EuropeAnalysis

Putin’s re-election inevitable amid deepening authoritarianism in Russia

Opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s widow calls for ‘noon against Putin’ protest

A digital billboard shows Russian president, and presidential candidate, Vladimir Putin in St Petersburg ahead of this weekend's election. Photograph: Anatoly Maltsev/EPA

Daniel McLaughlin's face
Daniel McLaughlin in Kyiv
Fri Mar 15 2024 - 18:00

Russia is now holding a three-day presidential election that will give Vladimir Putin another six years in power, in what critics call a cynical charade intended to legitimise his increasingly authoritarian regime.

No genuine opposition figures are on the ballot list, two would-be challengers who denounced the war in Ukraine were barred from running, and Putin’s most influential critic, Alexei Navalny, died in an Arctic jail last month after years of repression.

More than 24 years as president and prime minister, Putin has gutted the weak and dysfunctional semi-democracy bequeathed by predecessor Boris Yeltsin and built an extensive system of control run by his fellow security service veterans.

Putin’s full invasion of Ukraine two years ago broke any remaining shackles on their power, and thousands of people have since been prosecuted for “discrediting the army”, “promoting extremism” or under other measures introduced to quash criticism.

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All signs of dissent are deemed threatening by prosecutors who have charged people for playing Ukrainian songs in public, and for carrying balloons or painting their nails in Ukraine’s blue and yellow colours. Last week a Moscow university student was given 10 days in jail for naming his wifi network Slava Ukraini, or Glory to Ukraine.

A poster of Russian president Vladimir Putin on a street in Simferopol, Crimea. It reads: "The West doesn't need Russia. We need Russia!" Photograph: AFP via Getty Images

Investigative media outlet Proekt found that more people in Russia had been prosecuted for their political beliefs under Putin than at any time since the rule of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.

During Putin’s latest term in office, 105,000 people were prosecuted for making public statements or attending protests and 11,400 faced charges under wartime censorship laws and for extremism, terrorism, treason, spying and refusing to serve in the army. Some 600,000 people had also been fined for disobeying police orders.

Proekt said this far surpassed political prosecutions under Soviet leaders Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev, who succeeded Stalin after his death in 1953.

Just as Putin and colleagues in the Soviet KGB relied on denunciations for much of their information, so their successors now encourage Russians to report any “unpatriotic” behaviour; neighbours, colleagues, relatives and pupils and their teachers have reported on each other for criticising the Kremlin or the war.

The creators of a parody app called My Denunciation that most people used to condemn the practice found last year that about 1,000 of the 5,000 “reports” filed were genuine allegations that included personal details of the supposed perpetrators.

The BBC Russian service quoted one prolific “denouncer” last November as saying she had reported on almost 1,400 people since Putin’s full invasion of Ukraine.

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“I was taught how to snitch by my grandfather who was a snitch himself,” said the woman, who gave her name as Anna Korobkova. “I do not feel sorry for them,” she said of her targets. “I feel joy if they are punished because of my denunciations.”

Hundreds of thousands of Russians fled the country in the last two years, including many of its most talented and dynamic citizens – but Putin welcomed the departure of what he called a potential “fifth column” that the West would exploit.

People walk in front of a poster showing Russian President Vladimir Putin and reading "The West doesn't need Russia. We need Russia!" in Simferopol, Crimea, on March 5, 2024. (Photo by STRINGER / AFP) (Photo by STRINGER/AFP via Getty Images)

“Any people, and especially the Russian people, will always be able to distinguish the true patriots from the scum and the traitors, and just to spit them out like a gnat that accidentally flew into their mouths,” he said in 2022.

“I am convinced that this natural and necessary self-cleansing of society will only strengthen our country, our solidarity, cohesion and readiness to meet any challenge.”

Andrei Kolesnikov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, has written about how the Kremlin now demands more than passive acquiescence from the masses – they must actively support Putin and the war. For some that means being drafted into the army and for many others it means voting for Putin this weekend.

“Now Russians are expected to share responsibility with the autocrat and express their voice in support of his actions with increasing frequency. It’s no coincidence that denunciations are the new social norm, along with violence and a ramping up of talk of nuclear strikes,” Kolesnikov said.

