Law, Power, and Justice

Today, the status of Russian civil society has never looked more precarious. Since the war in Ukraine began in February 2022, the state has relentlessly increased the number of laws criminalizing various forms of public expression—and with them, the number of prosecutions for antiwar activities. Anyone showing critical or nonconforming views might also face unofficial pressure and threats from the workplace or in public. Moreover, Putin is not content simply to revert to Soviet tactics to silence the public: he seeks to outdo them.

some might be tempted to argue that such forms of solidarity are senseless. But as the Soviet era shows, this misunderstands the intent. Acts of resistance, even if they have no practical result, show society that there are people who openly oppose state violence and injustice

They have in droves signed their names in support of Boris Nadezhdin, the opposition candidate who tried to run for president this year on an antiwar platform but was disqualified a month before the election. And they are honoring Navalny at sites associated with other victims of state repression: the Solovetsky Stone on Lubyanka Square in Moscow; the Wall of Grief on Academician Sakharov Avenue; and the Bolshoi Moskvoretsky Bridge, colloquially known as Nemtsov Bridge, where another man who might have become president, the liberal politician and Putin critic Boris Nemtsov, was killed nine years ago.

Larisa Bogoraz, one of the seven dissidents of the 1968 Red Square protest, said in her final statement in court, “I faced a choice: to protest or to stay silent.” She elaborated on her decision: “To stay silent for me meant to lie.”

CONSTITUTIONAL PATRIOTS

In the Soviet Union, the rise of dissident culture was initially driven by the insight that the authorities were failing to respect the Soviet constitution and the basic rights enshrined in it. The demand that officials rectify their ways, first formulated in 1965 by the political activist Alexander Esenin-Volpin in response to the arrests of Sinyavsky and Daniel, marked the beginning of the movement.

In December of that year, Esenin-Volpin organized a meeting in Red Square calling for a “fair and open trial” of the two writers. More actions followed. The next year, dissidents staged a protest calling for adherence to the constitution, again in Pushkin Square. Then, in January 1967, after Soviet authorities arrested the poet Yuri Galanskov and his friends for publishing and distributing a samizdat journal, several more dissidents set up at the square. A year after that, the so-called Trial of the Four—the case against Galanskov and three other dissidents, Alexander Ginzburg, Alexey Dobrovolsky, and Vera Lashkova—sparked a further wave of petitions and protests. By calling on the regime to follow the letter of the Soviet constitution, these people laid the foundation for human rights activists in Russia today. Indeed, the appeal to adhere to the law can be made even more strongly now, since every day the state is trampling the rights and freedoms of the people that are guaranteed in the Russian constitution.

The Soviet state’s immediate response to the protests of the late 1960s, however, was to pass new laws making it easier to crack down on dissent. Although the Soviet Penal Code already included a famous provision against “anti-Soviet” activity, it did not have provisions that specifically applied to some dissident actions, so in 1966, two more articles were concocted: Article 190-1, prohibiting the spread of knowingly false statements that defame the Soviet state and social system, and Article 190-3, banning group actions that violate public order. In the early 1970s, prosecutors made particularly wide use of Article 190 to charge dissidents, and the quality of the judicial process gradually deteriorated. Whenever dissidents were being tried, otherwise competent judges disregarded arguments, laws, and even common sense.

Relearning a Soviet-era art amid repression and war.
— Read on www.foreignaffairs.com/russia/new-moral-resistance-putin