Political Repression in Russia
Fletcher Russia and Eurasia Program recently hosted a talk on the mechanisms of political repression in contemporary Russia. The speaker was Stanislav Stanskikh, a former Fletcher visiting scholar who is currently affiliated with Harvard’s Davis Center and UNC CSEEES. He combines his academic research with expert testimony on Russian country conditions in asylum cases before USCIS and U.S. immigration courts.
Stanskikh underscored academic, international and U.S. assessments of the unprecedented level of political repression in Russia. The pattern of mass persecution began after the 2011-2012 protests and gradually evolved into a state-sponsored system of suppressing civil society, dissenting views, minorities and political opposition, which became fully entrenched during Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Currently, Russia’s highly authoritarian, personalist, and centralized regime persecutes any dissent, creating an atmosphere of fear, intimidation and impunity, and punishes Russians who refuse to fight in Ukraine. The country’s legal system serves these purposes well. Repressive Russian legislation is unconstitutional in nature and contradicts human rights standards, as confirmed not only by legal scholars but also by the European Court of Human Rights, the Council of Europe, the United Nations and other intergovernmental organizations.
In 2022-2025, the authorities detained over 20,000 Russians for anti-war activities and initiated thousands of politically motivated criminal prosecutions. Labeling thousands of Russians and their organizations as extremist, terrorist and foreign agents and abusing the Criminal Code has become the new normal. Russia has already designated hundreds of organizations as undesirable, collaboration with which can lead to criminal prosecution – ranging from Yale University to the Anti-War Committee.
In just the first six months of 2025, Russian courts issued nearly 600 convictions in terrorism-related cases, a record for the country’s entire modern history. Almost 19,000 individuals and more than 800 organizations have already been included in the official list of extremists and terrorists, a list where real criminals stand side by side with political dissidents, where ISIS is listed alongside human rights and opposition organizations such as the Free Russia Foundation and Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation.
The Russian Army and political leadership have committed war crimes, crimes against humanity and inhumane conduct in Ukraine. By the summer of 2025, over 1 million Russian soldiers were killed or wounded in Ukraine, and the survival rate is extremely low. It is therefore unsurprising that many Russian men do not want to take part in the internationally recognized act of aggression or die. Desertion and unauthorized absence from the military are on the rise, with nearly 20,000 criminal convictions since 2022 – figures that Putin’s regime is attempting to conceal from the public.
The lack of an independent judiciary is reflected in the statistics on acquittals, which are virtually nonexistent: 0.19% overall and 0% in anti-war, treason and sabotage cases. The average prison sentence in politically motivated and anti-war cases is 6-7 years.
Russians are now being charged retroactively for speech or donations, while participation in the war is treated as a mitigating factor in unrelated criminal cases.
The talk highlighted how minor, even private conduct, can trigger persecution: a private conversation in a hospital, restaurant or attorney’s office, a “like” on social media, reciting a poem or song critical of the invasion, participating in a survey or simply calling the “special military operation” a “war.”
To illustrate the scope and diversity of political repression, Stanskikh presented two case studies: Navalny’s supporters and Jehovah’s Witnesses. The Russian authorities have demonstrated a consistent pattern of harsh reprisals against individuals associated with opposition figures and initiated a comprehensive crackdown on supporters of Navalny’s organizations, targeting every single supporter, including those who had previously made donations and those who attended his funeral.
Stanskikh showed why authoritarian regimes around the globe tend to disfavor Jehovah’s Witnesses, whose treatment serves as a litmus test for the rule of law and the democratic character of a regime. He traced the long arc of state hostility, recalling Stalin’s 1951 “Operation North,” which deported nearly 10,000 Witnesses and family members to Siberia, and showing how the Putin‑era ban has revived persecution. Since the 2017 designation of JWs as “extremist,” authorities have conducted approximately 2,000 home searches and opened around 800 criminal cases – evidence that a peaceful religious minority is once again treated as a security threat.
Comparing eras, Stanskikh argued that while Stalin’s terror relied on mass purges and collective punishment, Putin’s repression has been selective and personalized in the digital age so far. Yet the results in court can be even more lopsided today: according to data he cited, modern Russian courts acquit defendants 20-30 times less often than Soviet courts did at the height of the purges – about 0.2-0.3% acquitted in recent years, compared with 7% in 1937 and 10-12% in World War II-era military tribunals.
The speaker described a society in which independent media have been shut down, opposition leaders are assassinated, jailed or forced into exile, and the state’s systemic use of violence and torture, including to extract confessions, coexists with arbitrary arrests, large-scale surveillance and “snitching” culture. Authorities have built databases of Russians who fled the country during the mobilization, as well as Russians with anti-war views.
Beyond criminal prosecution, authorities deploy a wide toolkit to suppress dissent, including forced draft, punitive psychiatric confinement, punishment of family members, deprivation of parental rights and citizenship revocation.
Repression travels across borders as well. Stanskikh detailed how agencies use photo and video fixation at protests abroad, infiltrate diaspora groups, monitor social media, abuse INTERPOL mechanisms, and engage in other forms of transnational repression. He recalled President Putin’s 2022 remark about society “spitting out” traitors – a chilling signal that dissenters, at home or abroad, are fair game. The new trend shows growing numbers of arrests and convictions in absentia, as well as FSB “filtration” procedures and persecution of Russians deported from the U.S.
Looking ahead, Stanskikh foresees a further tightening of legislation and its implementation under the pretext of protecting “national security” and “traditional values.” He expects increased targeting of children and families, expansion of mass surveillance (including predictive tools), stricter monitoring of social media, more usage of repressive psychiatry, deeper institutionalization of informant culture, expanded academic restrictions and a rising wave of persecution against deportees and returnees from Western countries, especially the U.S.
Summarizing the Kremlin’s strategy, he described a system designed to “make protest impossible, exile irrelevant, and resistance invisible,” echoing OVD-Info’s prediction that Russia is moving toward greater harshness, cruelty, and mass repression.
Across the talk, the through‑line was clear: war and repression are mutually reinforcing. Stanskikh’s analysis captured a society in which laws and institutions have been repurposed to enforce political loyalty and ideological conformity, with ripple effects reaching civil society, the media, religious and sexual minorities, political activists and ordinary citizens alike.Addressing questions from the audience, Stanskikh discussed, among other things, the challenges facing the Russian democratic forces and the institutional efforts to ensure their political representation on the international stage, including within the emerging PACE platform.