Resisting Russia’s grip can be dangerous to your health

From The Washington Post:

What is a good, reliable test of an open society? Can a citizen post something online calling the president a crook or a fool? Not in Russia, where speech is not free and the Kremlin’s whims rule.

Consider the online protest of Alexei Navalny, a Russian anti-corruption campaigner and leading voice of opposition to President Vladimir Putin. Navalny’s latest YouTube video is a 25-minute portrayal of a potentially corrupt association between one of Putin’s top aides and one of Russia’s richest oligarchs, featuring a secret rendezvous on a luxury yacht with a call girl. The title of the piece is “Yachts, oligarchs, girls: the huntress for men exposes the bribe taker.” Navalny suggests strongly that Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska was currying favour from a Kremlin official, Sergei Prikhodko, aboard his yacht and also floats some speculative theories about Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. election.

Navalny’s video went viral within days. But Putin’s power structure took offence. Deripaska went to court and won an order to take down some of the videos, claiming they violated his privacy. The Russian media oversight agency, Roskomnadzor, demanded YouTube and Instagram take down the offending material or else it would be blocked in Russia and also warned Russian media to remove it. The Russian outlets complied. So did Instagram, where some of the material had been posted. YouTube, owned by Google, passed a warning on to Navalny’s staff members that if they don’t remove the content, Google might be forced to do it, but Navalny’s people were unbowed. So far, YouTube has not removed the video.

It underscores the degree to which Russia has become a closed society under Putin. The 1993 Russian Constitution guarantees freedom of expression and assembly. Nowadays these words exist only on paper.