There were no mass protests in Russia in 2023. There were no hair-raising scenes of riot police in helmets and body armor beating students and shoving elderly demonstrators into police vans.
Nonetheless, the harsh repression of dissent was the daily business of President Vladimir Putin’s security forces, with the action shifted to pretrial detention centers, the courts, and the prison system.
“It is a return to the repressive system of the post-Stalin period,” said human rights activist Aleksandr Cherkasov of Memorial, which has been banned in Russia. “Maybe this has been ordered [from above] -- that is possible. But it is the same logic as the campaigns of the Soviet Union.
“Now Putin has returned to the same thing, but the difference is that he is not just maintaining some kind of stability but is undertaking social engineering, building a new country,” he added. “The scope of the repression turns out to be sufficient: One person is imprisoned and 100 have their hands tied because they already have an administrative offense, and the next violation means prison. It worked in the Soviet Union, and it works now.”
Most dramatically, the year saw increasingly long prison terms handed down in cases widely seen as politically motivated. Opposition politician Aleksei Navalny was handed a 19-year prison term in August on an extremism conviction. Navalny denounced the sentence as “Stalinist.”
Fellow opposition politician Vladimir Kara-Murza was sentenced to 25 years on treason and other charges in April. In November, St. Petersburg artist Aleksandra Skochilenko was sentenced to seven years in prison for an anti-war protest.
According to the end-of-the-year report by OVD-Info, a rights project that monitors and reports on repression in Russia, typical prison terms for anti-war charges in 2023 were from 36 to 77 months. Typical sentences for publications on the Internet were between 34 and 65 months.
'Satanic Work'
The OVD-Info report presents a clear picture of the Kremlin’s suppression of basic freedoms, using a tangle of new or recently modified laws criminalizing the spread of what the state deems “false” information about the armed forces, “justifying” terrorism, “rehabilitating” Nazism, and so on. The laws are notable for their vague language and unpredictable application.
In 2023, at least 2,830 cases were filed under the law on “discrediting” the armed forces -- Article 20.3.3 of the Code of Administrative Offenses, or KoAP. This represented a small downturn from the previous year, when people arrested at anti-war protests were routinely charged under that article.
More ominously, however, there was a significant uptick in prosecutions under Article 280.3 of the Criminal Code, which criminalizes the “repeated” discrediting of the armed forces. That law stipulates prison terms up to five years for defendants who have already been punished under KoAP 20.3.3. For instance, on December 28, 86-year-old Orthodox Archbishop Viktor Pivovarov was charged under the law in the Krasnodar region.
“I said during interrogation that the current government is acting illegally,” Pivovarov, whose small confession is separate from the state-allied Russian Orthodox Church, told RFE/RL. “It is the heirs of those who carried out the Bolshevik coup in 1917 and is continuing their Satanic work.”
2023 also saw a dramatic uptick in the application of the criminal law against disseminating “false” information about the war in Ukraine, particularly cases allegedly motivated by “political hatred” (Criminal Code Article 207.3). At least 794 defendants were charged under the article in 2023, OVD-Info reported. Siberian journalist Maria Ponomarenko was one of the most prominent defendants convicted under this article. In February, she was sentenced to six years in prison, after spending nearly a year in pretrial detention.
In May, she was transferred to a prison more than 1,000 kilometers away from her under-aged children, and in November she was charged with attacking a prison official, which could add another five years to her sentence.
'Significantly Harsher'
There were also at least 16 criminal cases opened in 2023 on the charge of “justifying terrorism,” which is covered by Article 205.2 of the Criminal Code. Many of the cases involved people who commented on the wave of attacks on military recruiting offices around Russia or on the attacks that damaged the Crimea Bridge, which connects Russia to the occupied Ukrainian peninsula.
Also in 2023, lawmakers criminalized the “justification” of extremism, which OVD-Info analysts predicted could portend a coming wave of prosecutions for anyone commenting on any individual or organization figuring on the Kremlin’s list of purported extremists.
Lawmakers also added Article 280.4 to the Criminal Code in 2023, criminalizing statements or actions running counter to national security. In recent months, at least 134 cases have been opened under the new law, at least 10 of which were connected with statements criticizing Russia’s 2022 military mobilization for the war against Ukraine.
At least 43 journalists were caught up in the wave of repressions in 2023 on a variety of charges usually related to statements about the war in Ukraine. Two American journalists -- Evan Gershkovich of The Wall Street Journal and Alsu Kurmasheva of RFE/RL -- were arrested in Russia in 2023 and remain jailed in pretrial detention.
In 2023, 217 individuals and organizations were added to the Justice Ministry’s list of “foreign agents.” Fifty-three organizations were declared “undesirable” in Russia, compared to 23 in 2022. The nonexistent “international LGBT social movement” was banned as extremist on November 30. At least 75 Jehovah’s Witnesses were charged with crimes related to “extremism” in 2023.
There were at least 45 cases under laws criminalizing the “rehabilitation of Nazism,” including a case in Kurgan where a man was fined 2 million rubles ($22,300) for lighting a cigarette using the local eternal flame war memorial. Volunteers with the banned Memorial human rights group were charged under the article after it was discovered that three of the tens of thousands of names included in the group’s database of victims of Stalinist repression were people who had collaborated with the Nazis during World War II.
“This year laws concerning public statements, ‘foreign agents,’ and ‘terrorist activity’ were made significantly harsher,” said OVD-Info analyst Yelizaveta Shtiglits. “Apparently, the latter was in response to the attacks on recruiting centers and railroad lines. They have begun adopting new laws on public statements, including calls for anti-government activity or the repeated display of banned symbols and so on.”
What The Future Holds
In April, the United Nations Human Rights Council appointed Bulgarian activist Mariana Katzarova as the first-ever UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Russia.
She told Current Time, the Russian-language network run by RFE/RL in cooperation with VOA, that the situation in Russia is “very difficult.”
“This doesn’t mean that activists and rights monitors are not still working in the Russian Federation,” she said, noting that she has received more than 200 reports from activists in the country so far. “They are working, but the foundation of civil society has been destroyed.”
Since Moscow’s unprovoked massive invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, she said, “we see…a situation in which all lawmaking and state activity is aimed at stifling the voices of the people, the voices of civil society, and the anti-war messages of the people.”
“I believe that the war became possible because of the enormous repressions within Russian society,” Katzarova added.
Such trends will continue and intensify in 2024, OVD-Info’s Shtiglits said.
“We can’t forget that during the last year a whole raft of new articles have been added to the security agencies’ arsenal that will enable them to even more actively prosecute expressions of opinion or cooperation with various organizations,” she said. “The laws on state-security crimes have been made significantly harsher.”
