Moscow (EFE).- Russian President Vladimir Putin has two enemies, one outside, the Ukrainians, and the other inside, all those who oppose his militaristic policy. The Kremlin has managed to silence dissent by condemning its top leaders, but the opposition believes a defeat in Ukraine could topple its regime.
“Russia is on the path from Putinism to Stalinism. The approval of the death penalty would already be the definitive step,” Lev Ponomariov, a veteran defender of human rights exiled in France, told Efe.
The 25-year sentence received by opposition member Vladimir Kara-Murzá, an unprecedented sentence for a Russian politician, confirms that Putin will not tolerate even the slightest show of dissent in times of war with the West.
“The opponents are now traitors, enemies of the people, spies, members of the fifth column and foreign agents,” sociologist Lev Gudkov told Efe.
Stalinist methods
The repression tool is now the courts, which convict an opponent of “high treason”, even though he has never revealed state secrets, only for criticizing the military campaign in Ukraine.
“The Chekists knew that Kara-Murza had been one of the initiators of the Magnitsky Law. It was the first list of sanctions against the Kremlin. He is a true hero. I only hope that those 25 years are an exceptional measure due to his close ties with the West, ”Ponomariov explains.
The Russian courts are practically unaware of what it is to acquit a defendant in a criminal proceeding, in the image and likeness of the NKVD troikas (precursor of the KGB) during the Stalinist purges of the 1930s, although then there were millions of informers.
“We are still in thousands of accusations,” says Ponomariov, a collaborator of Andrei Sakharov, father of the human rights movement in the USSR.
The deputy of the liberal Yabloko party, Boris Vishnevsky, believes that the Putinist system “is, to a large extent, a copy of Stalinism.”
“He certainly reminds of Stalin. The State is above the human being. Anyone can be subject to repression. Not to the same magnitude, but the trend is evident”, he assures Efe.
Today, he adds, “the conditions of a totalitarian regime exist”, since, “one of its main features is that disagreeing is punishable, dissent is a crime.”
a long list
Kara-Murzá, who was poisoned twice like imprisoned Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalni, is just the latest in a long line.
“Those who were not eliminated, such as (the agent Alexandr) Litvinenko or (the politician Boris) Nemtsov, have been imprisoned,” says Gudkov, who stresses that the repression began as soon as Putin came to power (2000), but it continued exacerbated in February 2022 with the military intervention in Ukraine.
The sociologist denounces that Navalni, who has lost eight kilos in recent weeks, is being “slowly” murdered in prison, while Kara-Murzá’s lawyers denounced on Monday that his precarious state of health prevents him from serving his sentence.
Nemtsov’s former manager, Iliá Yashin, was also sentenced to eight and a half years in prison, and the only opponent who has been mayor of a city of more than a million inhabitants, Yevgeny Roizman, faces a trial next week. .
Gudkov points out that the purges also affect senior officials. “Since (the annexation of the Ukrainian peninsula of) Crimea, 10% of high-ranking officials have been either arrested or convicted,” he says.
“Putin has created a system that eliminates all individual initiative and bases its stability on passivity and political apathy. There is no euphoria with the military campaign, rather submission. The regime has been consolidated around militarism, fear and hatred of the West, ”he highlights.
The new law that limits the fundamental rights of all Russians of military age to combat desertion would be part of the Kremlin’s desire to impose “total control over society.”
The defeat, the last hope
Gudkov acknowledges that a majority of Russians continue to support the military campaign – although, paradoxically, almost two-thirds also support an early cessation of fighting, according to his calculations – and that Western sanctions have not affected the standard of living of the Russians.
“Everything depends on the outcome of the war. A military defeat could undermine Putin’s authority and provoke a crisis of legitimacy for the regime. It would show that modernization is not real and that Russia is not capable of beating a weaker army like the Ukrainian one,” he notes.
Once the blitzkrieg “failed”, he warns that “the prolongation of the fighting” added to the “constant mobilization” of the Russians can “trigger discontent”.
Vishnevski also considers that “nothing is irreversible” and that, whatever the polls say, the Russians do not want to “live permanently in war.”
“If you look at history, practically when a regime suffers a military defeat that leads to internal changes. This was the case in Russia after the defeat in the Crimea in the middle of the 19th century and also after the naval disaster before Japan in 1905, ”he noted.