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An employee walks past television screens in a store in Moscow showing a program featuring President Vladimir Putin.
Alexander Nemenov Afp | Getty Images
Political opposition and activism in Russia has always been fraught with danger, but it has become increasingly impossible in recent years, with political analysts saying it is now “extremely dangerous” to stand up to the Kremlin and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“To be politically and openly against the war and Putin’s rule in Russia is almost impossible,” Anton Barbashin, a Russian political analyst and editorial director of the online magazine Riddle Russia, told CNBC.
“All the political leaders of the opposition are either in prison or under restrictive measures or out of the country. I wouldn’t say the opposition is dead. The opposition is completely illegal,” he noted.
Repression of political opposition figures in Russia is nothing new. A number of high-profile Russian businessmen and opposition politicians critical of the Kremlin and Putin have been harassed, detained, disappeared or imprisoned over the past two decades.
Some accuse the Russian state of trying to poison them, while others have died under suspicious circumstances. The Kremlin has repeatedly denied any involvement in such affairs.
Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny appears on a screen via video link from the IK-2 correctional penal colony in Pokrov before a court hearing to consider an appeal against his prison sentence, in Moscow, Russia, May 17, 2022.
Evgenia Novozhenina Reuters
The prosecution of political opposition figures drew global attention in 2020 when high-profile Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny was poisoned with the Novichok nerve agent. The Kremlin denied any involvement in the poisoning and Navalny survived, only to be jailed shortly after returning to Russia after life-saving hospital treatment in Germany.
He is currently serving nine years in a maximum security prison for fraud and contempt of court, charges that he and his allies have denounced as politically motivated and designed to get him out of the limelight in Russia.
“Unfortunately, the Russian state is very good at this very methodical and unimaginative campaign of repression, arrests and intimidation,” Mark Galeotti, a London-based political scientist, lecturer and author of several books on Russia, told CNBC.
“In terms of organized political opposition [in Russia]basically, he’s gone,” he said and added: “His key figures are either in prison or, more likely, pushed out of the country.
The Kremlin’s greatest fear, Galeotti noted, was a civil uprising and regime overthrow, an existential threat he said had made figures like Navalny, a potential catalyst for social change, so dangerous in the eyes of the state.
The war has made them worse
Political analysts note that cracking down on Russian opposition figures has become a more pressing issue for the Kremlin with the invasion of Ukraine.
The war, with its inherent potential for domestic unrest and protests at home, had also allowed Putin’s regime to shed the “pretense of political pluralism” and become more unabashedly authoritarian, Galeotti noted.
“What for a long time was essentially an authoritarianism flirting with the appearance of legitimacy … I think now it’s just decided to bite the bullet and just turn into a much more conventional dictatorship,” he noted.
The process of becoming a one-party state, or autocracy under Putin, was already clear before the war, according to Maria Kuznetova, a spokeswoman for OVD-Info, an independent Russian human rights media program that documents political persecution in country.
“Even before the war, the government tried to do everything to prevent people from forming coalitions or creating large organizations. Then in 2021, after the arrest of Alexei Navalny, virtually all organized opposition was destroyed,” write down.
Kuznetova said Russia’s crackdown on civil society escalated after that point, with the number of arrests and criminal charges brought against opposition figures or civilians increasing dramatically.
From the start of the war in Ukraine on February 24, 2022, until March 2023, OVD-Info estimates that the Russian state has arrested nearly 20,000 people for their “anti-war” stance, with the harshest repression in the month the war began. Since then, Russia has also charged more than 450 people with criminal cases related to what it considers “anti-war activity,” many of which run afoul of new laws targeting what the state sees as the spread of “fake news” about “special his military operation”. ” in Ukraine and “discrediting” the Russian armed forces.
Opposition politician Ilya Yashinthe former mayor Yevgeny Roizman and activist Vladimir Kara-Murza All have been detained or imprisoned in recent months after being found guilty in Russian courts on charges ranging from spreading “false information” about the war to treason. Global human rights organizations and Western governments have condemned what they see as “politically motivated” beliefs.
