Overwhelming Majority of Russia’s Political Prisoners Get No Support, Leading to Their Silence and Intimidating Others, ‘Horizontal Russia’ Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 5 – Only a handful of the more than 1000 political prisoners in the Russian Federation receive any attention or support from others, Horizontal Russia says. As a result, many of them give up and end their political activities; but even worse, their experience in this regard leads other Russians to decide against making a protest.

            The regional news service draws these disturbing conclusions on the basis of both conversations with four former political prisoners who say they have given up on their fellow citizens and on the possibility that they can make a difference and also on the judgments of close observers of such people more generally (semnasem.org/articles/2024/08/05/travma-repressij-aktivisty-stolknuvshiesya-s-tyurmoj-ili-shtrafami-menyayut-svoe-mnenie-i-obraz-zhizni).

            “One of the basic reasons many activists give for ending their anti-war activity,” a Without Prejudice activist says, speaking on condition of anonymity, “is the exhaustion of their own internal resources because of the repression they experience” and both the absence of popular support and the inability to change the political course of the country.

            This has an impact on others as well, Polina Grundmane of the same organization continues. “They remain quiet because they see that even the strongest and loudest are being destroyed. Such people are concerned that the same thing could happen to them; and in this, they are absolutely right.”

            She says that for the political prisoners and former political prisoners, disappointment in Russian society is “the main feeling” they have and that as a result, “more than 80 percent of such people not only turn away from doing what they have been doing but also from believing what they had believed.”

            Indeed, Grundmane says with obvious bitterness, “people have lost not so much meaning as faith in other people.” And that loss of faith in others thus achieves many of the same goals Soviet leaders like Stalin sought through the use of even more massive repression than Putin has so far visited upon the country.

            As Aleksandr Cherkasov, former president of Memorial puts it, Putin is using the very same methods to achieve his aims that Soviet leaders after Stalin did. “Mass terror in the USSR was stopped after the death of Stalin but the logic of the system remained the same: almost everyone who fell into the orbit of the punitive machine was arrested and convicted.”

            But despite that, “the number of those repressed remained too high, and the CPSU Central Committee feared a repetition of the Great Terror” and so sought ways to reduce the number of such cases by conversations, firings and other forms of softer repression, the human rights expert explains.

            “In contemporary Russia,” he says, “something similar is taking place with criminal repressions serving as a threat for those who had received only administrative punishments.” This works because “it turns out that to control [society as a whole], it isn’t necessary to incarcerate everyone.”

            Instead, Cherkasov arresting only a relative few but intimidating them and in so doing others into silence as well is enough.