Putin’s Unchallenged Control of Russia and Her People - Till Now.

Russia is a country that has never been afraid of making headlines. From internal revolutions to being directly and indirectly involved in wars abroad, the country has never shied away from openly committing crimes and directly taking on entire countries, and that trend has not changed. For instance, the assassination of former KGB and FSB (Federal Security Service) officer Alexander Litvinenko on UK soil by poisoning him with Polonium (a radioactive element), was an act carried out by two FSB officers (Andrey Lugovoi and Dmitry Kovtun) in 2006 solely because of Litvinenko’s involvement in publicizing his research on the atrocities committed by Russian corporations and state officials and tarnishing Vladimir Putin’s reputation. This wasn’t the only instance that Russia has attempted to have people killed to protect its ‘sovereignty’ either; Sergei Skripal (former Russian double-agent) and his daughter Yulia in 2018, the recent suspected assassination of the leader of the Wagner group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, and most notably, Alexei Navalny, a Russian opposition leader, anti-corruption activist and lawyer.

Russia legally claims to be a free democratic country. However, the reality could not be further from it. On December 31st, 1999, Vladimir Putin was declared Russian president. Coming from a history of being a KGB agent and being the head of the FSB, he had developed specific ideas on how he wanted to govern the country. According to author and journalist Masha Gessen, he believed he had had a government as ‘centralized, insular, and secretive as the KGB’. This led to Putin’s acquisition of what he believed were the 4 most powerful elements of his country; the media, the elections, the oligarchy, and the law, all acquired via corruption. Having the law on his side, the media was threatened and barred from displaying any news that would taint his image in the minds of the Russian citizens. Subsequently, elections that were meant to be democratic were rigged by having fake parties run against Putin, essentially meaning he had no competition, and by rigging vote counts. He promised protection to all the oligarchs in the country in exchange for their power, and the few that didn’t comply either died under suspicious circumstances or were arrested on trumped-up charges of embezzlement. Law itself was controlled by him and his government, and just like that, all concept of democracy and freedom in the country was wiped out entirely. His control of the media kept the citizens of Russia oblivious to the estimated US$427 billion lost to corruption in 2008, while his control of the law let him have the people who tried tarnishing his reputation all killed and jailed, thus giving rise to cases like Litvinenko’s, Skripal’s and most recently, Navalny’s.

Alexei Navalny was a young lawyer who started off as an anti-corruption activist, writing blogs exposing how large corporations, oil schemes, land deals, and banks were involved in the storage of billions of dollars of government money in offshore accounts, exposing internal documents and showing the public every minute detail needed. His blogs circumvented state media and exposed the truths of the horrors that the Russian citizens lived in daily but were oblivious to, sparking mass protests against voter fraud and corruption. Navalny was then, however, arrested on trumped-up charges of embezzlement in an attempt to put an end to the nationwide protests Putin faced. However, this had the opposite effect as protesters took to the streets again, highlighting Navalny’s power in the country.

In November 2020, Navalny put out a YouTube video on his channel where he regularly uploaded videos exposing Putin and his corruption. This video was unlike the rest; in August of the same year, Navalny was suspected of having been poisoned with Novichok, a KGB-era poison frequently used at the time, and in his video, he personally tricked the agent responsible for having poisoned him into giving him every detail on how it was done, all while posing as an FSB senior. This video, too, racked up millions of views, as it became increasingly evident how autocratic and dictator-like Russia’s government was. Shortly after, Navalny returned to Russia knowing full well that he’d be imprisoned, and to date, he remains in prison and was recently sentenced to 19 years more in jail.

While Navalny is currently unable to shake the Putin presidency as violently as he once did, the damage he did was unlike any other and it exposed a lot of truths to the Russian public.

Alexei Navalny made Putin’s tyranny clearer than ever, exposing how free speech was nothing but a dream to the people of the country and true democracy was an unattainable elysium in the face of a dystopian reality; one where the people are muted, blinded, and deafened, where they are nothing but puppets for one man to control, where power and reputation takes precedence over human lives and human rights.

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By Rian Devaiah