When charismatic opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was shot dead on a bridge near the Kremlin in February 2015, more than 50,000 Muscovites expressed shock and outrage the day after the brazen crime.
Police stood by as they marched and chanted anti-government slogans.
Nine years later, shocked and angry Russians took to the streets on the night of February 16, when they learned that popular opposition leader Alexei Navalny
had died in prison
.
But this time, those laying flowers at makeshift monuments placed in major cities
were met by riot police
, who arrested and dragged away many of them.
Major repressions began gradually after Putin came to power.
Photo: AP
In the years between each event, Vladimir Putin's Russia went from a country that tolerated some dissent to
one that ruthlessly represses it
.
Arrests, trials and long prison terms, once uncommon, are now common, especially after Moscow's invasion of Ukraine.
In addition to doing so against its political opponents,
the Kremlin now attacks human rights groups
, independent media and other members of civil society organizations, LGBTQ+ activists and certain religious denominations.
"A totalitarian state"
“Russia is no longer an authoritarian state; “It is a totalitarian state
,” said Oleg Orlov, co-president of Memorial, the Russian human rights group focused on political repression.
“All these repressions are aimed at
suppressing any independent expression
about Russia's political system, about the measures of the authorities, or any independent civil activists.”
A month after making that comment to The Associated Press, Orlov, 70, became a statistic of the group itself
: he was handcuffed and led out of a courtroom after being convicted
of criticizing the military over the Ukraine case and
sentenced to two years and a half in prison.
Memorial estimates that there are
about 680 political prisoners in Russia
.
Another group, OVD-Info, said in November that
1,141 people are behind bars
on politically motivated charges, more than 400 are receiving other punishments and nearly 300 more are being investigated.
The USSR fades, but repression returns
There was a time after the collapse of the Soviet Union when it seemed that Russia had turned a new leaf and widespread repression
was a thing of the past
, said Orlov, a human rights defender since the 1980s.
While there were isolated cases in the 1990s under President Boris Yeltsin's regime, Orlov said major crackdowns began gradually after Putin came to power in 2000.
A Russian police vehicle with detainees inside.
Photo: AP
Exiled oil tycoon
Mikhail Khodorkovsky
, who spent 10 years in prison after defying Putin, told the AP in a recent interview that the Kremlin began stifling dissent even before his arrest in 2003.
He purged the independent television channel NTV
and he went after other oligarchs who challenged him, such as Vladimir Gusinsky or Boris Berezovsky.
Asked if he thought back then that the repressive measures would reach the current scale of hundreds of prisoners and politically motivated lawsuits, Khodorkovsky replied: “I thought he (Putin) would break sooner.”
When Nadya Tolokonnikova and the other members of Pussy Riot were arrested in 2012
for performing an anti-Putin song
at a major Moscow Orthodox cathedral, their two-year prison sentence was shocking, she recalled in an interview.
The members of the group Pussy Riot, detained in Moscow.
Photo: AP
“At the time, it seemed like an incredibly (long) (prison) sentence.
I didn’t even imagine I could get out,” she said.
A growing intolerance of dissent
When Putin regained the presidency in 2012
after evading the limits of the office
by serving as prime minister for four years, he was greeted with mass protests.
He saw them as
inspired by the West
and wanted to root them out, said Tatiana Stanovaya of the Carnegie Center for Russia and Eurasia.
Many people were arrested, and more than a dozen received sentences of up to four years in prison following the protests.
But mainly, Stanovaya noted, the authorities
were “creating conditions in which the opposition could not thrive
,” rather than dismantling it.
A wave of laws followed
that tightened protest regulations
and gave authorities broad powers to block websites and surveil online users.
They placed the restrictive “foreign agent” label on certain groups to eradicate what the Kremlin considered a harmful outside influence that fueled dissent.
Police arrest a protester in Moscow in 2014. Photo: AP
Between 2013 and 2014,
Navalny was convicted twice
of embezzlement and fraud, but his sentences were suspended.
His brother was jailed in what is seen as a move to pressure the opposition leader.
