June 17, 2026
By K.M. Seethi
On the morning of 16 June 2025, Robert Kuzovkov — known to the world by his artistic name Semyon Skrepetsky — was shot dead near his home in Biała Podlaska, eastern Poland, close to the Belarusian border. The 44-year-old satirist had spent years producing caustic caricatures of Vladimir Putin, Ramzan Kadyrov, and the machinery of Russian nationalism. Days before his murder, he had stood outside the Russian embassy in Berlin holding placards comparing Putin to Stalin. Two Belarusian nationals were detained for questioning. Polish investigators opened a politically motivated murder inquiry. No formal charges had been announced at the time of writing.
The killing of Kuzovkov comes in a line of cases that have grown steadily across two decades. Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned with polonium in London in 2006. Anna Politkovskaya was shot in Moscow the same year. Boris Nemtsov was killed within sight of the Kremlin in 2015. Sergei Skripal survived a Novichok attack in Britain in 2018. Alexei Navalny — poisoned in 2020, imprisoned upon his return to Russia, and dead in a penal colony in February 2024 — became the most prominent symbol of what happens to those who make themselves ungovernable. Vladimir Kara-Murza, himself poisoned twice before his eventual imprisonment, is currently serving twenty-five years. Boris Kagarlitsky, a Marxist sociologist who condemned the invasion of Ukraine, was sentenced to five years in a penal colony in 2024. Alexander Skobov, a Soviet-era dissident who was already persecuted under the USSR, received sixteen years from a military court in St. Petersburg in March 2025, partly for anti-war statements — his case haunted by the historical detail that a young KGB officer named Vladimir Putin reportedly encountered him during an earlier investigation in Leningrad. These are glaring instances about what Russia has become.
Dissent and Societal Character
Any serious assessment of a political system must begin with how it treats its citizens, sociopolitical forces and critics. The imprisonment of Kagarlitsky, the death of Navalny, the long sentence handed to Gorinov for holding up a blank placard, the targeted killings abroad etc are not mere instances requiring individual explanation. Over years, if not decades, criticism of the state has been reclassified, gradually but unmistakably, as a threat to state security.
Whether one agrees with these individuals or not, all of them have the basic right to express their views. We know Kagarlitsky is a Marxist, Kara-Murza is a liberal, Navalny’s politics combined anti-corruption populism with moments of nationalism, and Skrepetsky was a provocateur with a paintbrush. Their ideological diversity is precisely the point. What they shared was a refusal to accept the terms of public life as the Russian state defined them. And it is that refusal that made them ‘dangerous’ in the eyes of power.
Freedom House classified Russia as “Not Free” in its 2026 report, awarding it 12 out of 100 points — 4 for political rights, 8 for civil liberties. That score places Russia among the world’s most restrictive systems by the methodological standards applied to every country in the index. The report describes courts, law-enforcement agencies, and “foreign agent” and “extremism” designations as instruments routinely deployed to silence dissent. A society measured at 12 out of 100 is one in which the indicator of political health has broken.
Construction of an Authoritarian System
Russia’s present condition was built, carefully and incrementally, over a quarter century. When Putin came to power in 2000, the context mattered enormously. The 1990s had been catastrophic for millions of Russians – the collapse of state institutions, hyperinflation, the Chechen wars, the accumulation of national assets by a narrow oligarchic class, and the humiliation of a superpower reduced to economic dependency. Against that background, the early Putin years offered something that a substantial portion of the population genuinely valued – order, rising incomes, and the restoration of state coherence. The bargain was stability in exchange for political deference, and for a time it appeared to function.
Over time, however, stability became its own justification, and the conditions attached to it multiplied. Power concentrated in the presidency. The Federation Council, the Duma, and the judiciary became instruments of the executive rather than counterweights to it. Regional governors, once elected, were replaced by appointed loyalists. Television networks were brought under state control. Opposition parties were permitted to exist but deprived of the resources and legal protections necessary to compete meaningfully.
What scholars of comparative politics describe as “electoral authoritarianism” — a system in which democratic institutions formally exist but operate under conditions that prevent genuine competition — describes contemporary Russia with increasing precision. Elections are held, opposition candidates are disqualified or harassed, state media presents a single narrative and the result is determined before the count.
War, Nationalism, and the Expansion of Control
The invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 showed a qualitative turn. Wars have historically served as accelerants of executive power. The argument is simple: emergency requires unity, unity requires discipline, and discipline requires the suppression of dissent. What distinguished Russia’s case was the speed and comprehensiveness with which this logic was institutionalised.
Within weeks of the invasion, new legislation criminalised the publication of “false information” about the armed forces, carrying sentences of up to fifteen years. The word “war” became legally hazardous and journalists were instructed to use “special military operation.” The category of “foreign agent” — already applied to NGOs, journalists, and civil society organisations before 2022 — was expanded and weaponised more aggressively. Terrorism-related charges were applied to anti-war statements. Alexei Gorinov received seven years for holding up a blank sheet of paper during a Moscow city council meeting. Kagarlitsky received five years for a social media post. Skobov received sixteen years for statements he made publicly about a war he opposed.
The Jamestown Foundation has documented how this repression has moved into the digital sphere. Hundreds of thousands of websites blocked, global platforms restricted, VPN services criminalised, and penalties extended not only to creators of dissenting content but to its consumers. The logic is systemic: the goal is not merely to punish those who speak but to prevent the formation of the social networks and informational environments in which opposition could organise.
Alongside legal repression, a coherent nationalist ideology hardened. Official discourse became centred on civilisational confrontation with the West, the defence of “traditional values,” the moral authority of Orthodox Christianity, and a historical memory constructed around the Great Patriotic War. Nationalism ceased to be merely a sentiment and became a political architecture — a source of legitimacy that simultaneously justified the concentration of power and the persecution of those who questioned it. Critics were branded as traitors, foreign agents, enemies of civilisation.
