local leader, Mikhail Stepanenko, was angry with her letter to the newspaper criticizing him for not paying teachers. Then there was the time, under the previous local boss, when the draft committee conducted its recruiting meeting surreptitiously to avoid Ms. Vanina.
Mr. Stepanenko, in more relaxed moments, confides suspicions that Russia's human rights movement has been financing warlords in Chechnya. His predecessor printed an article in the local newspaper calling Ms. Vanina a cosmopolitan, an old-fashioned derogatory word for a person of Jewish descent, which she is not.
It is good to irritate officials, said Lyudmila Alexeyeva, chairwoman of the Moscow Helsinki Group, who fought against the Soviet practice of imprisoning and committing political dissenters to insane asylums. These small battles are in fact the beginning of a civil society, she said.
"In Soviet times, all Russian intellectual and cultural life was in Moscow and Leningrad," she said. "But now we see that the provincial intelligentsia is coming alive. They are not concerned with getting rich, but with protecting others."
FATE intervened just when Ms. Vanina was at her lowest point in her battle with the police force. A friend invited Ms. Vanina to attend a Mary Kay cosmetics sales party. She was skeptical, but went. It turned out to be a transforming experience.
It was not the frilly pink packaging but the respect for individuals that impressed Ms. Vanina. In a country where the notion of individual rights and self-worth are alien, the approach moved her.
The company's preachings — financial independence, international sisterhood and lifestyle — appealed. Her Mary Kay epiphany led to the creation of a beauty salon-turned women's center in a defunct banya, or sauna. She made a profit at first, she said, selling Mary Kay cosmetics, haircuts and massage. But she closed when mold formed on the sauna ceiling. She could not find an affordable place to move, and she began her civil liberties organization.
"That American company made a revolution in my life," she recalled. It exudes a "tender care and value for people that amazed me. In the police force, relations were crude. This was so different. I almost had tears in my eyes. I told myself, `This is what I want to do.' "
For now, people still expect to lose in a fight against the state, Ms. Vanina said. No one complains, for instance, when the village police routinely beat suspects during questioning.
Russia will only begin to change when people start demanding more from their state. Some already have. Like the roofless villager, Lyudmila Khrenova, who described Ms. Vanina's work in a single sentence: "It makes you feel like a human being."
nytimes.com |
