Reverting To Stalinist Patterns? Russia’s Political Prisoners in the 2020s
January 12, 2020
After several months of relative calm, 2019 gave a glimpse of what is to come for Russia in the 2020s, writes Kirill Martynov for Novaya Gazeta (English version reprinted in the Moscow Times).
In the wake of the Moscow protests in the summer 2019, Russian authorities “snatched up one person after another,” and, with December ending, “the country is witnessing trials of political prisoners nearly every day,” he says.
Martynov fears that Russia is reverting back to Stalinist patterns, and that in the 2020s, the “state will continue putting people of conscience through its meat grinder of a justice system.”
In recent months, the international community has begun taken note. However, most of the outcry has been focused on the fate of Ukrainian political prisoners held in Russia and Crimea, some of whom were released as part of a detainee exchange negotiated between the governments of the Russian Federation and Ukraine.
The problem is much larger. As a report released in June of 2019 entitled “The Kremlin’s Political Prisoners: Advancing a Political Agenda by Crushing Dissent,” showed, there are more than 230 political prisoners currently held in Russia — among them Alexey Pichugin, Russia’s longest serving political prisoner, who was first subjected to the Russian “meat grinder of a justice system” in 2003, and has spent more than 6,000 days in jail.
Martynov paints a dark picture of Russia in the 2020s:
“Most of our contemporaries did not live through the Stalin era, and many are too young to remember former Soviet leader Yury Andropov.
However, when dark political clouds appear on the horizon, the Russian people almost instinctively begin marching in lockstep to their collective doom. To acknowledge that political catastrophe unfolding in this country is to risk your career, standing in society, and possibly, your personal freedom.
This catastrophe is so obvious that real effort is required to pretend nothing is wrong. A future generation of historians and anthropologists might be baffled as to how a chilling collective silence descended not once, but twice in the very same country.”
As Russia’s political prisoners are deprived of opportunities to speak up for themselves, the international community must become their voice.
In the words of Irwin Cotler, founder and chair of the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights and former Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada:
“We must not forget those arrested by tyrannies around the world who remain imprisoned based on their fidelity to conscience.
We may not know all of their names, but we must speak for these heroes in the war for freedom and the rule of law — to let them know we stand in solidarity with them, and that we will not relent until their freedom is secured.”
Source: Kirill Martynov, Russia Is Reverting to Stalinist Patterns, The Moscow Times, December 31, 2019 (Russian version originally published in Novaya Gazeta, December 22, 2019).
Image source: creative commons license (CC BY 4.0), flickr photo by Hernán García Crespo
