Dissent, its Persecutors, and the New Russia

Abstract

The post-Soviet decades have brought about significant changes of the Russian social landscape. A countless number of civic initiatives engaged in charitable operation, legal assistance, education, environment, arts and culture, etc. have emerged across Russia. Self-help communities and effective crowd-funding for all kinds of purposes are evidence of public solidarity inconceivable in the Soviet state. The second half of the 2010s were marked by a rise in investigative reporting based on state-of-the-art data journalism and the rapid progress in social media. Apparently, the impressive rise in civil society has become a matter of growing concern for the Russian government, and in the past year, the Kremlin has stepped up persecutions of political activists and investigative media. This repressive surge is reminiscent of the events some four decades ago when the Soviet government undertook to radically eliminate the dissident movement. The activists of today may be different from the Soviet dissidents, but for now, they are just as defenseless vis-à-vis the state as the dissidents were.