The persecution of opponents of the war against Ukraine in modern Russia is increasingly compared to the repressions of the Brezhnev or even Stalin era. The director of the Sakharov Center, Sergei Lukashevsky, believes such parallels are appropriate, but there are many differences. The human rights activist left Russia immediately after the start of the war and now works in Berlin. In an interview with DW, Lukashevsky spoke about the policy of intimidation, EU sanctions, as well as Sakharov’s advice, which the West failed to heed.

DW: What’s happening in Russia – new laws, arrests, searches – many people compare it to the repressions of the Soviet Union and even say it’s like 1937. Do you think these comparisons are fair?

Sergei Lukashevsky: Speaking of current repressions, on the one hand, it is very important to draw historical parallels – in fact, there are many similarities. For example, contemporary repression of activists is often seen as a signal system. Here a person is arrested under an administrative article, sent to a special detention center, he is there under administrative detention and they say that this is a signal to leave – so they will not put you in prison and if you stay they will arrest you Also, if a person does not get out, an arrest follows in a criminal case.

This, of course, is very reminiscent of Brezhnev’s Soviet Union practice. And by madness, by the incredible extensibility of the statement (laws. – Ed.) the current repressive practice is already reminiscent of the 37th year. Literally, if you compare the words, what is “being under foreign influence”? (This wording is used in the new law on “foreign agents” signed July 14. – Ed.) This is something like the tragically anecdotal “connections leading to suspicion of espionage” from Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago.

“The tasks of the current government are to push society into the space of lack of freedom”

– What’s the difference anyway?

– Despite the fact that we see cruel sentences – up to 7 years simply for words spoken at a meeting of municipal deputies (Quote for Alexei Gorinov. – Ed.), it is wrong to compare modern repressions with Stalinist repressions. Stalin had an entirely different task. It was important for him to subjugate large masses of people and force them to work for their own goals: to build factories, to go to mass war wherever Stalin sent them. He needed to completely control society. So there were mass repressions, capturing hundreds, thousands, millions of people. Now, modern government has other tasks. They boil down to the fact that society should show general loyalty and not interfere, not stand in the way.

So these are targeted crackdowns. Despite the fact that the number of people behind bars is greater than it was a few years ago, and the number of those repressed is growing, however, they are still selective repressions, with the aim of intimidating. It seems you can see more parallels with the Brezhnev era. So, too, the crackdowns were targeted, they concerned those who were ready to come out publicly and speak out about human rights violations in the Soviet Union. But here, too, there is an important difference.

In the Brezhnev era, at the end of the Soviet Union, repression took place against the backdrop of a totalitarian society. Society had been “disciplined” by Stalin before and existed within very strict limits. And it was necessary to limit only those who tried to break those limits, to go beyond them. The task of the current government is to create these structures and push society into the space of lack of freedom. So on the one hand these crackdowns are targeted, but on the other I think they will be quite harsh and cruel towards who will be affected. Therefore, we see phrases like Alexei Gorinov or Alexei Navalny.

“There is a feeling that the state of the Russian Federation is capable of anything”

– To what extent can the authorities intimidate people? We still live in a different time and a new generation has grown up. According to your estimates, how many people are silent and afraid, but how many are still ready to go out in the event of a change in external conditions?

– I think that, unfortunately, the policy of intimidation is very successful, mainly because people remember this historical fear. And often those people who go out to protest, speak out in defense of human rights and against war, are people who know history well and know the era of Stalinism. So that common fear comes back. There is a feeling that the state in Russia is capable of anything. Therefore, many of those who went out to protest in the first days after the war left, soon after several arrests, clearly realizing that the Putin regime has no limits, that it will be so cruel until it achieves the goals it set for itself. However, in fact, in the last 20 years, a generation has grown up that does not remember Soviet realities, does not remember the habit of silence, the habit of self-censorship, spilled into the air, not even fear.

Of course, we will not see mass protests in Russia. For mass protests, it is important to understand that there are some structures, some leaders that will organize and take people to the streets, that a person will not be alone in the void or with some sympathizers. And this is exactly what in the previous 20 years the political regime in Russia uprooted and expelled, uprooted to the fullest. That’s why the authorities were so afraid of Navalny’s political initiatives.

– You say that many left after February 24th. Can we talk about some new dissent? What role can these people, who have already left Russia, play for the democratic movement within the country?

