Putin's trusted ‘first-wave democrat’ What you ought to know about Russia's new election commissioner

Russia's two most important electoral campaigns for the next several years—a parliamentary contest this September and a presidential race scheduled for 2018—will take place on the watch of human rights advocate Ella Pamfilova, whom the Central Electoral Commission earlier today elected to serve as its head. Pamfilova is known as one of Russia's “first-wave democrats.” Her resume includes work as a government minister in cabinets led by Egor Gaidar and Viktor Chernomyrdin, and in the early 2000s she focused on human rights advocacy, at a time when conditions were growing worse every year. Despite all this, she's managed to remain within orbit of Vladimir Putin, who's now entrusted her with overseeing the country's delicate election process—an institution that became considerably discredited under her predecessor, Vladimir Churov. Meduza reviews the highlights of Pamfilova's life and career, as she takes on one of the most difficult and disliked jobs in Russia. 

Ella Pamfilova was born in 1953 in Uzbekistan, where she excelled in school, even earning the right to present Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev with a bouquet of flowers in the early 1960s, during a visit to Tashkent. Later, she said Khrushchev failed to make a strong impression on her as a girl, though she does remember “how the sunlight gleamed on his bald head.” She graduated from the Moscow Energy Institute and went to work for Mosenergo. In 1989, however, she participated in Russia's first-ever free elections, winning a seat as a people's deputy of the USSR. (Alexander Veshnyakov, another future election commissioner, also won a deputy's seat in these elections.)

As a member of this short-lived Soviet parliament, Pamfilova was part of the interregional deputy group, which also included the scientist and human rights activist Andrei Sakharov and the future mayor of St. Petersburg Anatoly Sobchak. It was a generally oppositionist group. In 1990, Pamfilova announced that she was leaving the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. 

After the disintegration of the Soviet Union, President Boris Yeltsin appointed Pamfilova to serve as minister of social welfare under Prime Minister Egor Gaidar. It was an impossible job. With the introduction of “shock therapy” and Gaidar's economic reforms, virtually the entire country was suddenly in need of a social safety net. Pamfilova had to develop legislation establishing social guarantees at the same time that she was sitting on a commission charged with organizing the distribution of humanitarian aid to different regions of Russia. 

In December 1992, she resigned along with the rest of Gaidar's cabinet. But Yeltsin personally insisted that she continue to work in the next government, with Viktor Chernomyrdin as prime minister. In 1993, she was part of the committee that drafted Russia's modern-day constitution. Two years later, she resigned again, though Yeltsin continued to value her expertise on social policy. She went on to work on a presidential advisory board on social issues. 

In December 1995, she was elected to the State Duma. A member of the “Russia's Choice” faction, led by Egor Gaidar, Pamfilova fought for an end to parliamentary immunity from legal prosecution, and campaigned vociferously against the first war in Chechnya. She developed legislation meant to resolve the conflict peacefully, but fellow lawmakers rejected the plan. (Even some members of her own faction declined to support it.) Afterwards, Pamfilova left “Russia's Choice,” finishing her term in the Duma as an independent. 

Pamfilova didn't make the cut for the next Duma in 1999, but in March 2000 she became the first woman ever to run for president. Admittedly, her campaign was more about symbolism than anything else, and she attracted just more than one percent of the electorate (fewer votes than the “against all” option on the ballot). After this, Pamfilova left politics largely behind, but she did establish a good working relationship with Vladimir Putin.

In the new millennium, Pamfilova made human rights advocacy her primary focus. She founded the “For Civil Dignity” movement in 2001, and the next year she became head of the Kremlin's commission on human rights. 

Until 2006, human rights workers in Russia weren't terribly popular with the authorities, but neither did they provoke many direct conflicts with the government. Problems, generally speaking, were limited to Chechnya.

Everything changed in 2006, when Alexander Mamontov's TV exposé, “Spies,” hit the airwaves. The documentary focused on the “spy rock,” which British diplomats in Moscow infamously used to receive and transmit information secretly. The film was an indirect but powerful blow to human rights advocates. For instance, Mamontov's report claimed that Lyudmila Alekseeva of the Moscow Helsinki Group had met with British diplomats. It was precisely in this scandal that Russia's modern-day stereotypes about human rights activists emerged: people who operate on foreign grants against the interests of Russia.

Pamfilova found herself in a very difficult situation. Human rights abuses in Russia were becoming increasingly common, and her colleagues and friends in the advocacy community were suddenly more persecuted than ever. Pamfilova had to make statements that risked putting her in conflict with the authorities. For example, she became one of the leading voices calling for the release of Svetlana Bakhmina, a former Yukos worker imprisoned for tax evasion and embezzlement, and she publicly demanded an investigation into the death in prison of Hermitage Capital's lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky. In October 2009, she spoke out in defense of the journalist Alexander Podrabinek, who authored a controversial opinion piece that critics said offended military veterans. For this, Pamfilova was hounded by activists from the pro-Kremlin youth group “Nashi.” Some Duma deputies even demanded her resignation from the human rights council.

Serving as the president's human rights advocate became increasingly difficult, and in 2010, under President Dmitry Medvedev, she tendered her resignation. At first, she said nothing about the reasons for her departure, but eventually she explained publicly, saying, “In the current system, it's become impossible to change qualitatively the situation concerning rights and freedoms—especially political rights and freedoms. I came up against this dead end.”

After leaving the presidential commission on human rights, Pamfilova returned to the organization she created nine years earlier, For Civil Dignity. Three years later, however, Pamfilova was working closely with the Kremlin yet again. By 2013, For Civil Dignity had become one of the groups responsible for distributing presidential grants to nonprofit organizations, which today have come to rely on government money more than ever, given Russia's growing hostility to Western funding for NGOs. Beginning a year earlier, Russian officials started labeling one organization after another a “foreign agent,” adding groups to a blacklist that carries additional, often crippling regulations. For human rights outfits like “Golos,” the Moscow Helsinki Group, and the For Civil Dignity movement, Kremlin grants have become the only means of survival. 

In 2014, Pamfilova accepted Vladimir Putin's invitation to serve as his new commissioner for human rights. The appointment got a warm welcome from Russia's human rights advocates and social activists. In office, Pamfilova managed to get the government to recognize participants of Russia's military operation in Syria as combat veterans (which bestows all the accompanying state benefits). She also clashed with Ramzan Kadyrov, the head of the Chechen Republic, advising him to “dial it back a notch” in his confrontation with Russia's liberal opposition. Chechen officials, who recently have become enormously sensitive to the slightest mention of their public behavior, responded by telling Pamfilova to “take a sedative and apologize.” She refused.

On March 3, 2016, news broke that Pamfilova was being considered to replace Churov as head of the Central Electoral Commission. That day, she turned off her phone and for a long time afterwards refused to comment on the story, though she was regarded from the start as the frontrunner for the job. Finally, three days before the election of a new commissioner, Pamfilova announced that she would take the position: “This is a field of activity with which I'm very familiar, and I understand perfectly well that it will be very, very difficult work. But I've never shied from complexities or difficulties before. I hope that my coming to the Central Electoral Commission will be of some use.”

Pamfilova got the job, winning 14 of the 15 votes on the commission's board.