Russian Courts Now Act Cruelly Not Because They are Instructed to Be But Because They Fear Exposure as Not Being Cruel Enough, Maksimov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 22 – The imposition of extraordinarily harsh sentences in a series of cases in Russian courts calls attention to a dangerous development: Prosecutors are asking for such punishment and judges are imposing it not because they have been instructed to do so but because they are afraid of being humane, Andrey Maksimov says.

            Under current conditions, the journalist argues, any judge or prosecutor who shows mercy puts himself at risk of being denounced as helping the enemies of the state, a fear that means as long as the situation continues, ever more draconian sentences are likely (novayagazeta.ru/articles/2026/10/22/o-strakhe-byt-ne-zhestokim).

            That puts in motion a system in which court officers will compete with one another to show how tough and cruel they can be, not because they are being instructed to do so but because the system Putin has put in place makes such a spiral of official cruelty ever more likely and not something that those who launched it can easily reverse.

            These arrangements echo those in Stalin’s time, not as described by Arthur Koestler in Darkness at Noon as a tightly controlled system that carried out the will of one man but rather the one outlined by Victor Serge in The Case of Comrade Tulayev in which the fear of not being cruel enough takes over, a situation even dictators can’t stop at least for a time.