Street protests and activism tolerated by Putin before the war in Ukraine have largely vanished
Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny’s death Friday at a Russian prison camp in the Arctic silenced a man who was arguably the most influential remaining critic of President Vladimir Putin and the authoritarian state the former spy has methodically built on the wreckage of the Soviet Union.
Putin, who has effectively run Russia for 24 years and is seeking to extend his time in office for another six years in elections set for next month, now strides the Russian political stage with almost no visible challengers. Many of those who have opposed him have ended up in prison, or dead.
Since Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the Kremlin has introduced laws to punish critics of its military campaign, muzzled independent media, branded pro-peace authors and artists as “foreign agents” and denied Russians the ability to publicly express opinions about the war.
Authorities have unleashed a wave of repression to ensure compliance. Many ordinary citizens have been swept up in a crackdown and handed fines and lengthy jail times for what authorities view as discrediting the army or spreading misinformation about Russia’s stalled military campaign. A 72-year-old woman who questioned Russia’s conduct in the war in Ukraine online was sentenced recently to 5½ years in jail.
Navalny and the network of political offices he established in 2017 were once able to assemble protests in major Russian cities, rattling the Kremlin and prompting the deployment of riot police to quell them. There hasn’t been a significant wave of demonstrations since the days just after Russia invaded Ukraine.
Hundreds of anti-Kremlin activists have fled the country, many of them continuing from abroad their efforts to shed light on government corruption and the crackdown on opposition within Russia, despite being declared foreign agents by the state and facing prosecution if they return home.
Russia’s parliament recently passed a bill allowing authorities to confiscate the assets of people convicted of discrediting the Russian military, including those living abroad. Vyacheslav Volodin, the speaker of the parliament’s lower house, said such people “publicly throw dirt at Russia, insult our soldiers and officers” and “feel their impunity, believing that justice cannot reach them.”
Even lawyers who served government critics as a last line of defense against a legal system that is being reshaped to punish dissent have either been jailed or fled the country. Three of the lawyers who have represented Navalny are now in jail on charges of involvement in an extremist group. Two have been arrested in absentia.
“It’s not even clear how any doubt in what Putin says can be voiced in Russia, what kind of disagreement can be raised,” said Konstantin Sonin, an expert on Russian politics at the University of Chicago who personally knew Navalny.
Faced with punishment for criticizing the war, which the Russian government refers to euphemistically as a “special military operation,” ordinary Russians are also starved of access to information that questions the Kremlin narrative.