Official hostility could hurt U.S. ties
MOSCOW Irene Stevenson, an American labor activist, has lived and worked in Russia since 1989. Late last year her organization, a U.S. government-funded affiliate of the AFL-CIO, counseled the air-traffic controllers' union as they threatened a strike.

On Dec. 30, when she returned to Moscow after a brief Christmas vacation, she was curtly turned away at the airport, refused entry even though her visa had been renewed only a month before. Her name, it seems, is now on Russia's watch list as a threat to national security.

Stevenson's case might have been an isolated manifestation of Russia's opaque, often capricious bureaucracy, except that it was the latest in a series of moves against Americans and other foreigners working here. It is a troubling trend, U.S. officials said, that could undermine not only Russia's image as an emergent democracy but also its relations with the United States.

Three days before Stevenson arrived in Moscow that night, the government announced that it was ending the work of the Peace Corps in Russia, after having refused to renew the visas to 30 of its American volunteers last August. A day after her expulsion, the government announced that it was ending the mandate of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe's small mission overseeing the conflict in Chechnya.

A spokesman for the Kremlin, Alexander Machevsky, declined to discuss Stevenson's case except to say that Russia, like the United States, had a right to deny anyone a visa without explanation.

Some officials have attributed the Russia actions to wounded pride, a feeling that Russia did not need aid from groups like the Peace Corps, whose mission is to assist developing nations.

Similarly, in October, when President Vladimir Putin revoked the special status conferred in 1991 on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the American government radio networks created in the Cold War to broadcast news and information behind the Iron Curtain, officials said that since Russia's press was now free, the Russians no longer needed such networks for independent reporting.

But measures against foreigners appear to be becoming more stringent. On Jan. 7, a German journalist, Guenter Wallraff, was turned away at the airport because, the Foreign Ministry later said, he planned to report on Chechnya, despite having applied only for a tourist visa. The same day, a U.S. official with the OSCE's office in Tajikistan, Meaghan Fitzgerald, was turned away as she tried to travel through Moscow to Dushanbe.

The reasons in each case, if one was given, were different. But underlying them all appeared to be a renewed wariness and even outright hostility to what some Russians consider foreign interference in the country's internal affairs.

In the cases of Stevenson and the Peace Corps, Russia's expulsions appear to contradict the spirit of Putin's agreements with President George W. Bush to increase cultural and educational exchanges. More broadly, they appear to show that there are limits to Putin's efforts to torque Russia closer to the West.

"Nobody argues against the necessity of cultural exchanges," said Igor Bunin, director of the Center for Political Technologies, an influential research organization here. "But whenever the power feels its sovereignty is infringed, this is when old ambitions wake up."

The government's actions hardly herald a return to Soviet-like isolation. Nor are they unprecedented in democratic Russia, where only two years ago a government-induced wave of spying mania swept the country, catching foreigners and Russians alike in a wave of espionage allegations that prompted new restrictions on cultural and scientific exchanges.

Russia has historically struggled with xenophobia and suspicion of the outside world, the product, perhaps, of centuries of isolation and invasions. And officials and experts suggested that the latest moves reflect the latest struggle over the extent to which Russia's leaders should tolerate the surge of foreigners who swept into the country after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Alexander Vershbow, the American ambassador, said the U.S. government had raised the incidents with Russian officials. He suggested that the trend, if it continues, could undermine foreign investment and cool the general warming of relations with the United States.

"As more incidents accumulate," he said in an interview, "it's going to have consequences, irritating constituencies in the United States that have supported closer cooperation with Russia."

Stevenson was one of those. She arrived in Russia even before the Soviet Union's collapse and stayed ever since. Since 1992, she has led the American Center for Labor Solidarity, which has provided educational programs and legal advice for Russia's unions. The organization, funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development, received $1 million in American funds this year.

Stevenson expressed doubt that the organization's role in the air-traffic controllers' threatened strike was at the root of her visa problem, saying it played only a limited roll by providing a lawyer for their union in a court hearing. The union lost that hearing, in November, but staged a wild-cat hunger strike over several days in December that eventually led to pay raises.

"Whatever contact we had with the air-traffic controllers is no different than the contact with any other unions," she said. Of her expulsion, she said, "I keeping hoping it is a mistake, because I want to get back to my home."

The mood in Russia suggests Stevenson may have to wait. Vladimir Lukin, deputy speaker of the lower house of Parliament, said he opposed the decision to end the mission of the OSCE to work in Chechnya, but that international monitoring of Russia's behavior struck many as insulting.

"Such open monitoring has a sense of humiliation for us," he said in a radio interview on Ekho Moskvy. "And you always feel particularly humiliated when there is an element of truth in the fact that you're being viewed as something of a second-class citizen."

Some of the Americans targeted also belong to organizations, including the Peace Corps, Radio Free Europe and the AFL-CIO, that still suffer from old Cold War perceptions, including suspicions that they were simply arms of American intelligence agencies.

After the end of the Soviet Union, those suspicions died as policymakers that surrounded President Boris Yeltsin welcomed all manner of American assistance in the heady days of Russia's emerging democracy.

But with the ascendancy of Putin, a former colonel in the KGB, the intelligence services once again wield great influence, and lingering suspicions now appear to be resurfacing as government policy.