Moscow's annexation of Crimea in 2014
generated
a
wave of patriotism
and boosted Putin's popularity, emboldening the Kremlin.
Authorities restricted foreign-funded nongovernmental organizations and rights groups, banning some as “undesirable” and targeting online critics with lawsuits, fines and occasionally jail time.
Meanwhile,
tolerance for protests declined
.
Demonstrations led by Navalny in 2016 and 2017 led to
hundreds of arrests
;
At mass rallies in the summer of 2019, other protesters were convicted and imprisoned.
The covid excuse
The Kremlin
used the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 as an excuse to ban protests
.
To this day, authorities refuse to allow marches, citing “coronavirus restrictions.”
The police arrest the now deceased Navalny in 2019. Photo: Reuters
Following Navalny's poisoning, recovery in Germany, and arrest upon returning to Russia in 2021,
repression intensified
.
His entire political infrastructure was banned as extremist, exposing his allies to being sued.
Open Russia, an opposition group backed abroad by Khodorkovsky,
also had to close
, and its leader, Andrei Pivovarov, was arrested.
Memorial, Orlov's group,
was closed by the Russian Supreme Court in 2021
, a year before winning the Nobel Peace Prize as the hopeful symbol of a post-Soviet Russia.
He remembers the disbelief after the court's decision.
“We couldn't imagine all those steps in the spiral, that war could arise, and that all those laws about discrediting the army would be sanctioned,” he said.
War and the new repressive laws
With the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russia enacted these new repressive laws that stifled any protests against the war and criticism of the army.
The number of arrests, criminal complaints and trials
grew wildly.
The accusations ranged from donating money to human rights groups helping Ukraine to a relationship with Navalny's group, now labeled “extremist.”
Kremlin critics were jailed,
and
their prominence did not seem to matter.
Finally, Navalny was sentenced to 19 years, while another opponent, Vladimir Kara-Murza, received the maximum sentence of
25 years for treason.
Among those also sentenced is a St. Petersburg artist sentenced to
seven years
for
replacing supermarket price tags with pacifist slogans
;
two Moscow poets sentenced to five and seven years
for reciting verses
in public, one of which mentioned Ukraine, and a 72-year-old woman, sentenced to five and a half years in prison for two
anti-war
social media posts .
Activists point out that prison sentences have become longer compared to those imposed before the war.
Increasingly, authorities have appealed sentences with lighter sentences.
In Orlov's case, prosecutors sought to retrial his previous conviction, which was initially reduced to a fine;
He was subsequently sentenced to prison.
Another trend is
the increase in absentee trials,
said Damir Gainutdinov, director of the rights group Net Freedoms.
The organization counted 243 criminal complaints over accusations of “spreading false information” about the military, and 88 of them were issued against people outside Russia, including 20 who were convicted in absentia.
Independent news sites
were blocked
.
Many have moved their newsrooms abroad, such as the independent television channel Dozhd or Novaya Gazeta, and their work is available to Russians through virtual private networks (VPNs).
Against the LGBTQ+ community
At the same time, the Kremlin
expanded a 10-year offensive against the LGBTQ+ community
in what officials said was a fight for “traditional values” supported by the Russian Orthodox Church against the “degrading” influence of the West.
Last year, courts declared the LGBTQ+ “movement”
extremist and banned gender transition.
LGBTQ+ activists during a demonstration in Moscow.
Photo: AP
Pressure
against religious groups
also continued, with hundreds of Jehovah's Witnesses criminally sued across Russia since 2017, when that religious denomination was
declared extremist.
The oppressive system is designed
to “keep fear in people,”
said Nikolay Petrov, a visiting researcher at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs.
It doesn't always work.
Last week, hundreds of people defied large numbers of riot police to
mourn Navalny's death
at his funeral in southeast Moscow, chanting "No to war!"
and “Russia without Putin!”, slogans that would normally have led to arrests.
This time, unusually,
the police did not intervene.
___
Emma Burrows contributed to this report.