The Russian Opposition: 25 Years
Twenty five years of resistance, successes, failures, and tragedy.
In the last quarter century of Putin’s dominance over Russia, the world witnessed the development and failure of one of modern history's most famous and lasting opposition movements.
This article will seek to lay out the history and primary trends behind the opposition’s trajectory over the past two and a half decades and point to a future direction for resisting the United Russia regime. I have built this timeline in three primary segments: the unopposed beginnings of the Putin regime (2000-2008/10), the coalitionary period (2012-2014/15), and the decade of suppression (2015-2025).
As my research in this article shows, the Russian opposition achieved its ultimate successes when it built a coalition of ideologically differing participants united by economic issues and a belief in the Russian people's right to free democratic elections.
Russia entered the new millennium as a bankrupt, desperate, and exhausted nation. The past decade had seen it suffer through the collapse of the Soviet Union, and just two years ago, the young Federation’s economy defaulted. Now, the year had seen Russians endure terrifying terrorist attacks, collapsing entire apartment buildings, killing hundreds, and injuring nearly two thousand people. The attacks and an invasion by the Chechen Islamic International Peacekeeping Brigade (IIPB) had plunged Russia into another Chechen War, with bad memories of Russia’s humiliating defeat in the first.
Russia also entered 2000 with a new president. Yeltsin had resigned minutes before Moscow Time crossed into January 1st. His replacement? A little-known advisor to the Mayor of St. Petersburg who, in the last four years, spontaneously rose through the ranks of Yeltsin’s administration and had, in just the previous year, been appointed Director of the FSB and later one of three Deputy Prime Ministers. He began gaining immense media popularity for his hard stance on terrorism.
The First Years of Putin
In Putin’s first two terms in power, he didn’t face not just a coalition of opposing forces, but essentially any widespread opposition in general. In this period, his primary ‘opposition’ was not ideological or economic, but a collection of pre-Putin parties, politicians, and oligarchs who had not realized they had lost their influence.
Putin entered his position at the head of the nation with vigor and passion absent from Yeltsin’s last years in power. Within a few months, the war with Chechnya was concluded victoriously, and the economy began recovering. For the second time since Russia left the Soviet Union, the economy didn’t shrink and grew by a staggering ten percent (the highest growth rate the Russian Federation has ever experienced). This economic recovery and break from the old order gave Putin incredible popularity for most of his first 8 years in power, with the opposition not being defined in this period and the future resistance split on supporting Putin himself.
After winning the 2000 election in a single round with 53.4% of the vote, Putin intensified his campaign against free media and the liberal-democratic establishment.
The Media and the Kursk Submarine Disaster
Putin’s first crisis would be the Kursk submarine disaster, when the nuclear submarine K-141 Kursk sank in the Barents Sea. Putin, who was on vacation, decided to stay there in the unfolding days of the disaster as the military assured him the rescue effort was well underway and urged him to avoid involving foreign assistance out of a false belief that the disaster was caused by a collision with a foreign vessel. By the time Russia’s rescue efforts faltered. Foreign help was finally accepted, the submarine was able to open, and all crew members had perished (it would not be until later investigations that it would be determined that all surviving crew would’ve died within eight hours of the disaster, meaning rescue was fundamentally impossible).
The immediate aftermath was a particularly challenging period for Putin, who quickly moved to bolster—or rather, preserve—his popularity, which never fell below 50%. During this time, oligarchs who weren’t friendly to Putin used their media holdings in an attempt to harm Putin’s image further.
“Press criticism—spurred in part by oligarchs attempting to turn the public relations fiasco into a political liability for Putin—reinforced Putin’s desire to rein in the media.”
— ‘Russia’s Kursk Disaster: Reactions and Implications’ - CIA Intelligence Report
It is undeniable that this test with the free press, just four months into his first official term as President, would further his attempts to limit the institution. According to the Guardian, Putin called the media “liars” and said that the media had been “thieving money and buying up absolutely everything" while “destroying the state for 10 years.”
The earliest signs of Putin’s escalation of the campaign against the free media, which had already begun under Yeltsin but in a much more constitutional and weak fashion, came in May, when the FSB raided the headquarters of Media-Most, the holding company of oligarch Vladimir Gusinsky. Following Kursk, however, the effort became even more pronounced.
In April 2001, Gazprom installed a loyalist board at NTV, seizing control of Russia’s last independent national television station. During the same month, Media-Most was forced to shut down two of its pro-opposition publications, with both Segodnya and Itogi firing their editors. Before even two years of Putin’s term, TV-6 remained Russia’s last private TV channel, only due to its backing by Boris Berezovsky. It, too, would be closed by the Russian justice system in early 2002.
“By mid-2003, all television stations with national reach had been placed under the firm control of the Kremlin, as had most radio stations. Television news had become monotone, perpetually portraying the president in a positive light and avoiding criticism of his policies. All programs featuring live debate on political issues had been cut. Only a small number of newspapers and Internet publications provided some plurality of opinion, but their readership was marginal.”
