An worker walks past TV screens in a Moscow store showing a program with President Vladimir Putin.
Alexander Nemenov | AFP | Getty’s paintings
Political opposition and activism in Russia have all the time been fraught with risk, but this has change into increasingly unimaginable in recent years, with political analysts saying that defying the Kremlin and Russian President Vladimir Putin is now “extremely dangerous.”
“Being a politician and openly opposing the war and Putin’s rule in Russia is sort of unimaginable,” Anton Barbashin, a Russian political analyst and editorial director of the net magazine Riddle Russia, told CNBC.
“All opposition political leaders are either in prison, under restrictive measures, or overseas. I would not say the opposition is dead. The opposition is totally illegal,” he noted.
Repression of political opposition activists in Russia is nothing recent. Many outstanding Russian businessmen and opposition politicians critical of the Kremlin and Putin have been harassed, detained, missing or imprisoned over the past twenty years.
Some accuse the Russian state of attempting to poison them, others died in suspicious circumstances. The Kremlin has repeatedly denied any involvement in such cases.
Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny is seen on screen via video link from the IK-2 penal colony in Pokrovsk ahead of a court hearing to contemplate an appeal against his prison sentence, Moscow, Russia May 17, 2022.
Yevgeny Novozhenina | Reuters
The persecution of political opposition activists gained worldwide attention in 2020, when outstanding Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny was poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok. The Kremlin denied any involvement in the poisoning, and Navalny survived, only to be imprisoned shortly after returning to Russia after life-saving hospital treatment in Germany.
He’s currently serving nine years in a maximum security prison for fraud and contempt of court, charges he and his allies have denounced as politically motivated and designed to maintain him out of the general public eye in Russia.
“Unfortunately, the Russian state is superb at this very methodical and unimaginative campaign of repression, arrest and intimidation,” Mark Galeotti, a London-based political scientist, lecturer and creator of several books on Russia, told CNBC.
“Regarding the organized political opposition [in Russia]mainly gone,” he said, adding, “His predominant characters are either in prison or, more likely, pushed overseas.”
Galeotti noted that the Kremlin’s best fear was civil rebellion and regime overthrow, an existential threat that he said made figures like Navalny, a possible catalyst for social change, so dangerous in the eyes of the state.
The war made the situation worse
Political analysts note that with the invasion of Ukraine, the repression of Russian oppositionists has change into a more urgent matter for the Kremlin.
The war – with its inherent potential to spark domestic unrest and protests – has also enabled Putin’s regime to shed its “pretense of political pluralism” and change into more unabashedly authoritarian, Galeotti noted.
“What for a very long time was essentially authoritarianism that flirted with semblance of legitimacy … I believe it’s just now decided to bite the bullet and just move on to a rather more conventional dictatorship,” he noted.
In response to Maria Kuznetsova, spokeswoman for OVD-Info, an independent Russian media project on human rights documenting political persecution in the country, the technique of becoming a one-party state or autocracy was already clear before the war under Putin.
“Even before the war, the authorities tried to do all the pieces to forestall people from forming any coalitions or large organizations. Then in 2021, after the arrest of Alexei Navalny, mainly all organized opposition was destroyed,” she noted.
Kuznetova said that since then, Russian crackdown on civil society has intensified and the variety of arrests and criminal charges against opposition activists or civilians has increased dramatically.
From the start of the war in Ukraine on February 24, 2022 to March 2023. OVD-Info estimates that the Russian state detained nearly 20,000 people for his or her “anti-war” stance, with the harshest repression in the month the war began. Since then, Russia has charged greater than 450 people in criminal cases related to alleged “anti-war activities,” a lot of whom are violating recent laws geared toward what the state perceives as spreading “fake news” a couple of “special military operation” in Ukraine and “discrediting of the Russian Armed Forces.
Objection politician Ilya Yashinformer mayor Yevgeny Roizman AND activist Vladimir Kara-Murza all have been detained or imprisoned in recent months after being found guilty by Russian courts on charges starting from spreading “false information” concerning the war to treason. Global human rights organizations and Western governments have condemned what they see as such politically motivated beliefs.
