Putin’s Approach to Authoritarianism Is Changing

On Jan. 17, a Russian court in Petushki, a small town near Moscow, found three lawyers guilty of “participating in an extremist community.” It was a recent instance of the state using anti-extremist legislation to target critics: The lawyers had defended Alexei Navalny, the opposition leader who died in an Arctic maximum-security prison last year, and were accused of smuggling Navalny’s messages from prison. As one lawyer said in court, “We are on trial for passing Navalny’s thoughts to other people.”

Before his death, Navalny’s allies would publish the messages online, helping him remain an influential political figure even while locked in solitary confinement. Sometimes hopeful, sometimes witty, they helped rally support for the opposition and exposed the horror and absurdity of the Russian prison system—for example, by calling on his supporters to participate in protests and lambasting the prison authorities for throwing him into punishment cells. These dispatches later became integral to Navalny’s posthumous memoir, which came out last year.

The prosecution used recordings of meetings between Navalny and his lawyers in prison as key evidence—illegally breaking attorney-client privilege. In the end, the sentences were strict: Igor Sergunin, the only lawyer to admit to the charge, was sentenced to three and a half years in prison. The other two, Alexei Liptser and Vadim Kobzev, were given five and five and a half years, respectively.

Until now, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s approach to authoritarianism has relied on slowly suffocating civil liberties and institutions while keeping repression under a veneer of legality. These tactics are not dissimilar to ones that successful autocrats have used throughout history, entrenching their power through the gradual erosion and weakening of institutions, from 1930s Germany to present-day Hungary.

But this is the first clear-cut case in the post-Soviet era of the state punishing lawyers with multiyear sentences simply for doing their jobs. The sentencing marks Putin’s Russia crossing the Rubicon into unchecked lawlessness.

Contrary to what many Westerners believe, Russia is not a crystallized totalitarian empire—yet. It is a country in flux. Even as its leadership actively works to transform Russia into an authoritarian state united around great-power aspirations, civic infrastructure that seeks to thwart the government’s efforts still exists. This comes in many forms, from groups that help Russians flee the draft to shelters for LGBTQ+ Russians to legal aid organizations such as OVD-Info, where I oversee the English-language media program.

Although the Kremlin’s onslaught is methodical and relentless, Putin has long seemed to be concerned with maintaining a veneer of legality around his capture of Russia. The legal apparatus is almost universally subjugated by the Kremlin, with judges, prosecutors, and public defenders nearly always working in unison to support the state’s agenda. Still, repression is carried out under the auspices of legal instruments.

Russian authorities go to great lengths to legitimize repression through law. For instance, individuals persecuted for opposing Russia’s war in Ukraine are not normally disappeared, but rather charged under one of the laws that the Kremlin has been pushing through parliament since 2022.

This includes the 110 people who are imprisoned on the charge of “public dissemination of knowingly false information about the use of the armed forces.” One of those individuals is Maria Ponomarenko, a journalist sentenced to six years in prison for covering the Russian bombing of Mariupol. Since being detained, she has received brutal treatment and attempted suicide more than once.

This legal veneer has long created a niche, however small, for civil society to operate in. Indeed, human rights lawyers have a storied history in Russia stretching back to the Soviet era, when they provided scarce but much-needed protection to dissidents.

Civil society groups still rely on lawyers who choose to stay in the country despite the growing risks. OVD-Info, one of Russia’s largest human rights monitoring groups, works with more than 300 lawyers across the country; these individuals provide legal aid, expertise, and defense for some of the more than 3,000 people who the organization has documented as currently persecuted in Russia for political reasons.

It may seem as though lawyers have little influence. After all, despite legal support, Navalny still died in an icy colony beyond the Arctic Circle. At least 1,505 of those on the list of politically persecuted individuals are being detained in prisons, pretrial detention centers, or mental institutions. Indeed, while lawyers might be able to make their case in courts, the Kremlin has virtually monopolized Russia’s justice system. It controls both the courts and the police.

However, human rights lawyers still have vital functions in Russian society. They occasionally manage to snatch people from the jaws of the Kremlin’s courts. Take the case of Lev Skoryakin, a left-wing activist, who was kidnapped by Russian agents in 2023 while hiding in Kyrgyzstan. Skoryakin disappeared for weeks until an OVD-Info lawyer found him, beaten, in a holding cell in Moscow. Within weeks, the lawyer was able to secure Skoryakin’s release.

As the only visitors allowed in prisons much of the time, lawyers are also able to provide for political prisoners’ other needs. A Russian prison is, in itself, a brutal instrument of punishment. Prisoners are commonly underfed, beaten, and subjected to harsh conditions. Lawyers work to get everything from cookies to books through the prison gates to their defendants. An entire ecosystem of civil society groups, large and small, has sprung up to support prisoners alongside these individual lawyers.

This support is vital for prisoners’ survival. Consider Sasha Skochilenko, a Russian artist and former political prisoner who was released as part of an international prisoner swap last August; her support group ensured that she was able to receive gluten-free food while she was detained, as she could not eat most prison meals due to medical conditions.

Most importantly, lawyers, working together with civil society at large, can help prisoners remain in contact with the outside world. This seems to irk the Kremlin the most, as the case of Navalny’s lawyers has demonstrated.

Ilya Yashin, a dissident who was freed in the same exchange as Skochilenko, said that the many letters that he received from around the world kept him emotionally stable in prison and demonstrated to his jailers that he was not forgotten. Like Navalny, Yashin was even able to publish commentary while imprisoned, thanks to his lawyers, becoming an important voice for anti-war Russians.

It is exactly this resilience from civil society that the Kremlin has targeted as it has ramped up repression at home since the start of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. This is why the Kremlin punishes what it deems as speech crimes so severely—such as the case of Igor Baryshnikov, who was sentenced to more than seven years in prison for social media posts that were critical of the war, and the Moskalev family, which was torn apart after 12-year-old Masha Moskaleva drew an anti-war doodle in class.

The Kremlin wants to control the narrative. Now, it is willing to forego even its façade of legality in order to punish the lawyers who enabled Navalny’s communication with the world—and thus warn others who might want to act as messengers for civil society in the future.

Russian authorities are experts at boiling the frog. They have worked carefully, hitting legal aid institutions—including OVD-Info, which Moscow declared a “foreign agent” in 2021, forcing it to abandon its office in the country—and stripping away lawyers’ protections bit by bit. In recent decades, lawyers have been beaten by police, detained, and threatened.

Since at least 2017, Russian police departments have implemented the “Fortress Protocol” in response to protests; originally meant to protect police stations from imminent threat or terrorist attacks, this protocol allows police to unlawfully prevent lawyers from meeting with their clients after arrests during protests. When lawyers get too close to politics, they get burned, such as in the 2020 protest carried out by lawyers against the detention and pressure on their colleagues in the North Caucasus region of Kabardino-Balkaria.

The jailing of Navalny’s lawyers did not come out of nowhere. But it does represent a turning point in the Kremlin’s program to destroy civil society.

“What can I say—it’s what we expected,” said Liptser, one of Navalny’s lawyers, after hearing his sentence. The journalists and supporters in the courtroom erupted in cheers, with one person shouting, “You are heroes and the best people of Russia!”

With this verdict, the Russian government is signaling that the rules of the game have changed: It is no longer safe to support civil society and dissidents; rather, it is better to forget them altogether.