Countervoices

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Introduction

Elsewhere on these pages, you will find a wealth of information about the best-known opponents of Vladimir Putin's regime. It's no coincidence that this is on the pages The Show Trials Under Putin and Murders in the Putin Era, which you can find clicking the link Back to Putinism in the adjacent column. People like Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Vladimir Kara-Murza can still recount their experiences with Putin's repressive apparatus. Others like Alexei Navalny, Boris Nemtsov, Anna Politkovskaya, and many more can no longer do so. They were poisoned with novichok or radioactive material, fell from windows, starved to death in squalid cells, or simply shot in cold blood in the street, just as in the time of Iosif Stalin.

Yet, the future looked much brighter when the idea of ​​glasnost was introduced in 1986 in what was then the Soviet Union.


First came glasnost...

The term Гласность [glasnost] or openness, was, along with перестройка [perestroika] or reform, one of the key words launched by General Secretary Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachov (1931-2022) on February 25, 1986, at the 27th Congress of the Communist Party to initiate a shift in Soviet policy. It aimed to increase transparency and openness in government and society. The policy would encourage open discussion of political and social issues and give citizens greater freedom of expression: «The demand for the extension of glasnost is fundamental for us. This is a political question. Without glasnost, there is no democracy, no mass political creativity, and no participation in government. Yet, they are, if you wish to call it tha way, the guarantee of a state-oriented and responsible attitude toward tens of millions of workers, collective farmers, and intellectuals, and the starting point for the psychological restructuring of our management positions». In the official political report of this congress, this sentence is followed in brackets by the text Продолжительные аплодисменты [Prodolzjhitelnye aplodismenty] or Prolonged applause.

This openness allowed abuses in the country to be exposed and created the possibility of openness and transparency in government activities and the freedom to disseminate information. But glasnost also served as a catalyst for ethnic groups and peoples to make their voices heard and demand independence, and it certainly contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union.


...but then came Putin

This last observation, among others, makes it unsurprising that glasnost would not last much longer once Vladimir Putin came to power. Putin, after all, repeatedly declared that the collapse of the Soviet empire was «the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century». From the moment he took office, he began curtailing freedom of speech. Censorship was reinstated, dissenters were persecuted or even murdered, and previously independent mass media were nationalized or banned. All of this, just as under Stalin, was framed within a massive stream of propaganda, no longer supported by posters, but by television and every possible modern technological means.

Given his drive to re-establish a pan-Russian empire, it should come as no surprise that Ukraine soon came into his sights, and that anyone who opposed it would face difficulties. And indeed, after the first incursion of Russian soldiers in uniforms without insignia into the Donbas and the annexation of Crimea in 2014, and even more so after the full-scale war against Ukraine that began on February 24, 2022, Russia, at the initiative of Vladimir Putin, passed increasingly strict laws aimed at silencing - or sometimes even killing - any dissenting voices against the regime.

These stricter laws have all but silenced open resistance. Those who disagree with the regime's direction no longer dare to express it and therefore remain silent. They do so not only out of fear of government apparatuses like the police or the FSB, but also because of another venom that was rampant during Stalin's time: their fellow citizens who do idolise Putin - or who, also out of fear of the regime, anxiously keep their opinions to themselves, or pretend to agree with the course of events.

Indeed, the supporters of the lines set by the Kremlin do not hesitate to intimidate opponents of the regime, to exclude them, to disregard them in job applications, to hinder them in the exercise of their duties, and so on.


The brave ones

And yet, there are still people who feel responsible for making their voices heard, and young people, in particular, seem to experience less fear of repression. For example, the song Swan Lake Cooperative by rapper Noize MC is increasingly appearing as a rallying cry reminiscent of the legendary Bella Ciao, which was popular in Italy during World War II among partisans who resisted fascism. Noize MC's song contains satirical references to Putin's entourage and his spokesperson, Vladimir Rudolfovich Solovyov, the host of the television program An Evening with Vladimir Solovyov on Russia 1.

But it's not only young people who are making their voices heard. Even older people, such as Lyudmila Nikolaevna Vasilyeva (°1941) and Yelena Andreevna Osipova (°1945), both from St. Petersburg, have been arrested several times for protesting, which they sometimes do alone.

In this section of the website, we introduce you to some of these brave individuals.