Russian oppositionist and former mayor of Yekaterinburg, Yevgeny Roizman, accused of “propaganda or public display of attributes or symbols of extremist organizations” for sharing a post by the inspiration of oppositionist Alexei Navalny – labeled “extremist” in 2021 – on the social media platform VKontakte in May 2022. , on March 16, 2023, he appeared in court in Yekaterinburg. He was sentenced to 14 days in prison for disseminating “extremist” symbols, Russian news agencies reported.
Anna Yuryeva | AFP | Getty’s paintings
Now it isn’t just celebrities to observe out for, because the variety of cases against civilians can also be on the rise – perhaps probably the most infamous by far father sentenced to prison after his daughter drew an anti-war cartoon and was informed about it by the college principal.
“For unusual individuals who share anti-war views, everyone understands thoroughly you could get arrested and go to prison for five, 10, 15, 20 years. Everyone understands this thoroughly,” Kuznetova said.
Russian political scientist Tatiana Stanovaya agreed that being a critic of the Kremlin is now “extremely dangerous”, no matter background.
“The difference between today’s Russia and pre-war Russia is that before the war, the regime mainly attacked activists and skilled politicians. Now it targets any suspicious behavior. You may be a civilian, you’ll be able to be a teacher, you’ll be able to be a professor, you’ll be able to be anything,” noted Stanovaya, a senior fellow on the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center and founding father of political evaluation firm R. Politik, adding that the variety of cases involving “whistleblowers” has dramatically increased, anecdotally .
Stanovaya, Barbashin and Kuznetova of OVD-Info now live outside of Russia, claiming that their work could be unimaginable to do and their personal safety could be in danger in the event that they were in their home country. Russia banned Barbashina’s online journal as an “undesirable” organization in late 2022, accusing it of “posing a threat to the safety” of the country.
What the Kremlin says
The Kremlin is keen to emphasise that political pluralism exists in Russia. Contacted concerning the story, Kremlin press secretary Dmitry Peskov told CNBC in an announcement that “in Russia there are politicians with different views and positions.”
Theoretically, this will likely be true, but Tatyana Stanovaya noted that although there are “systemic opposition parties” in Russia, similar to the Communist Party, the Liberal Democratic Party and A Just Russia for Truth, in reality these parties generally support the federal government and have even agreed more for the reason that starting of the war.
Those that might be counted as “non-systemic opposition”, i.e. political opponents of the Kremlin and Putin, Stanovaya said that “they need to not exist.”
“It could be said that today the non-systemic opposition has been completely destroyed and outlawed in Russia. Anything related to political forces that oppose Putin might be criminalized. I believe most of those that not only talked that that they had to go away Russia or stayed, but had to maintain silent. They cannot risk speaking up,” she said.
Nevertheless, Stanovaya said there are gray areas for the Kremlin. Critics who’re perceived as pro-Western are labeled enemies of the state, but those perceived as critical but nationalist and patriotic, sarcastically, offer some protection from Putin himself.
This was especially evident with the rise of ultranationalist Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of the private military company of the Wagner Group, which is fighting in Ukraine. Prigozhin openly criticized the Russian defense ministry and its tactics in Ukraine, though he avoided any criticism of his ally Putin.
Yevgeny Prigozhin, founding father of Wagner’s private military company
Mikhail Svetlov | Getty’s paintings
“Western observers often think so [the Kremlin cannot tolerate opposition figures] Because Putin is afraid. Not because he’s afraid. All of it is determined by the intention,” said Stanovaya.
“For the Putin regime, critics who take a pro-Western position are seen as a tool in the hands of Western countries to destabilize the situation in Russia, they’re seen as a weapon of the West… and have to be neutralized. But if you happen to stand for patriotic intentions, you is not going to be moved.”
Sarcastically, Stanovaya noted, Putin was the predominant defender of figures like Prigozhin, figures that Russian security agencies would favor to sideline. “The regime could change into much worse without Putin,” she said.