Ivan: Then I’m going to have to arrest you
about the civilian casualties of the war. Social media platforms were commandeered, with official hashtags hijacked on Instagram and fake Tinder profiles created with accounts of war crimes.
An inventive means of quiet protest involved mass pigeon feeding, which attracted curious passers-by. When asked what they were doing, the pigeon feeders would use the encounter to explain what was happening in Ukraine.
According to Almut Rochowanski, a writer on civil rights, far from being cowed or passive, the Russian opposition’s ‘nationwide mobilisation and co-ordination effort is one of the most comprehensive, competent, courageous and resilient anywhere’.
But they are up against a repressive state. The newspaper Novaya Gazeta’s founder Dmitry Muratov had received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021. In February 2022, his paper ran the headline, ‘Russia is bombing Ukraine’. Six weeks later, he was attacked and doused in red paint by assailants subsequently identified as members of the security forces.
The state censor Roskomnadzor acted to restrict access to alternative sources. Nearly 7,000 websites were blocked in the first six months of the war, including all independent media and human rights groups.
Russians searching Yandex, the Russian version of Google, for information on what had happened in the Ukrainian town of Bucha (where hundreds of civilians were massacred by the invading Russian army) would be left with the impression that no one had been killed there at all during the whole of the occupation.
False claims were made that victims of bombings, such as the women in the Kremenchuk maternity hospital, struck by Russian missiles, were hired actors, or that Ukraine had staged photographs of massacres (including Bucha), and that corpses seen lying on the ground were later spotted standing up.
Russians who dared to tell the truth were punished to the full extent of laws hastily passed to curtail freedom of speech. Ilya Yashin, a Moscow city councillor, was prosecuted for spreading ‘disinformation’ by speaking about Russian soldiers killing civilians.
He used his final speech in court to address Putin. ‘You are at war not only with the Ukrainians but also with your own people. You send hundreds of thousands of Russians into a combat inferno and many will never come home. To you, this is just statistics, but for countless families it means the unbearable pain of losing husbands, fathers and sons.
‘Hundreds of thousands of Russians are leaving their home country because they don’t want to kill or be killed. Those people are running from you, Mr President. I urge you to stop this madness.’
To those Russians who oppose the war, he said: ‘It is better to spend 10 years behind bars as an honest man than to burn silently in shame for the blood being shed by your government.
‘Don’t give in to despair. This is our country. It is worth fighting for. Be courageous, don’t give in to this evil, and resist. Defend your neighbourhood. Defend your city. And above all, defend one another! There are many more of us than it seems, and together we are a great force. Believe me: Russia will be happy and free.’
He was sentenced to eight-and-ahalf years in a penal colony.
Despite Yashin’s plea, the vast majority of Russians have not ‘resisted’, turning a blind eye as they try to hang on to a sense of normality.
Denial and avoidance are their mechanisms for coping with the fact that their country is responsible for mass death and destruction, war crimes and worse.
When asked by a journalist whether or not Russia had attacked Ukraine, a man on the streets of Moscow replied: ‘No. I mean yes’, before resorting to a desperate, ‘but we didn’t do it first’.
A history teacher packing his car to flee to Armenia pinpointed the dilemma. ‘A lot of people realise there’s something wrong with what’s going on.
‘They try to find some justification, so they repeat what they’ve heard on TV about the supposed threat from Nato. But you can tell that on an emotional level they’re all having a really hard time. They won’t look you in the eye.’
Andrei Goryanov, a commentator with the BBC’s Russian Service, wrote of the moral compromise that inaction implies.
‘To keep the war from their door, Russians have to pretend this isn’t an expansionist invasion, and must close their eyes to the Ukrainians who are killed in their thousands and driven from their homes in their millions.
‘Russians must accept that it
Russians who dared to tell the truth were punished to the full extent
To keep the war from their door, people must close their eyes
doesn’t matter that they can no longer travel or be part of a broader world.
‘That it’s normal for soldiers to go into schools and tell their children war is a good thing. That a sledgehammer is now a positive symbol of Russian power in executions captured on camera. And that it’s normal to go to jail for years for saying what you think about the war.’
