passopenrecords.org

In this blog we have mostly reported on events in Harrisburg and have sampled opinions from across the state of Pennsylvania. We have also written about local events in communities throughout the Commonwealth, for it is at the municipal, county and school district levels that most of the open records action takes place. Occasionally we have looked at other parts of the country to put our own state in national perspective – and as many have pointed out, on the open records report card we do not fare very well.

Today we go half way around the world to bring you the story of a man in St. Petersburg, Russia, who literally risks his life for “the right to know.”

The following excerpts, from an article in the New York Times, are a reminder – with a twist – that one of the first things corrupt and dictatorial governments set out to do is to control the flow of free and public information. In such governments there is only one point of view, which means that the only reality is what the official government organs say it is. As George Orwell wrote almost 60 years ago in 1984, “And if all others accepted the lie which the party imposed - if all records told the same tale - then the lie passed into history and became the truth,” with the result that the “past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth.”

The twist in the story below is that the people who are going after Ivan Pavlov are not ambitious dictators seeking power, but venal bureaucrats looking for a payoff. Their aim is not to keep the information secret but to line their pockets. It’s a kind of privatization, however perverted, under which public information is sold to the highest bidder. It is, said Mr. Pavlov, “an element of ordinary corruption.”

There are many reasons people want to keep public records from public view, none of them good. Read on . . .

The men who attacked Ivan Y. Pavlov waited beside his car outside his home.

They knocked him over from behind, stomped him and kicked him in the head. None of them spoke. They stole nothing. As Mr. Pavlov lay curled defensively on the street, they trotted away. Then they tried to run him over with their car.

The battle for personal and political freedom in Russia is often framed as a contest between the Kremlin and its critics over the rights of assembly, speech and suffrage, and for an independent judiciary, legislature and media.

Mr. Pavlov leads a quieter but still dangerous campaign: legal battles for what he calls, simply, “the right to know.”

As the director of the Institute for Information Freedom Development, a private organization he founded in 2004, he strives to teach government agencies that stores of information in their possession – a manufacturing and sanitary standards, court records, licenses, fire codes, public tenders, administrative decrees, agency phone directories, registries of public and private organizations – should be made available for all to view.

His work is necessary, he and his supporters say, because much of the basic information of governance in Russia has never been made public, even after the Constitution codified the public’s right to nonsecret information in 1993.

It is a peculiar form of dysfunction. Information that was once sealed off from the public by Soviet policies of secrecy is now withheld by government insiders looking to profit from their positions. “There are people in every agency who want to sell their information, not give it away for free,” Mr. Pavlov said. “It is an element of ordinary corruption.”

Gary Schwartz, a director of the Tides Foundation, a private philanthropic organization in San Francisco that has helped underwrite Mr. Pavlov’s institute, said his campaign “is critical for the way civil society will develop in Russia.”

Mr. Pavlov, for his part, speaks of the standards battle as a matter of iron principle. “This information was made by taxpayers’ money,” he said. “So you cannot sell it back. Like I told the court: you cannot sell me my shirt. I already own it.”

Mr. Pavlov, tall and lean, with a self-assured and intense bearing, took a roundabout route to his current line of work.

“Nobody defended the basic right – the right to know, to have access to information,” he said. “People cannot have their freedom, and realize all their other rights, without this right.”

His goals include the release of all official information at the federal statistics service, a database of Russian pollution sources in the air and water, the filings and registry of Russian corporations and organizations, all product certifications and a database of all decrees issued by ministers in the federal and regional governments.

“We will do everything to make this information available for the broad public,” Mr. Pavlov said.

His supporters say the litigation might eventually help the Russian government escape its ossified past and strengthen Russia’s public administration and business climate.

“A strong and consolidated authoritarian state does ultimately need the rule of law,” said Thomas S. Blanton, director of the National Security Archive at George Washington University, which collaborates with the institute Mr. Pavlov founded. “High oil prices cannot sustain the state. What he is doing is common-sense good government.”

“Civil rights are like a muscle,” he added. “If you don’t use them, they will atrophy.”