‘No Political Repression in Russia Today,’ Presidential Human Rights Council Head Says

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Oct. 29 – One of the biggest problems those who follow the state of human rights in Putin’s Russia is that those Russian government agencies responsible for reporting about conditions there often are anything but reliable. Indeed, most of them seem committed to misleading rather than informing.
    A new example comes from Valery Fadeyev, head of the Presidential Human Rights Council, who declares that today there are no political repressions at all but only “sanitary methods” that are being applied to those who are working for the West against Russia (interfax.ru/russia/989322 and zona.media/news/2024/10/30/eto_ne_repressii).
“God forbid,” he continues, “that Russians now would feel on their own skin what political repressions are. There were repressions in 1937-1938 when 740,000 people were shot, most of whom were innocent. Even now we don’t know how many priests were shot in the 1920s and 1930s. Those were real repressions.”
Not only are there no repressions now but only carefully targeted moves against enemies of Russia, Fadeyev continues; but “humanization of this spheres is going on without interruption. Twenty-five years ago, we have a million people behind bars; now, we have 300,000. This is an enormous advance.”
    If one accepts Fadeyev’s argument that there are no repressions unless they reach the level of those in Stalin’s Great Terror, then he is of course right; but if one uses almost any other standard, then there are real repressions in Putin’s Russia and they are increasing, even if the prison population is falling as criminals are allowed to gain their freedom by fighting in Ukraine.