NIZHNY NOVGOROD, Russia — Michael Posner got up at 4 a.m. in Moscow, bound for this Volga River city where he began filling a yellow spiral notebook with stories of newspapers silenced, human rights advocates threatened and political parties repressed as the United States prepares for a new chapter in its relations with Russia.
Call it reset 2.0.
Posner, U.S. assistant secretary of state for the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, describes the task as moving decisively to another level in an area where the United States has not made visible progress.
On a trip to Russia that began Monday and ended Saturday, Posner visited Moscow, Nizhny Novgorod and Kazan, asking activists and opposition politicians what the United States could or should be doing to better support their efforts. He listened, took notes, asked questions and answered even more.
The reset refers to the Obama administration’s policy of improving relations that had badly deteriorated, and Russia hands generally consider it a success. A nuclear arms reduction treaty has been signed, Russia permits military supplies bound for Afghanistan to cross its territory, and it has backed the United States on Iran and abstained on the U.N. authorization of force in Libya. Progress has been made toward Russian membership in the World Trade Organization.
Inside the country, however, democratic institutions are stunted, demonstrators supporting freedom of assembly are beaten and arrested, and the law is often used to punish enemies rather than protect individuals.
“In this area where we haven’t gotten progress over several years,” Posner said, “we have a particular challenge.”
That leaves the Obama administration vulnerable going into the 2012 election campaign, said Matthew Rojansky, deputy director of the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
“We’ve seen already the attack is going to be on human rights issues,” he said by telephone from Washington. “Republicans are saying, ‘Russia is a bad country. Why are you working with them?’ ”
So, even as the United States continues operating along the more successful circuits of the reset — including cooperating on counterterrorism — it will also venture more assertively into human rights, a course that has less chance of success, he said.
“It’s reset 2.0,” Rojansky said. “The core of the software remains, but you get additional features.”
‘A very important signal’
Thursday found Posner and Thomas O. Melia, deputy assistant secretary in the bureau, in Nizhny Novgorod, a city of 1.2 million about 250 miles east of Moscow. Uncomplaining about a minibus that lurched at stoplights and bucked over potholes and disregarding a serious lack of sleep, they started their interviews over coffee in a cozy cafe.
“Keep meeting us like this,” said Stanislav Dmitrievsky, who investigates killings and disappearances in Chechnya and was convicted of extremism in 2006. “The authorities can keep talking about us as a marginal group, but you’re giving them a very important signal.”
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