Get the latest information on Human Rights Organizations in the NIS in our NIS Organizations section of the Website.

Profound changes were registered in a number of states of the former USSR. Growing political repression and violence characterized Tajikistan, where a brutal, Russia-backed Communist government inaugurated a wave of terror after displacing a coalition government in December 1992. In Turkmenistan, President Saparmurat Niyazov tightened already near total control by extending the official worship of his person. And in Uzbekistan repressions against moderate and secular opposition groups exacted a growing toll, forcing more opposition groups out of the country or into the underground.

Freedom was severely restricted in Kazakhstan, where free trade unions were intimidated and the free press harassed. In Ukraine, an ex-Communist nomenklatura stymied all efforts at economic reform and blocked privatization, while using its considerable power to control nationwide television as national elections approached. As the year drew to an end, Ukraine's authorities tightened the lid on private entrepreneurs and voted for an electoral system that eliminated the importance of political parties and strengthened the hand of local nomenklatura-linked industrialists, collective farm directors, and local government officials.

Georgia registered a decline in freedom attributable, in part, to civil war and external aggression. Armenia's active prosecution of a war against Azerbaijan contributed to freedom's decline in the latter country, as ex-Communist boss Gaidar Aliyev skillfully orchestrated a coup d'etat against Azerbaijan's democratically elected president and ushered in a wave of repression against political opponents, including parliamentarians from the Mejlis.

Among the ex-Soviet states, only Estonia registered gains by regularizing citizenship laws to give voice and vote to Russians and other non-indigenous nationalities in local elections. And while Russia's 12 December election holds out the promise of a more rapid transition to a free market and political pluralism, the country's involvement in a number of ethnic conflicts on its periphery and substantial sentiment among the Russian people for a Great Russian state sent ominous signals about the future path of that giant Eurasian state.(Reprinted by permission of Freedom House)

For more information or to order a subscription, see our publications page.

Center for Civil Society International [email protected]