Russian police detain a man trying to lay flowers at a monument in St. Petersburg to honour Alexei Navalny on Feb. 17, 2024.
| Photo Credit: AP
When charismatic opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was gunned down on a bridge near the Kremlin in February 2015, more than 50,000 Muscovites expressed their shock and outrage the next day . Police stood aside as they rallied and chanted anti-government slogans.
Nine years later, stunned and angry Russians streamed into the streets on the night of February 16, when they heard that popular opposition politician Alexei Navalny had died in prison. But this time, those laying flowers at impromptu memorials in major cities were met by riot police, who arrested and dragged hundreds of them away.
In those intervening years, President Vladimir Putin’s Russia evolved from a country that tolerated some dissent to one that ruthlessly suppresses it. Arrests, trials and long prison terms — once rare — are commonplace, especially after Moscow invaded Ukraine.
Wider targets
Alongside its political opponents, the Kremlin now also targets rights groups, independent media and other members of civil-society organisations, LGBTQ+ activists and certain religious affiliations.
“Russia is no longer an authoritarian state — it is a totalitarian state,” said Oleg Orlov, co-chair of Memorial, the Russian human rights group that tracks political prisoners. “All these repressions are aimed at suppressing any independent expression about Russia’s political system, about the actions of the authorities, or any independent civil activists.”
A month after making that comment, the 70-year-old Orlov became one of his group’s own statistics: He was handcuffed and hauled out of a courtroom after being convicted of criticising the military over Ukraine and sentenced to 30 months in prison.
Memorial estimates nearly 680 political prisoners in Russia. Another group, OVD-Info, said in November that 1,141 people are behind bars on politically motivated charges, with over 400 others receiving other punishment and nearly 300 more under investigation.
There was a time after the collapse of the Soviet Union when it seemed Russia had turned a page and widespread repression was a thing of the past, said Mr. Orlov, a human rights advocate since the 1980s.
While there were isolated cases in the 1990s under President Boris Yeltsin, Mr. Orlov said major crackdowns began slowly after Mr. Putin came to power in 2000.
When Mr. Putin regained the presidency in 2012 after evading term limits by serving four years as Prime Minister, he was greeted by mass protests. He saw these as Western-inspired and wanted to nip them in the bud, said Tatiana Stanovaya of Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center.
Many were arrested, and over a dozen received up to four years in prison after those protests. But mostly, Ms. Stanovaya said, authorities were “creating conditions in which the opposition could not thrive,” rather than dismantling it.
Moscow’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 from Ukraine created a surge of patriotism and boosted Mr. Putin’s popularity, emboldening the Kremlin. Authorities restricted foreign-funded non-governmental organisations and rights groups, outlawing some as “undesirable,” and targeted online critics with prosecutions, fines and occasionally jail.
With the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Russia enacted repressive new laws that stifled any anti-war protests and criticism of the military. The system of oppression is designed “to keep people in fear,” said Nikolay Petrov, visiting researcher at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs.
