Steve Gutterman's Week In Russia

I'm Steve Gutterman, the editor of RFE/RL's Russia/Ukraine/Belarus Desk.

Signs of the times: The Sakharov Center is shut, suspicions settle on the Kremlin as Wagner mercenary group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin is presumed dead in a plane crash, and Ukraine celebrates the independence it is guarding from relentless Russian attacks.

Here are some of the key developments in Russia over the past week and some of the takeaways going forward.

Evict And Liquidate

For more than a quarter-century, a modest building in a small park just off the Garden Ring in Moscow served as a kind of oasis of historical truth in a country whose leadership, particularly since Vladimir Putin came to power, has been increasingly dishonest about the past.

It took its name from Andrei Sakharov, the hydrogen-bomb designer turned dissident who fought for human rights and freedoms and died two years before the U.S.S.R. collapsed after a failed coup staged by plotters bent on undoing the reforms he helped usher in and preserving the Soviet Union.

The Sakharov Center, by contrast, worked to preserve the memory of the crimes of the Soviet state and of their victims, who numbered in the millions. One exhibit displayed there featured a large number of faded, dog-eared documents from the time of Josef Stalin's Great Terror, each including a citizen's name and a one-word order saying that he or she would be shot.

The coup attempt was over less than three days after it began on August 19, 1991. Almost 32 years later to the day, on August 18, a Moscow court issued a different kind of death sentence, ordering the closure and "liquidation" of the Sakharov Center, which had been evicted from its longtime premises in January.

The shutdown of the Sakharov Center is just one of the latest steps in a relentless campaign by the Russian state to stifle civil society and silence dissent amid the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which reached the 18-month mark yesterday with both sides far short of their goals: in the case of Moscow, the aggressor, subjugating Ukraine, and in Kyiv's case driving Russian forces out the country.

The clampdown, since the invasion in February 2022 but can be traced as far back as a dozen years ago, when the state suppressed large protests over evidence of election fraud and Putin's return to the presidency after a stint as prime minister, has become part of the fabric of Russia as he approaches a quarter-century in power.

But that would have been hard to predict when the coup plot collapsed on August 21, 1991, hastening the disintegration of the U.S.S.R. and raising hopes for robust democracy to take hold in Russia, Ukraine, and the rest of the former Soviet republics. Critics say Putin, a KGB officer in the Soviet era, began reversing steps in that direction soon after he came to power.

‘Turn The Clock Back'

Today, far from being scions of those who thwarted the coup, author and analyst Mark Galeotti suggested, Putin's government is "the spiritual descendant" of the members of the State Committee on the State of Emergency, the GKChP, who were bent on preserving the circumstances that gave them power and personal security no matter what it meant for the millions of citizens desperate for change.

Putin's Kremlin, Galeotti said, "owes so much of its attitudes and its fears to…the people in this emergency commission, who thought that [Soviet leader Mikhail] Gorbachev had gone too far and was going to bring about the dissolution of their entire system, and that all they could do was essentially try to turn the clock back through the use of force and fear."

"That, quite frankly, provides much more of a sense of the credo of today's Kremlin," he said on his podcast, In Moscow's Shadows. "No wonder they may not be sleeping that calmly."

The clearest example of Russia's efforts to "turn the clock back through the use of force and fear" is the invasion of Ukraine, which at its heart is a bid to regain control over some of the territory that was under Moscow's thumb in the Soviet era but has been independent for 32 years -- a milestone marked across the country on August 24 in defiance of the invasion.

In ultimatums -- cast as "proposals" -- leveled at the United States and NATO weeks ahead of the February 2022 invasion, Russia sought to undo some of the chief effects of the collapse of communism in 1989 and the disintegration of the Soviet Union two years later by restricting the rights of countries across Central and Eastern Europe to provide for their own security.

Russia's war against Ukraine raged on with sickening persistence this week. On August 20, a missile strike on the northern city of Chernihiv -- which Russia besieged in the first weeks of the invasion but failed to capture before beating a retreat back across the border -- killed at least seven people, including a 6-year-old girl, Sofia.

Work For The Clampdown

Inside Russia, the closure of the Sakharov Center also looks like an attempt to turn back the clock -- in this case, to a time before activists began documenting the crimes of the Soviet state.

In the years that followed the U.S.S.R.'s collapse, such efforts were seen by many in Russia as part of a reckoning that was crucial to the development of the country going forward. In the Putin era, rights activists say, they are treated by the authorities as attacks on the state -- actions to be nipped in the bud, not nurtured -- because they are perceived as threats.

Amid the war in Ukraine, the persistent state campaign to neutralize perceived threats has gone into overdrive.