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“The country has been thrown back not just 40 years – to a time when behavioural patterns largely consisted of adapting to the decline of the Soviet system – but 70-75 years: to the beginning of the Cold War, the struggle against ‘cosmopolitans’ and any ‘kowtowing to the West’; to an epidemic of denunciations and new waves of repression,” he said.

Russian Communist party supporters attend a ceremony at Joseph Stalin's tomb to mark the 71th anniversary of his death this month. Photograph: Yuri Kochetkov

The demand for displays of loyalty is rippling through society, from schools where funding for “patriotic education” is soaring and new textbooks glorify Russian history, to the celebrities forced to publicly apologise for attending an “almost naked” party in Moscow last December that critics said was unacceptable while soldiers were at the front.

After suffering a succession of defeats in Ukraine in 2022, the Kremlin reframed its invasion as an existential struggle not with Kyiv but with the “collective West”, which supposedly wants to dismantle Russia and corrupt its people with decadent liberalism.

When Dmitry Medvedev was president in 2010 – during a one-term job swap that helped Putin bypass term limits – he visited the United States, ate burgers in a diner with then US leader Barack Obama and toured Silicon Valley and Twitter headquarters in San Francisco, where he sent his first tweet and set up accounts for the Kremlin.

Now Medvedev is deputy chairman of Russia’s security council and one of the most vocal supporters of the war in Ukraine and of all-out confrontation with the West.

When Russia eavesdropped on German officers discussing how long-range cruise missiles could be sent to and used by Ukraine, Medvedev lambasted what he called “the Fritzes” for having “again turned into sworn enemies”.

Former president Dmitry Medvedev is now deputy chairman of Russia’s security council and is one of the most vocal supporters of the war in Ukraine. Photograph: Yekaterina Shtukina / POOL / AFP

Then he quoted a 1942 poem called Kill Him! which urges Soviet troops to kill German soldiers, and includes the lines: “So kill at least one/So kill him quickly/However often you see him/That many times you must kill him.”

Medvedev ended his post March 1st post on Telegram with what he called a rallying cry from the second World War: “Death to the German-fascist occupiers!”

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When French president Emmanuel Macron refused recently to rule out western troops going to Ukraine, another senior Moscow official reached even further back through military history - to France’s 1812 invasion of Russia - to offer a warning to Paris.

“Before making such statements, it would be right for Macron to remember how it ended for Napoleon and his soldiers, more than 600,000 of whom were left lying in the damp earth,” said Vyacheslav Volodin, speaker of Russia’s lower house of parliament.

When Navalny (47) was buried in Moscow last month, tens of thousands of people risked arrest or identification as an “unpatriotic” citizen by coming out to pay their respects, in a show of mourning and defiance reminiscent of the 1989 funeral of Soviet dissident and Nobel Peace Prize winner Andrei Sakharov.

Yulia Navalnaya, Alexei’s exiled widow, has urged Russians to come to polling stations en masse at noon on Sunday in a show of protest.

Yulia Navalnaya, Alexei Navalny's widow, wrote this week in the Washington Post: 'Do not believe that everyone in Russia supports Putin and his war.' Photograph: Yves Herman/ POOL/ AFP

“Do not believe that everyone in Russia supports Putin and his war. Russia is under a harsh dictatorship. The number of political prisoners in Russia is three times higher than it was during the Soviet system’s struggle with dissidents,” she wrote in the Washington Post this week.

“I call on political leaders of the West to help all Russian citizens who stand up against Putin’s gang. I urge you ... to not recognise the results of the falsified elections, to not recognise Putin as the legitimate president of Russia.”

The Kremlin insists that an overwhelming number of Russians support Putin and that the elections will be exemplary.

“Our democracy is the best and we will continue to build it,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said last week.

Oleg Orlov, one of Russia’s most respected human rights campaigners, expressed a different view last month when being jailed for 2½ years for denouncing the war in Ukraine.

“I have not committed a crime. I am being tried for a newspaper article in which I called the political regime in Russia today totalitarian and fascist,” he said.

“At the time some of my acquaintances thought that I was exaggerating. But now it is quite obvious that I was not exaggerating at all ... Our country is sinking into darkness.”

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