How the Russian government silences wartime dissent
An anti-war scribble on a bathroom wall. A request to a DJ for a Ukrainian song. A photo with a blue-and-yellow scarf. Or a recorded conversation at school.
In Russia, those have all been grounds for prosecution. Thousands of court documents tell the story of Russia’s totalitarian crackdown on anti-war speech.
Just days after invading Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin of Russia signed a censorship law that made it illegal to “discredit” the army. The legislation was so sweeping that even his spokesperson acknowledged that it was easy to cross the line into prohibited speech. In the first 18 months of the war, the law scooped up a vast array of ordinary Russians – schoolteachers, pensioners, groundskeepers, a car wash owner – for punishment.
The law has led to more than 6,500 cases of people being arrested or fined, more than 350 a month on average, according to a New York Times analysis of Russian court records through August. That’s a small percentage of Russia’s population of 146 million, but the New York Times analyzed the details of every case, revealing the extraordinary reach and invasiveness of the Kremlin’s crackdown; anyone questioning the war or revealing sympathy with Ukraine – even in a private conversation – is now liable to prosecution in Russia.
No gesture, apparently, is too small. Judges have ruled that simply wearing blue-and-yellow clothing – the colors of the Ukrainian flag – or painting one’s fingernails blue and yellow can be punished. And there are few safe havens, as people increasingly inform on their fellow citizens. In dozens of cases, people were prosecuted after someone reported them for comments they made on the train, in a cafe or in a liquor store.
“A large number of totally unknown, nameless, nonpublic people, who simply wrote something or said something somewhere, are getting hit,” said Andrei Kolesnikov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center.
To better understand the extent of this censorship, the New York Times spent months analyzing a database of every available public record of prosecutions under the new law provided by OVD-Info, a Russian human rights and legal aid group.
First-time offenders are typically handed a fine of 30,000 rubles – around $300 at the current exchange rate, about half the average monthly salary in Russia – while repeat offenders can receive prison time. Known as article 20.3.3, the law has become the most widely used tool in Russia’s wartime crackdown, and it is the focus of the New York Times’ analysis; another law punishes spreading “false information” about the Russian army with up to 15 years in prison.
Experts say the wartime censorship is transforming Russian society and setting the stage for even more widespread repression in the future, as authorities automate their monitoring of the internet and encourage people to denounce one another online. Putin set the tone last year when he referred to opponents of the war as “scum and traitors” to be cleansed from society.
In response to the crackdown, many Russians have begun to self-censor. Demyan Bespokoyev, a private school tutor who was prosecuted for writing an anti-war message on his coat, described the process this way: “The prison forms inside your head.”
Silencing protest
Hundreds of Russians were prosecuted for “discrediting” the army with homemade signs or graffiti, even for spray-painting anti-war messages on the snow.
As the atrocities by Russian soldiers in Bucha, Ukraine, came to light in spring 2022, the Kremlin’s denials of those brutal acts enraged some in Russia. More than 70 people were prosecuted for some form of protest involving Bucha.
Some people were targeted without even mentioning the war. They were prosecuted for wearing Ukrainian colors – or just a green ribbon, which activists display as a symbol of peace. Others got in trouble for explicitly stating their support for Ukraine.
At the same time, the government also started cracking down on protests online – including people’s “likes” on anti-war posts.
In the small town of Iglino in western Russia, a retired train driver named Zaynulla Gadzhiyev, now 76, predicted on his social media page: “Nothing will save Russia now from collapse.”
Bespokoyev, 22, the private school tutor, walked through a St. Petersburg subway station wearing the overcoat his grandfather wore in World War II, on which Bespokoyev had written: “I’m hurting and afraid. I don’t want war.”
In Novosibirsk in Siberia, Marina Tsurmast, a local journalist, scrawled “Bucha” in red on a piece of paper and pasted it over an exhibition stand celebrating the anniversary of Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Police officers detained her on the spot.
In dry legalese, the court documents recount the Russian state’s case against them.
The judge in the case of Tsurmast ruled that she had “distorted the true goals” of Putin’s war. A St. Petersburg judge ruled that Bespokoyev had undermined “the authority, image and trust in the use of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation.” And Gadzhiyev was cited for “undermining trust in the decisions of the state authorities of the Russian Federation on the conduct of the special military operation.”
All three were fined 30,000 rubles, about $500 at the time. In those first three months of the war, the data shows that at least 1,662 other Russians faced prosecution for anti-war speech.
Other critics, some of them prominent opposition figures, have received much harsher sentences under other more punitive laws, such as politician Vladimir Kara-Murza, who received a 25-year term on treason charges after criticizing the war. A pacifist artist, Sasha Skochilenko, 33, was sentenced in November to seven years in a penal colony for placing price tags with small anti-war messages in a supermarket.
But for the thousands convicted of discrediting the army, the fines are a small part of the trouble they face. Interviews with 10 of them show that convictions bring social opprobrium and complications in finding work, spurring some people to leave Russia altogether.