The closure of the Sakharov Center is an example, as is the ongoing trial of Oleg Orlov, a leader of the Memorial Human Rights Center, which was shut down by court order in December 2021. Memorial has long been at the heart of efforts to establish historical truth, and in the crosshairs of the Kremlin as a result.

With a presidential election looming in seven months, so is the increasing pressure on Golos, a group that has monitored elections and tracked voting fraud claims since the early 2000s, and the prosecution of its co-chairman Grigory Melkonyants.

So is the new conviction of opposition leader Aleksei Navalny, who was sentenced this month to 19 years in an isolated, harsh, high-security "special regime" prison after a trial on extremism charges that he dismisses as absurd.

'Retribution And Reprisal'

So too, possibly, is the August 23 plane crash that probably killed Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Wagner leader whose brief mutiny exactly two months earlier brought his mercenary force within 200 kilometers of Moscow and made Putin look vulnerable.

"It is pretty straightforward," Maria Snegovaya, a Russia analyst at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), told RFE/RL. "He did something that was taboo. He was going to be eliminated sooner or later, and this time it came quite fast."

Many Russians suspect that Putin had Prigozhin killed. And a "preliminary U.S. intelligence assessment" concluded that an intentional explosion caused the crash, the Associated Press reported, citing unnamed U.S. and Western officials who said it was in line with Putin's "long history of trying to silence his critics."

In a way, though, what really happened hardly matters.

"Whatever the reasons for the plane crash, everyone will see it as an act of retribution and reprisal, and the Kremlin will not interfere much with this," Tatyana Stanovaya, a senior fellow at the Berlin-based Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin, wrote on Telegram.

That prediction seemed to be borne out by Putin's first public comments about the crash, issued late on August 24. He offered condolences and praise for Prigozhin, but said the Wagner leader had "a difficult fate" and had made "serious mistakes in life."

That's it from me this week.

If you want to know more, catch up on my podcast The Week Ahead In Russia, out every Monday, here on our site, or wherever you get your podcasts (Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts).

Yours,

Steve Gutterman

I'm Steve Gutterman, the editor of RFE/RL's Russia/Ukraine/Belarus Desk.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has killed more than 500 children -- possibly many more. One Kremlin foe is handed a 19-year prison term while another, sentenced to 25 years in prison on a treason conviction after criticizing President Vladimir Putin and the war, draws parallels with the Stalin-era persecution of citizens branded “enemies of the people.”

Here are some of the key developments in Russia over the past week and some of the takeaways going forward.

A Terrible Statistic

Almost 18 months after Russia launched its large-scale invasion of Ukraine, the war – at first almost unthinkable despite months of warning signs that it was on the way – has become a grim fact, an ongoing occurrence that throws up horrors daily but is also the mundane stuff of maps, schedules, daily planning meetings at media outlets, and more. While it is obviously anything but normal, it has been normalized to some degree, at least.

At the same time, there are developments that drive home the fact that there is nothing normal about it, and these are captured in things like news stories, photographs, videos. Even statistics, like this one: At least 500 children have been killed, and more than 1,000 wounded, since the large-scale invasion began on February 24, 2022, according to the Ukrainian Prosecutor-General’s Office.

Like the UN office that counts casualties and said this month that 9,396 civilians had been confirmed killed, the Ukrainian authorities stressed that the figures are incomplete, largely because of the difficulty gathering information from Russian-occupied areas, and that the actual toll may be much higher.

In any case, it is rising as Russia pushes ahead with its unprovoked invasion despite numerous setbacks and the failure to achieve Putin’s goal of swiftly – or even not so swiftly -- subjugating Ukraine.

On the same day as the figure of at least 500 was announced, officials said that two more children were dead: a 12-year-old boy and a 23-day-old girl who were killed along with their parents in a strike on their village in the Kherson region.

The children who have been killed have included the 14-year-old twin sisters killed in a missile strike on a pizza restaurant in the Donbas in June, the 4-year-old girl with Down syndrome killed in a cruise missile strike on the west-central city of Vinnytsya, far from the front lines, and a child whose mother and sibling survived an attack in March in Mariupol, which was razed by the time Russian forces captured it in April. And many, many more.

And in addition to the killings, Russia has taken many children across the border from Ukraine – a practice that led the International Criminal Court to issue an arrest warrant for Putin in March. He stands accused of “the war crime of unlawful deportation of population (children) and that of unlawful transfer of population (children) from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation.”

'Destroying Modern Russia'

While Putin has destroyed many lives in Ukraine, he has not destroyed Ukraine.

But he just might destroy Russia, Anne Applebaum, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book Gulag: A History, told RFE/RL’s Georgian Service in an interview.

“I don't think there's any question that Putin will be remembered as the man who really set out to destroy his own country,” Applebaum said. “And apart from what he did to Ukraine, apart from what he did to Georgia, apart from what he did to Chechnya, apart from what he did to Syria, you know, this is somebody who has worsened the living standards, and freedom, and culture of Russia itself.”

