Putin is crushing the last voices of dissent
The arrest of opposition leader Maxim Kruglov is a blow against the last vestiges of democracy in Russia.
Hardly a day goes by without another political arrest in Russia. Under President Vladimir Putin, the scale of repression against those who disagree with the Kremlin has surpassed anything seen in our country since the death of Joseph Stalin. According to a recent United Nations report, some 60 politically motivated criminal cases are opened against Russian citizens every month. The number of known political prisoners in Russia (more than 1,700) already exceeds the respective figure for the whole of the Soviet Union — that is, 15 present-day countries together — in the mid-1980s. And the leading cause of political imprisonment in Russia is continuing protest against the war in Ukraine.
Every new arrest comes as a shock — another reminder of the oppressiveness and injustice of Putin’s system. But the emotional impact is all the greater when the news concerns a personal acquaintance or a friend.
Earlier this month, Russian authorities arrested Maxim Kruglov, former member of the Moscow City Duma and deputy leader of Yabloko, Russia’s last remaining opposition (and anti-war) party. Elected in 2019 on a wave of opposition sentiment in the capital, Kruglov went on to lead his party’s caucus in the Moscow legislature. His term was marked by public opposition to the rushed (and illegal) constitutional amendments allowing Putin to stay in power in violation of term limits; by efforts to put up an official plaque in memory of the slain opposition leader Boris Nemtsov; and by attempts to organize street protests after Putin ordered the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Kruglov was also persistent in his advocacy for political prisoners. He was among the first people to hold a vigil outside the police station where I was held on the night of my arrest in April 2022. He attended all my court hearings — most often standing in the corridor outside, as my trial was held behind closed doors. And every time the authorities at my Omsk prison found a way to make my conditions more unbearable — extending time in a punishment cell or forbidding another phone call to my children — Kruglov bombarded them with parliamentary inquiries, triggering outside inspections and audits. Of course, these could not have any practical impact in today’s Russia — but it is impossible to overstate how important it is for a political prisoner to feel solidarity from the outside world and to know that they are not forgotten.
Kruglov is now a political prisoner himself. Placed under arrest by a Moscow district court, he was charged with “disseminating knowingly false information” about the Russian army, which, in the Orwellian speak of Putin’s Russia, means telling the truth about the Kremlin’s war in Ukraine. Kruglov’s two counts of criminal indictment are over his social media posts condemning the massacre of Ukrainian civilians in the towns of Bucha and Mariupol in the first weeks of the Russian invasion and calling for an international investigation of war crimes committed by Russian forces in Ukraine. The charge carries up to 10 years in prison. Among the “material evidence” seized during the nightlong search at Kruglov’s apartment was his membership card in the Yabloko party.
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Kruglov’s arrest brought the total number of Yabloko members who are under criminal prosecution to nine people, while another 11 had served administrative detention and 36 had been charged by police with “discrediting” the Russian army. Days before Kruglov’s arrest, prosecutors in St. Petersburg moved to designate a book by another deputy leader of Yabloko, Boris Vishnevsky, as “extremist” for describing Putin’s Russia as “a state sliding toward fascism” and advocating for the return of Crimea to Ukraine. The “extremist” designation, set to be rubber-stamped by a judge later this week, could open the way for criminal prosecution. A third deputy leader of Yabloko, Lev Shlosberg, has already been indicted for “discrediting” the Russian army and is awaiting trial in his hometown of Pskov.
Founded in the 1990s by prominent economist Grigory Yavlinsky as the democratic opposition to then-President Boris Yeltsin, Yabloko has consistently opposed Putin since his arrival in the Kremlin in 2000. Today, as Russia slips into a full-scale dictatorship, Yabloko stands as one of the last vestiges of our brief experiment with democracy. Its presence on the ballot provides the last legal and relatively safe option for Russian citizens to express opposition to the war in Ukraine. In every local and regional election since February 2022, Yabloko has used Picasso’s dove as its campaign symbol and urged an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine.
It is precisely this option that the Kremlin wants to eliminate as it readies for what are sure to be sham parliamentary elections in September 2026. “Russian society is exhausted by the war — and in the year [ahead] … that fatigue will only deepen,” wrote Ksenia Fadeyeva, former coordinator of the late opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s movement in the Siberian city of Tomsk and a former political prisoner who was freed in the same exchange as me in August of last year. “So why would the authorities allow Yabloko, running on the slogan ‘For Peace and Freedom,’ to remain on the ballot?”
Putin’s anxiety is understandable. The Kremlin knows that public opposition to the Ukraine war is much greater than what its propaganda would admit. Last year, amid the staged circus of Putin’s reelection, the maverick anti-war presidential bid by former lawmaker Boris Nadezhdin elicited an extraordinary public response, as long lines formed at his campaign offices across Russia to sign petitions in support of his nomination. Nadezhdin was barred from the ballot, but the carefully crafted propaganda myth of universal support for Putin’s war was shattered in a matter of days. “And what if similar lines form at the polling stations [next September], this time to vote against the war?” Fadeyeva asks.
Maxim Kruglov is being held in Kapotnya, Moscow’s quarantine prison, before being transferred to one of the capital’s pretrial detention centers. The outcome of his upcoming trial is not in doubt. What is also not in doubt is that people like Maxim — Russians who refuse to become silent accomplices to the Kremlin’s crimes — are saving our country’s honor amid this current darkness. And it will be they who will lead Russia back to normality and back to civilization once the drawn-out nightmare of Vladimir Putin’s rule is finally over.