According to Kirill Martynov, the editor of the renamed Novaya Gazeta Europe, ‘people seem to think that at some point Putin probably will win or the war will somehow be ended, and that, like a miracle, people will find themselves back in the Russia of before February 24. That is the most dangerous illusion.’
Before he went to war, Putin had been losing popularity.
The suffering during the Covid-19 pandemic, which revealed the crumbling state of the health system and the glaring shortcomings of his administration, turned many against him.
His absence from public view, spending much of the lockdown at his Valdai residence, seeing visitors only after they had undergone periods of quarantine, punctuated by bizarre appearances at long tables to keep his distance from everyone else, was widely mocked and his image as a man of the people undermined.
This left the nation torn between
disenchantment with its leadership and unwillingness to be unpatriotic at a time of war. The discontent, though, is growing as his war in Ukraine increasingly has an economic and social impact at home. Conscription to the military has disproportionately targeted deprived regions, fuelling instances of resistance. In Siberia, recruitment centres were shot at or set on fire.
In Dagestan, which contributed the highest number of troops per capita of population, tensions flared into violence.
A demonstration against the Kremlin’s expansion of military conscription in September 2022 resulted in angry scenes and more than 100 arrests.
An official at a local recruitment office was secretly filmed berating reluctant combatants, ‘You have to fight. For your fatherland. For the future!’ to which one man is heard to reply, ‘We don’t even have a present, let alone a future. My grandfather fought for his country [in the Second World War]. That was a real war. This one is just politics.’
Moscow refuses to provide casualty figures, but estimates for Russian fatalities in the first year of the war range as high as 70,000. Reports from the front of appalling conditions, shortages of equipment and disregard for the wellbeing of rank and file troops added to the sense of alarm.
The spectre of more young Russians being sent to the ‘meatgrinder’ of front-line combat has brought home the reality of a war that had previously seemed distant, triggered a shift in attitudes and made the mothers of those mobilised a powerful voice for protest.
The Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers of Russia – formed in 1989 to lobby for soldiers’ rights after the disastrous Soviet war in Afghanistan – said the army’s treatment of its troops in Ukraine was worse than anything in the past. Never before had the military situation developed so quickly, so brutally and on such a large scale.
The moral authority of mothers standing up for their children made their criticism hard to dismiss. Much of it was aimed personally at Putin. One group addressed an open letter to him, accusing mobilisation committees of issuing illegal military summonses and sending untrained youngsters to the front. When they complained to the local authorities, the mothers said they were met with threats and abuse.
Putin’s response was clever. He invited 17 of them to the presidential residence on Mother’s Day to be comforted personally by the commander in chief.
‘I and the entire leadership of the country share your pain,’ he told a bereaved mother. ‘We understand that nothing can replace the loss of a son but we all die and the real test is how we lived. His life was significant – it had a purpose.’
The reaction to his platitudes was remarkably positive. The women nodded in agreement; no one expressed unhappiness or anger about the war. The independent news organisation, Meduza, established the reason. Those attending had been vetted in advance for their loyalty to the Kremlin. Fourteen of the 17 were mothers of career soldiers who had signed up to fight. Only three were the mothers of conscripts.
Tellingly, no representatives of critical NGOs were present. Olga Tsukanova, the founder of the Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers, commented scathingly: ‘Vladimir Vladimirovich [Putin], are you a man or what? Do you have enough courage to look into our eyes – openly, in a meeting with women who weren’t hand-picked for you? Women who aren’t in your pocket? Are you going to keep hiding from us?’
She was subsequently detained on her way to deliver hundreds of complaints from mothers of serving soldiers and was later fined for ‘abuse of the freedom of the media’. The Council of Mothers and Wives had its social media pages blocked.
But Tsukanova was not deterred. ‘Putin is afraid of women,’ she said. ‘The women’s movement is the strongest driving force in Russia, because when a mother fights for her son, it’s very, very hard to stop her.’
Can the mothers of Russia be the ones to turn the tide? Only time will tell.
When a mother fights for her son, it’s very, very hard to stop her
Adapted from Putin And The Return Of History by Martin Sixsmith (Bloomsbury, €29).