Putin has “brought back a form of dictatorship that I think most Russians had thought they'd left behind,” she said. “Remember the Putin regime for the first decade that Putin was president had elements of freedom in it. It wasn’t a totalitarian state.

“There was no thought police, no thought control of the kind people had known from the Soviet era. He is now slowly bringing that back. So, this is a crushing, not just of dissent, but a crushing of all politics, all imagination, all culture, all activity, anything independent,” Applebaum said. “What he's really doing is really destroying, you know, modern Russia.”

Perhaps the most obvious evidence of the crushing of politics is the long and continuing prosecution of opposition leader Aleksei Navalny, who was in and out of jail over peaceful street protests for more than a decade and has now been behind bars since January 2021, when he was arrested upon return to Russia after recovering in Germany from a near-fatal nerve agent poisoning he blames on Putin.

Navalny has published evidence suggesting that Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) poisoned him. On August 17, the United States imposed sanctions on four men it said were linked to the FSB and were involved in his poisoning in Siberia in August 2020. One of them is Konstantin Kudryavtsev, an agent Navalny later said he had he had duped into revealing that the FSB was the culprit.

On August 4, Navalny was convicted on three criminal counts related to accusations of extremism, which he and his supporters dismiss as absurd, and sentenced to 19 years in a harsh, maximum-security “special regime” prison. But that’s not all, or it might not be: He may also face trial on terrorism charges, which could result in an additional prison term.

Ballots And Prison Bars

Navalny has been convicted in three major trials – not including retrials – in the past decade. The charges he has faced have ranged from economic crimes such as fraud and embezzlement to, now, extremism and potentially terrorism.

What does that have to do with crushing politics?

Well, it’s widely suspected that the real reason he is being separated from society is that the Kremlin fears he poses a political challenge to Putin, who seems to be unable or unwilling to utter Navalny’s name in public.

Navalny was allowed to run for Moscow mayor in 2013, but he was barred from the ballot – because of his criminal record – when he tried to go up against Putin in the most recent presidential contest, in 2018. The extremism charges that led to his conviction this month were related in part to a nationwide network of offices that he established as would-be campaign headquarters for the election.

Nineteen years would be the longest sentence handed down to a Kremlin opponent since the Soviet era – if not for another trial that ended this year, as the Russian state’s already intense clampdown on dissent intensified further following the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

Vladimir Kara-Murza, a vocal Putin foe who has spoken out against the war on Ukraine and has campaigned in the West for sanctions against Russians who violate human rights, was convicted of treason in April – part of a surge of treason cases since the invasion – and sentenced to 25 years in prison.

Sent To The Gulag

Like Navalny, Kara-Murza – who lived part-time in the United States in recent years – was arrested after returning from abroad. Despite the threat of prosecution, he came back to Russia in April 2022, after delivering a speech in Arizona in which he accused the "dictatorial regime in the Kremlin" of committing "war crimes." He was speaking about a year before the ICC issued the arrest warrant for Putin.

And like Navalny, Kara-Murza believes he was poisoned as retribution for his opposition to the Russian state.

On July 31, an appeals court upheld the verdict and sentence against Kara-Murza, as expected.

In an August 15 column in The Washington Post – dateline: Pretrial Detention Center No. 5, Moscow – Kara-Murza wrote that after a trial that was held behind closed doors, it was a “special treat” to “see the faces, smiles, tears and thumbs-ups of my friends, colleagues and supporters, as well as journalists and diplomats who packed the courtroom.”

Officially, Kara-Murza’s trial was closed to the public because his case was classified. However, he wrote, “The real reason – as prosecutor Boris Loktionov candidly stated at the appeals hearing last month – was ‘to prevent Kara-Murza from using the court as a political platform and publicly calling our president, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, a murderer.’”

When his prosecution began, Kara-Murza wrote, “I expected my experience to be similar to that of the dissidents of the 1960s and 1970s whose struggles against Soviet totalitarianism I have studied and documented.

“But Russia’s regress under Putin has taken a much more dramatic pace,” he wrote, adding that his trial “had much more in common with the handling of ‘enemies of the people’ under Josef Stalin” and invoking his grandfather, who he said had been “arrested and sent to the gulag” in 1937, during the Great Terror, for “expressing hostility towards the leaders of the party and the government.”

“The sentence completed the parallel,” he wrote. “Before me, the last time political prisoners in this country had received 25-year terms was at the end of Stalin’s reign.”

That's it from me this week.

If you want to know more, catch up on my podcast The Week Ahead In Russia, out every Monday, here on our site or wherever you get your podcasts (Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts).

Yours,

Steve Gutterman