– Dissidence is, above all, dissent within the country. And now, it seems to me, will be developed very actively. These are also our traditions. We can say that there is a political tradition, unfortunately, of an authoritarian state and a tradition of political repression. But at the same time, there is a tradition of resistance, and that tradition is not even a few dozen, but actually many hundreds of years old. I believe that the main task of people outside the country is to help those who remain and resist. And that’s all kinds of help, that’s help in organizing material support, that’s informational assistance – as happened in the dissident times in the Soviet Union. Here the parallels are absolutely appropriate.

“Europe and the West did not listen well to Sakharov”

– In Germany, they are actively reviewing their relations with Russia. This is, first of all, energy dependence. But not only – they are connections both in the sphere of business and in the sphere of civil society. How are relations between Russia and Germany developing in this area now?

– Speaking about the rupture of economic and energy ties, I can’t help but say that, unfortunately, Europe and the West as a whole did not listen well to the main Russian thinkers. They didn’t listen well to Sakharov. In 1977, Andrei Dmitrievich wrote an article “Nuclear Energy and the Freedom of the West”. So he saw a way out of the nuclear energy situation, but his main idea was different. The Western world must not depend on authoritarian regimes for resources. None and nothing. It must trust in its ability to produce new technologies, in its ability to develop science. And, unfortunately, their appeals were not heeded.

The Western world, especially Europe and, to a large extent, precisely Germany, found itself in such dependence. Now we see what this leads to, we see that he was right in that sense. We need to listen to the people of Russia, we just need to choose the right people to listen. I certainly see how a large number of very important ties between Russia and Germany are being destroyed at the level of scientific and cultural exchanges. We still do not fully realize, neither in Europe nor in Russia, what we have lost because of the war unleashed by the Russian authoritarian regime. On the other hand, I see that, however, in civil society – both in Germany and in Russia – there is an understanding that ties must remain. They just need to be fundamentally separated from all official space. There must be no “Petersburg Dialogues”. Sanctions against the Putin regime, economic, restricting the financial sector, of course, are necessary. But you need to understand that there must be interaction between the structures of civil society.

– In your opinion, is the Russian government trying to somehow instrumentalize history, and what is its success?

– Yes, of course, this is one of the main tools of the regime. There is no eternal Russian empire, there is a right-wing conservative dictatorship. It is led by a dictator who fights for his own power. And fighting for his own power, he uses whatever can hook people. What can he do to grab people? Indeed, there is nostalgia for the Soviet Union, as if for a time of calm, for the dead Soviet Union. There’s a trauma in the 90s, when there was a lot of freedom, but people lived very hard. It was the trauma of a very difficult transition to a new reality, because the whole socioeconomic reality collapsed and a new one grew on its foundations.

And Putin very purposefully and consistently uses this habit of living in a big country. People didn’t feel like fighting. The fear of war in the last years before the start of the war with Ukraine was very high. People felt that something was coming and they were afraid of it. They spoke of it with fear. And for people to accept all of that, you have to really put it in some historical context. That is, explaining to people what you like or don’t like, that’s your destiny. And for that, as I now understand, the cult of victory in war, the cult of victory in World War II, is actually being established quite consistently – not as a shared experience of tragedy, but precisely as militarism and the cult of success. military. And this is a constant and deliberate power politics to make people believe that this is their destiny.

“If the war continues, there will be a lot of murmuring”

– We see that the economic situation of the country is deteriorating sharply. Could this in any way affect people’s understanding of what is happening, the possibility of protest? What might happen in Russia in the next few years?

– It will certainly affect people’s understanding. If we assume that hostilities will continue and sanctions will have an impact and make people’s everyday lives much worse, then the attitude will certainly change and there will be a lot of murmuring. But people don’t go to the streets, because in the first place it has been shown by repression that everyone who leaves first will be captured and repressed.

On the other hand, although they cannot formulate it, people are well aware that if our ruler was ready to launch the army and tanks against another country, which, in fact, did nothing, did not directly pose any threat. real to the country, then he can do that against us. And the internal troops, the National Guard will not stop shooting people. In Belarus, we have already seen how mass protests can be suppressed. So I wouldn’t expect any mass demonstrations unless there is an economic collapse. If there are interruptions in the supply of products, mass layoffs of people. Unfortunately, it turns out that a rather primitive and at the same time stable economic system was built in Russia, while the West and the world depend on Russian resources.