Putin kicked off the decade by changing the Russian constitution to allow him to continue holding the presidency until 2036, which would make him the longest Russian ruler since Stalin. By shuttering Memorial he is seeking to remove any contradictions to the heroic version of history he prefers Russians to have - regardless of whether that version of history is real or imagined. Putin saw an organization dedicated to refusing to forget injustice in the past as a threat to injustice in the present. Condemnation of this was swift, but ineffective. The latest blow has been to a longstanding pillar of Russian civil society: Memorial, an NGO founded to preserve historical memory of atrocities committed under the Soviet Union, is under intense new pressure as authorities work to shut it down.
An unrelenting state media steps in to fill the void, and the result is an increasingly bare information ecosystem that Russians live in, with far less access to reliable independent information. At the same time, independent news organizations across the country are being designated “foreign agents” for their reporting, many being forced to shut down. It has experimented with throttling social media sites like Twitter and talked about outright banning YouTube. While not going so far as the Chinese Communist Party, which has created a virtually separate internet, the Russian government has started flexing its muscles to block Russians from seeing what it deems undesirable. Facing threats to arrest local employees, the companies relented. When the remnants of Navalny’s network tried to make recommendations for who Russians should vote for in this year’s parliamentary elections, the Russian government exerted massive pressure on Apple and Google to censor the content. The Kremlin even enlisted American tech giants in its repression. While Navalny has been serving out his sentence in a penal colony, the Kremlin has declared his network an “extremist organization” on par with ISIS and worked to dismantle it.
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The world was outraged when it saw Putin’s domestic repression on full display in the treatment of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who was first poisoned by the security services, then arrested on spurious charges when he returned home to Russia from recovering abroad. Putin has used the power of the Kremlin to shore up his rule, often by making Russian politics more predictable, while sowing chaos abroad to prevent a unified international community from standing together against his abuses. Experts and decision makers need to be clear-eyed about Putin’s Russia as it is - not as they want it to be - especially as those same authoritarian tools work their way outside of Russia and into the West by way of illicit money and the corruption of credible leaders as well as information warfare that fuels our own political turmoil. The most important political development in Russia over the last two decades is Putin’s effort to take Russia backwards while experimenting with new ways to exert authoritarian control over a society. Today, we see each of these issues escalating and showing exactly what a more fully formed revisionist power looks like on the world stage.
Individual flashpoints over the last decade pointed to this, including the invasion of Ukraine, hybrid warfare against the West, and political repression at home that increasingly suffocates Russian civil society. For years, experts have warned that Russian President Vladimir Putin Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin Overnight Defense & National Security - Biden mobilizes military help amid virus surge Putin blames West for increasing tensions in Europe US says bilateral engagement with Russia likely to start in January MORE has taken his country from the nascent democracy that emerged in 1991 at the end of the Soviet Union to a revanchist, revisionist power seeking to aggressively reassert the Kremlin’s primacy - both in the world and at home in Russia.
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