Reaching into private life
The number of cases grew amid the outcry over Putin’s draft in September 2022. The crackdown reached increasingly into people’s personal lives. The crackdown reached into people’s workplaces, their churches, their cars and, in at least 86 cases, their homes. Authorities also targeted people when they had their guard down: At least 144 cases involved defendants alleged to have been under the influence of alcohol.
The law allowed people to settle scores or inform on their fellow citizens. The New York Times found more than 100 cases where someone reported to authorities the comments or behavior of someone else – something overheard on a train or mentioned in a workplace chat group.
On the morning of Sept. 25, 2022, police officers burst into the Moscow apartment of Daria Ivanova, 29, and, she said, carried her out by her arms and legs before she had time to put on her shoes, she said. Surveillance cameras had identified her and a friend, police told her, as being the ones who put up prank posters to protest Putin’s mobilization: “To order a coffin, go to the nearest draft office.”
Ivanova said she was beaten while in custody for 11 hours. Still in Moscow, she now takes a dim view of her job prospects. A friend told her that, given her conviction, “you’ll never be approved by the security service” at the state company where the friend worked.
Policing the internet
By last year, with public protest all but gone because of the crackdown, the internet was left as the main vehicle for dissent.
The total number of prosecutions declined in 2023, which experts see as evidence of the Kremlin’s success in stifling anti-war speech. Of the cases that were brought, most involved online actions.
Authorities targeted speech on a wide range of platforms – from YouTube and Instagram to Chatroulette, a website for video chats with random strangers. Communications that people expected to be private ended up serving as evidence against them; many were prosecuted for exchanges in closed chat groups. But most of all, authorities cracked down on posts on Russia’s most popular social network, VK, a Russian-owned website that is known to cooperate with law enforcement. The New York Times found more than 1,000 related cases.
Prosecutions declined last year in large part because Russians have become much more careful about speaking out, experts say. In the event of new disruptions like another draft, they predict, prosecutions will rise again.
In June, Russia’s Constitutional Court upheld the censorship law in the face of a challenge from OVD-Info, the legal aid group. People’s “negative assessment” of the Russian military could adversely affect its performance, the court said, presenting a national security risk. But the court left it up to individual judges to decide what exactly qualified as illegal speech – a remarkable acknowledgment of the law’s arbitrariness that the Kremlin has embraced.
Asked in a November interview to explain the difference between justified criticism of the war and “discreditation,” Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesperson, said it was hard to determine. “Where’s the line? I can’t tell you,” he said. “It’s very thin.”
For the moment, lawyers say, the volume of prosecutions is held in check by the large amount of paperwork that every case requires; as a result, many instances of anti-war speech still go unpunished. But experts fear that as prosecutions become ever more routine and as authorities focus on policing online speech, they could develop automated ways to launch investigations and to file cases.
“There certainly is that fear, given the reports that instruments for automatization are being developed,” said Polina Kurakina, an OVD-Info lawyer.
Russia’s Pacific coast region of Primorye, for example, launched an anonymous Telegram service last month allowing people to inform on anyone who, among other things, “promotes evil.” And a leak last year from Russia’s internet regulator showed it was developing automated systems to scan social media and news websites for politically sensitive content.
In many ways, though, the Kremlin’s campaign of repression has already achieved the desired result. Some of those prosecuted have fled the country, while others have squelched any impulse to protest the war.
Kolesnikov, the political scholar, who is based in Moscow, sees the law as an indicator of Russia’s descent into an even more controlling, totalitarian system, with anyone anywhere speaking against the Kremlin becoming vulnerable to prosecution.
And yet, some people still protest. In October, a judge ordered Anna Sliva, 18, to pay a 50,000-ruble fine – about $500 at the exchange rate then – for holding up a sign at a Moscow memorial to the Soviet gulag labor camps: “Stop killing and imprisoning civilians.” In an interview, Sliva said that her action would give her an answer if she were to have children who asked her: “Mom, what did you do when the war came?”
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The New York Times analyzed 6,771 cases tried under Putin’s new censorship law, article 20.3.3 of the administrative offenses code. The cases range from when Putin signed the law on March 4, 2022, to the end of August 2023. They are a subset of a larger data set of more than 9,000 cases provided by OVD-Info, a Russian human rights and legal aid group. Cases without detailed accounts of what happened were excluded from the analysis, as were cases we identified as appeals. A small number of cases may have appeared more than once in the database because multiple records were created for them in the court system, oftentimes to correct an error in the previous record.
To tally the cases in categories of cases – such as the number of defendants alleged to have been under the influence of alcohol – the Times searched the database for cases with related keywords and manually checked the results. The numbers of cases tallied in each category may be an undercount.
An unsupervised machine learning algorithm classified whether each incident happened online, based on patterns of language in court documents. A representative subset of these results was then manually checked to confirm the approximate number of online and offline cases.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.