Russian dissident and former mayor of Yekaterinburg Yevgeny Roizman, charged with “propaganda or public display of properties or symbols of extremist organizations” for sharing a post by the foundation of opposition leader Alexei Navalny – designated “extremist” in 2021 – on the VKontakte social media platform in May 2022, appears in court in Yekaterinburg on March 16, 2023. He was sentenced to 14 days in prison for sharing “extremist” symbols, Russian news agencies reported.
Anna Yurieva | Afp | Getty Images
It’s not just high-profile figures to watch out for now, with the number of cases against civilians also on the rise, perhaps the most notorious so far being the A father has been jailed after his daughter devised an anti-war plan and was tipped off by her school principal.
“For ordinary people who share anti-war views, everyone understands very clearly that you can be arrested and imprisoned for five, 10, 15, 20 years. Everyone understands that very well,” Kuznetova said.
Russian political analyst Tatiana Stanovaya agreed that “it is extremely dangerous” to be a critic of the Kremlin now, regardless of your background.
“The difference between Russia today and Russia before the war is that before the war, the regime mainly targeted activists and professional politicians. Now, they target anyone with suspicious behavior. You can be a citizen, you can be a teacher, you can you’re a professor you can be anybody,” noted Stanovaya, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center and founder of the political analysis firm R. Politik, adding that the number of cases involving “whistleblowers” had grown dramatically, anecdotally.
OVD-Info’s Stanovaya, Barbashin and Kuznetova are now based outside Russia, saying their work would be impossible to do and personal safety would be at risk if they were in their country. Russia banned Barbashin’s online magazine as an “undesirable” organization in late 2022, accusing it of “posing a security threat” to the country.
What does the Kremlin say?
The Kremlin is keen to emphasize that there is political pluralism in Russia. When contacted for this story, Kremlin press secretary Dmitry Peskov told CNBC in a statement that “in Russia there are politicians with different views and positions.”
This may be true in theory, but Tatiana Stanovaya noted that while there are “systemic opposition parties” in Russia, such as the Communist Party, the Liberal Democratic Party or Just Russia for Truth, in reality these parties generally support the government and they have consented even more since the war began.
For those who can be described as the “non-systemic opposition,” that is, political opponents of the Kremlin and Putin, Stanovaya said they “are not allowed to exist.”
“We can say that, today, the non-systemic opposition has been completely destroyed and outlawed in Russia. Everything that can be related to political forces that disagree against Putin can face criminal risks. I think most of those who “They were not just in talks, that they should leave Russia or stay, but they should remain silent. They cannot take risks to speak,” he said.
Still, Stanovaya said there are gray areas for the Kremlin. Critics who are seen as pro-Western are described as enemies of the state, but those who are seen as critics but nationalists and patriots are offered some sort of protection, ironically by Putin himself.
This was particularly evident with the rise of ultra-nationalist Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of the Wagner Group private military company fighting in Ukraine. Prigozhin has been openly critical of the Russian Defense Ministry and its tactics in Ukraine, although he has distanced himself from any criticism of his ally Putin.
Yevgeny Prigozhin, founder of the private military company Wagner
Mikhail Svetlov | Getty Images
“Often Western observers believe this [the Kremlin cannot tolerate opposition figures] because Putin is afraid. It’s not because he’s afraid. It’s all about intent,” Stanovaya said.
“For the Putin regime, critics who support a pro-Western position are seen as a tool in the hands of Western countries to destabilize the situation inside Russia, they are seen as weapons of the West… and must be neutralized. if you support patriotic intentions then they won’t touch you.”
Ironically, Stanovaya noted, Putin has been the main patron of figures like Prigozhin, elements that Russia’s security services would ideally like to brush aside. “The regime could become much worse without Putin,” he said.
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