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.

Abortions were banned under Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin but a commonplace under later Kremlin leaders. Now, after less than a century, official attitudes about abortion in Russia are changing once again.

Although abortion is still legal and widely available, new restrictions are being considered as President Vladimir Putin takes an increasingly socially conservative turn and seeks to reverse Russia’s declining population.

Having embraced the Russian Orthodox Church, he is stressing “traditional family values” — often used as code words to differentiate his country from Western social attitudes toward LGBTQ+ rights and other policies.

Abortion restrictions in Russia spark outrage as the country takes a conservative turn

Some see it as a throwback to the Stalinist era, when abortion was outlawed in 1936, and women ending unwanted pregnancies often turned to illegal and unsafe procedures.

“My grandmother worked as a teacher in a vocational school. She was telling me stories about abortions being performed with wardrobe hangers in the dormitories,” said Lina Zharin, a psychotherapist and feminist activist in Kaliningrad, where lawmakers are considering banning abortion in private clinics.

“Seemingly, everyone knows about it, about how scary it was, and I think that a lot of people are surprised and outraged that we’re going back to it,” she said.

Two years after Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953, authorities reversed the ban to curtail dangerous illegal abortions. But they didn’t endorse contraceptives, says Michele Rivkin-Fish, an anthropologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with the government remaining “pro-natalist” and wanting women to have children while staying in the workforce.

Abortion became a common way of dealing with an unwanted pregnancy amid the harsh Soviet economy, even though Mr. Rivkin-Fish said conditions at clinics often were “terrible.”

“Anesthesia was in short supply. … There was no privacy — you would have your abortion with other people in the ward,” she said. Painkillers were of low quality or scarce, she added, “so women were often in excruciating pain.”

Under Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms, a movement for family planning and adequate birth control was launched in the late 1980s by physicians who were mostly women, according to Mr. Rivkin-Fish.

After the USSR’s 1991 demise, President Boris Yeltsin funded family planning and birth control programmes, and doctors were trained to prescribe and administer contraceptives.

Also read: Explained | What do Indian laws say about Abortion?

“They all went through a federal family planning course that I taught and led,” said Dr. Lyubov Yerofeyeva, a gynaecologist and a reproductive health specialist at the core of the effort.

By the late 1990s, federal funding fizzled because of conservative opposition. Abortion regulations remained less restrictive, however. Women could terminate a pregnancy until 12 weeks without any conditions, and until 22 weeks for many “social reasons,” such as divorce, unemployment or low income.

In 2003, the authorities cut that list to just four: if a woman was raped, if she was in prison, if her parental rights were restricted, or if her husband died or became severely disabled during her pregnancy.

“This was the first sign that I saw that the government is concerned about lowering abortion rates, and they’re going to do so through access, restricting access,” Mr. Rivkin-Fish said.

Conservative law-makers proposed more restrictions in 2011, including that women need permission from their husbands or from their parents if underage; that doctors could refuse abortion if they opposed it; and that a woman must wait two to seven days, depending on the stage of pregnancy, to give her a chance to change her mind.

Ms. Yerofeyeva and a reproductive health group she ran, Russian Association of Population and Development, pushed back against these proposals, and only two were adopted nationally: allowing doctors to refuse if against their beliefs, and the mandatory waiting period of 48 hours to a week.

In 2012, the number of “social reasons” for allowing abortion between weeks 12 and 22 was cut to just in the case of rape.

Under Health Ministry regulations adopted in 2015-16, doctors had to offer women the chance to listen to the “fetal heartbeat” and show them ultrasound images. They also changed an abortion consent form to emphasize its risks, “the possibility of not resorting to it, and the preference of carrying a pregnancy to term.”

Ms. Yerofeyeva’s Russian Association for Population and Development was declared a “foreign agent” — a label that implies additional government scrutiny and carries strong negative connotations — and soon ceased activities.

Last year, Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova ordered the Health Ministry to look into banning abortions for those under 18 without parental consent.

In a speech to Parliament this year, Health Minister Mikhail Murashko criticised women who prioritise education and careers over childbearing and supported an abortion ban in private clinics — where up to 20% occurred in recent years. He also moved to restrict abortion pills, which are approved to be taken to end a pregnancy in the first 10 weeks.