Putin’s Moves against the Internet Showing Russians He Wants to Repress Everyone and Everything and Not Just Selected Groups, Kolesnikov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Mar. 19 – “The vast majority” of Russians assumed until recently that the Kremlin’s authoritarianism was “strictly a matter concerning liberals and other troublemakers and that democracy was merely a high-fallutin’ word with no relevance” to themselves, Andrey Kolesnikov says.

            But Putin’s moves against the Internet are convincing ever more of them that Putin has no plans to stop and that his prohibitions and use of force “concerned all of them and not simply liberals who oppose him,” according to the Novaya Gazeta observer (novayagazeta.ru/articles/2026/03/19/vechernii-zvon-zvonit-po-tebe).

            “A repressive state machine doesn’t stop,” Kolesnikov says; “it has no reverse gear.” For it, “prohibitions and violence have a viral nature, and there is no end to this pandemic,” if “the vaccine –human rights and democracy – remain under lock and key” and the state retains the overwhelming means of repression.

            Now this repressive drive “has even reached the point of destroying the internet, the natural habitat of the modern urban resident, under the pretext of peddling ‘security’ wholesale and retail” again people “who had hoped to hunker down in their homes and ride out the hard times by retreating into private life. But there is no private life left.”

            According to Kolesnikov, “The state had been probing the limits of the possible, and it ultimately concluded that nothing is impossible;” and that means that “the fetish of security has metastasized” to the totalitarian view that everything belongs to the state and that its security depends on constantly seeking new areas to repress.

            For the rulers of such states, “regimes of violence are the norm; brief interludes of human freedom are deviations from that norm, and those leaders who allowed society a moment to breathe are loathed. Unfreedom becomes sacred; the State becomes an idol—one to be worshipped, and one for which it is deemed absolutely essential to die on a regular basis.”

“All of this has happened before,” the commentator continues. Khrushchev, Gorbachev and Yeltsin tried to stop it from above, apparently the only way it could be. “But society remained dissatisfied with them for it proved unable to handle its newfound freedom and never truly grasped that the punishing hand is not the same as the feeding hand.”

And so, Kolesnikov concludes, “send not to ask for whom the bell tolls – it tolls for thee,” something ever more Russians are recognizing but have not yet figured out how to respond in a way that stops this cancer on their lives and futures.