Russian dissidents: fighting from within or without?

The dilemma of political dissidence—and of artists, who need to create in freedom—has always been the same: should we confront dictatorships directly or from the protection of abroad?

In the case of Russia, and especially in the times of the Soviet Union, the return of exiles often had dramatic consequences.

Nadezhda Krupskaia, Lenin's wife, who lived for years in different European capitals, was poisoned by Stalin in 1939, on her 70th birthday.

The composer Sergei Prokofiev in Parisian exile was not seduced by his promises and returned, with his wife and two of his children, at the height of the Stalinist purges, with the hope of working better in the Soviet Union.

The secret services soon separated him from his wife, the Spanish singer Lina Codina, who was sent to the Gulag.

The composer was also persecuted by Stalin, ended up falling ill and died on March 5, 1953, the same day as the dictator.

A tragedy also awaited the poet Marina Tsvetaeva in her country.

First, her daughter Ariadna, whom the regime sentenced to several decades in the Gulag, and her husband Sergei Efron, who died in prison after months of torture, returned from Paris to Moscow.

Reluctantly, before the arrest of her husband and daughter, Marina with her son Mur followed them, but the Soviet secret services pursued her until she committed suicide in 1942. The young Mur was forced to participate in the Second World War, where died.

Tens of thousands of Russians, those who had to leave during the times of the Russian Revolution and who returned from Western exile after the war, were sent directly to the Gulag, where they perished en masse.

Like Stalin, Putin also does not trust those who return to Russia from the West.

In their punishments, the Russian secret services play with dates using them as symbols.

Journalist Anna Politkovskaia, who was born in New York and had an American passport, was murdered on Putin's birthday, October 7 (2006).

The dissident Alexei Navalny was poisoned (the first attempt to get rid of him) on August 21 (2020), when it was 52 years since the occupation of Czechoslovakia by Soviet troops, and 80 years since, in Mexico City On Stalin's orders, Ramón Mercader split León Trotsky's head with an ice axe.

Boris Nemtsov, politician and opponent of Putin, who tried to Westernize Russian politics and even treated Bill Clinton and other politicians, was shot dead on February 27 (2015), the date on which the aforementioned Krupskaia was poisoned by Stalin .

In his bloody work, Putin's FSB looks for iconic matches and birthday gifts.

Alexei Navalny, poisoned the first time with Novichok, traveled to Germany to be cured.

There he made the decision that, once recovered, he would return to Russia.

Upon his return he was arrested and sentenced to a penal colony.

There he died on February 16, assassinated by the regime.

Both Navalny and Putin had made their bets higher.

All of these murdered figures had something in common: they lived abroad, where they soaked up the democratic values ​​that they tried to introduce in Russia.

There are other dissidents who are currently behind bars in Russia.

The best known of all of them is Vladimir Kara-Murza, a disciple of Boris Nemtsov and deputy director of Open Russia, an NGO founded by the dissident, as well as businessman, Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

And by the way, Khodorkovsky, imprisoned for 10 years by Putin in Siberia and now living in London, always has his bodyguard close to him.

Khodorkovsky and Gari Kasparov, the chess master who left his sport to dedicate himself to dissidence, decided to fight against Putin's regime from abroad, although they know that Putin's fingers reach everywhere: remember the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko, who He died in exile from London.

But let's return to Kara-Murza, Putin's most prominent political prisoner after Navalny's assassination.

This descendant of the Tatar aristocracy studied history at Trinity Hall in Cambridge, worked as a BBC correspondent in Washington, in addition to establishing the Magnitsky law in the United States, which punishes those who infringe human rights.

On two occasions the Putin regime has tried to get rid of this 42-year-old dissident, producer of a long documentary about the Soviet dissident movement.

Kara-Murza, who opted for direct confrontation with Putin, last year was sentenced to 25 years in prison “in a special regime”, that is, to a cell measuring three by four meters, humid, cold and dark, by the same regime. in which Navalny lived poorly until his death.

Monika Zgustova

is a writer.

Her most recent novel is

I Am Milena from Prague

(Galaxia Gutenberg).

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