Persecution of Dissidents in Putin's Russia: Background information when reading A Terrible Country

Persecution of Dissidents in Putin's Russia

This article relates to A Terrible Country

The political activists in A Terrible Country live in fear of arrest due to the threat of harsh sentences and even bodily harm that is frequently the result of protesting the Putin regime. Putin has a long history of silencing his detractors, using both legal and illegal means, with many critics ending up imprisoned in a gulag (a forced work camp) or dead. In 2014, the Kremlin essentially outlawed peaceful protests, and the punishment for taking part in such an assembly can be up to five years in prison. The repressive nature of the regime's legislature is perhaps best exemplified by the "single person picket" laws enacted in 2004 and amended in 2012. These state that anyone seeking to picket must do so alone "at a minimum distance of 50 meters from any other picketer" and may not picket more than two times within six months.

Here are some examples of Putin's practices:

Anna Politkovskaya was a journalist who frequently wrote about human rights violations and corruption within the Russian government. She was shot to death in the lobby of her apartment building on October 7, 2006 (which, incidentally, was Putin's 54th birthday). Two years before her murder, Politkovskaya became ill on a flight to Beslan, and it is widely believed that this illness was the result of an attempted poisoning.

Like Putin, Alexander Litvinenko was a former KGB agent. In 2006, he was working with the U.K.'s MI5 intelligence organization investigating Anna Politkovskaya's death when he consumed tea laced with radioactive polonium-210 in a London hotel, allegedly administered by another former Russian agent. Litvenko died a few days later.

Boris Nemtsov was a former deputy prime minister and well-known Putin oppositional figure. He was shot and killed outside of the Kremlin in 2015. At the time of his death, Nemtsov was reportedly investigating the activities of the Russian military in Ukraine.

Russian chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov has been arrested, imprisoned, and assaulted as a result of his vocal criticism of Putin. Kasparov was arrested twice at political rallies in 2007 while running as an opposition presidential candidate. In a 2015 interview with PBS's Frontline, Kasparov remarked on his decision to emigrate to the United States, explaining, "Right now, for me, going back to Russia would be a one-way ticket. I think that with my political views and my open statements, I wouldn't stay free for long in Russia...people sharing the same views and being as loud as myself, they're either behind bars or out of the country."

Perhaps the most well-known example of Putin's intolerance for protest is the 2012 arrest and trial of three members of the activist collective Pussy Riot after they performed an anti-Putin song in a Moscow church. The women were convicted of "hooliganism" and sentenced to two years in a gulag, an event that garnered international attention and outrage. In September 2018, Pyotr Verzilov, another member of Pussy Riot was hospitalized following a suspected poisoning. He recovered, and vowed to keep speaking out against corruption and oppression in Russia.

Finally, activist and filmmaker Oleg Sentsov was arrested on trumped up charges of terrorism after protesting the Russian annexation of Crimea. His trial and life sentence in 2015 have resulted in international outcry from human rights organizations. Senstsov underwent a 144 day hunger strike in the Labytnangi gulag in 2018. Sentsov is currently co-directing films from within his prison cell.

Pussy Riot
Anna Politkovskaya
Alexander Litvinenko
Boris Nemtsov
Garry Kasparov
Pussy Riot members Nadezhda Tolokonnikova (right), Maria Alyokhina (center) and Yekaterina Samutsevich (left) courtesy of eurofolkradio.com
Oleg Sentsov

Filed under Society and Politics

This "beyond the book article" relates to A Terrible Country. It originally ran in September 2018 and has been updated for the July 2019 paperback edition. Go to magazine.