Why Authoritarianism Retains Support
Over years, Russian public life experienced the feel that repression is the sole mechanism of political control. However, authoritarianism in Russia draws support from genuine social experience, and any analysis that ignores this is incomplete.
The 1990s left deep marks. For many Russians, especially those over fifty, the comparison point is not liberal democracy but the chaos and poverty of the Yeltsin years. State capacity, the ability to pay pensions on time, to maintain territorial integrity, to project national dignity — these are not minor concerns, and Putin’s system delivered on enough of them, for long enough, to generate durable legitimacy.
The fragmentation of the opposition since Navalny’s death illustrates the difficulty of building an alternative. Figures such as Yulia Navalnaya, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Garry Kasparov, and Ilya Yashin command international attention and run active media and investigative operations from exile. But they remain divided by ideology, strategy, and the fundamental question of whether the goal is military defeat of Russia in Ukraine, democratic transformation from within, or the construction of institutional alternatives for an eventual post-Putin order. Without organisational unity and a common political programme, the opposition cannot build the broad social coalitions that sustained democratic transitions elsewhere.
Many Russians who do not actively support repression, nonetheless, tolerate it because they associate political disruption with national catastrophe. State-controlled media reinforces this association constantly. Perceptions of Western hostility — amplified by genuine Western policy decisions as well as by systematic propaganda — provide additional justification. The result is a population in which active dissent is dangerous, and the space for genuine political deliberation has shrunk to near invisibility.
The Human and Institutional Costs
The costs of this system are clear enough – going far beyond the individuals who have been imprisoned, poisoned, or shot. When independent media is shuttered, universities are pressured to dismiss academics who deviate from approved narratives, NGOs are designated as “foreign agents” and driven out of existence, and lawyers who represent political defendants face disbarment and prosecution, the society loses something less visible but more consequential than any individual critic. And it loses the mechanisms by which errors are identified and corrected.
Political prisoners accumulate, and not only the prominent cases that attract international attention but the thousands of anti-war activists, protesters, and ordinary citizens swept up in the expanded repression since 2022. Self-censorship spreads further and faster than any law, because individuals learn to anticipate what is prohibited before it is formally prohibited. The attempt on Vladimir Osechkin, the founder of Gulagu.net who documents torture in Russian prisons and was reportedly targeted by a foiled assassination plot in France in 2025, illustrates that exile offers diminishing safety. The message to Russian critics living abroad is that distance is not protection.
Emigration fast tracks. Since 2022, hundreds of thousands of Russians -disproportionately educated, internationally oriented, and professionally mobile – have left the country. Among them are journalists, scholars, software engineers, medical professionals, and artists. A society can sustain this loss for a time and it cannot do so indefinitely without consequences for its capacity to innovate, to generate knowledge, and to sustain the institutional competence that modern economies require.
The Jamestown analysis identifies an additional paradox: the very extensiveness of repression may indicate growing anxiety. A regime that must monitor online searches and prosecute people for social media likes is a regime uncertain of its own social foundations.
Stability or Stagnation?
Russia’s greatest challenge may not come from external pressures such as sanctions, military support for Ukraine, or diplomatic isolation. It may emerge from the internal consequences of systematically suppressing the mechanisms through which a society learns about itself, addresses its failures, and adapts to change
Authoritarian systems often appear strong precisely because the weakness of opposition makes them appear uncontested. But the absence of visible opposition is not the same as the absence of discontent. Reports from within the Russian political elite — regional governors, Duma deputies, military commanders — suggest growing unease over the war’s costs, economic pressures, and the long-term trajectory of a system that concentrates risk at the top while distributing costs downward. Elite dissatisfaction does not threaten Putin’s control in the short term, the coercive apparatus remains intact, and there is no organised alternative within the state. But it is an indication that the system’s apparent stability depends on conditions that may not be reproducible indefinitely.
The longer-term question is one about political legitimacy and institutional capacity. A modern society requires the ability to identify policy failures, change course, generate new ideas, and sustain the social trust that makes complex institutions function. All of these capacities depend, in different ways, on the freedom to criticise — to say that something is wrong, that a decision was mistaken, that a course of action is failing. When criticism is criminalised, these feedback mechanisms are severed. The system continues to function, after a fashion, but it does so with diminishing information about its own condition.
This is the greater significance of cases like Kuzovkov, Skobov, Kagarlitsky, and Navalny. Their persecution, documented across a widening catalogue by organisations from TRT World to Deutsche Welle is seriously human rights crisis. It is evidence of a political system that has concluded, fatally, that it can afford to silence its critics. History suggests that systems which reach this conclusion are often the last to learn how wrong they were.
The repression of dissent in contemporary Russia is a window into the transformation of the Russian state from a managed democracy into a nationalist-authoritarian system whose apparent stability may come at the cost of political freedom, institutional flexibility, and long-term social development. The killing of a satirist in Poland, the imprisonment of a Soviet-era dissident for the second time in his life, the foiled assassination plot in France, the digital surveillance of ordinary citizens, etc are manifestations of a political order in which dissent is increasingly treated as a threat to state security and national unity.
About K.M. Seethi
K.M. Seethi is is Director, Inter University Centre for Social Science Research and Extension (IUCSSRE), Mahatma Gandhi University (MGU), Kerala. He also served as ICSSR Senior Fellow, Senior Professor of International Relations and Dean of Social Sciences at MGU. One of his latest works is "ENDURING DILEMMA Flashpoints in Kashmir and India-Pakistan Relations."
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