Putin’s Crackdown on Political Oligarchs
Early in his rule, Putin aggressively sought to control Russia’s wealthy oligarchs and remove those who sought to oppose him politically, essentially the only early opposition to his rule with any influence or chance of success. The most prominent of these is undoubtedly the case of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, then the wealthiest man in Russia and owner of the oil company Yukos. By 2003, Khodorkovsky had been quietly funding several liberal political parties, and, according to a later testimony by then-Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov, even bankrolled the Communist Party.
In 2003, Khodorkovsky was arrested on fraud and massive tax evasion charges. Within two years, he and his associate Platon Lebedev were convicted of major financial crimes and were sentenced to over a decade in prison.
Putin’s assault did not stop there, and the Kremlin moved to dismantle Yukos. After the imposition of brutal tax bills and assault freezes, the Russian courts declared the company insolvent by 2006, and it was fully liquidated in 2007. According to the Guardian, “Its most lucrative assets ended up with the state-run oil company Rosneft.” The Kremlin would face accusations that it had prosecuted Khodorkovsky to take control of the country’s most profitable oil company for free, and it is all but guaranteed that the prosecution was motivated by political and not legal reasons.
The Not-So-Mainstream Opposition
In this early period, the mainstream democratic opposition, embodied in liberal Yabloko and Nemtsov’s conservative Union of Right Forces, essentially lost its role in government. In the 2003 legislative election, they collectively lost 42 seats in the Duma and all their representation in the party-list, retaining a joint seven seats in the parliament. At this point, the parliament became essentially a rubber stamp for Putin’s agenda and would never again regain any semblance of independence.
Outside the parliament, non-systematic opposition continued. In 2006, activists formed “The Other Russia” in an attempt to unite ideologically diverse forces against Putin’s growing authoritarianism. The unlikely coalition included former Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov, democratic activist and chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov, socialist leader Sergei Udaltsov, and National Bolshevik leader Eduard Limonov. The group began a series of “Dissenters’ Marches” throughout 2006 and 2007, widely acknowledged as the start of the recognizable, protest-driven, non-systematic Russian opposition.
These protests were suppressed by riot police, indicating some of the first visible violations of the Russian constitution. In November 2007, police detained dozens of protesters, including Nemtsov, and jailed Kasparov for five days. The Kremlin maintained its traditional narrative that the opposition was irrelevant and foreign-sponsored.
By the end of the 2000s, all of the leaders and organisations of the genuine, non-systemic opposition leaders and organizations had been essentially wiped out of formal politics. But the seeds of a future stronger coalition that originated in the Dissenters' Marches were already sprouting.
A Second Decade of Putin
Compared to the opposition’s essential non-existence in the 2000s, the 2010s saw the formation of the largest coalition and the most significant successes ever achieved by anti-Putin forces.
Instead of the traditional institutional ‘opposition’, a new kind of resistance began to emerge, centered not around political parties but public investigations, online mobilization, and protest. The figure at the center of this transition was Alexei Navalny, a lawyer, blogger, and anti-corruption activist who gained widespread attention for publishing detailed investigations into government corruption, particularly within state-owned corporations. In 2011, he referred to United Russia as the “party of crooks and thieves,” a slogan that would stick.
Navalny began his anti-corruption activity in 2008 by becoming a shareholder in some of Russia’s biggest oil and gas companies, namely Rosneft, Gazprom/Gazprom Neft, Lukoil, and Surgutneftegaz. After a ₽300,000 investment, he was entitled to reports from the companies and a voice within their policymaking. In 2010, he published a report on Transneft’s construction of the Eastern Siberia-Pacific Ocean pipeline, detailing how the company’s leadership stole 4 billion USD.
In 2011, Navalny founded the Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK), raising small donations to open regional offices and investigate various officials.
By the 2011 Duma elections, Navalny had become a reasonably well-known and liked figure, but his emergence wouldn’t be finalized until 2012. When the elections became a source of significant controversy due to their perceived (and almost guaranteed) rigging, he joined other opposition leaders to lead the largest protests in Russia since Putin’s ascension to power.
The 2011-2012 Protest Wave
Russian opposition roared back onto the national stage with the protest movement of 2011 and 2012. Sparked by widespread accusations of fraud in the 2011 State Duma Elections and Putin’s announcement of his intention to run for President for a third term, tens of thousands took to the streets in what is sometimes referred to as the “Snow Revolution.”
On December 10, 2011, protesters gathered on Bolotnaya Square in Moscow demanding the annulment of the election, the resignation of electoral chief Vladimir Churov, investigations into fraud, and the release of arrested activists. Attendance estimates varied widely – the police put it at ~25,000 while organizers claimed ~100,000. Simultaneous protests occurred in 99 other cities and towns.
The non-systematic opposition built a broad coalition of urban middle-class citizens, students, and 90s-era activists. It even caused some systematic politicians from the Communist or “A Just Russia” parties to flirt with the protest movement. The demonstrations revived some of the opposition's optimism and energy, which had increasingly been lost with the opposition's continued defeat (and, at this point, total exclusion) within any notable governmental bodies.
In response, the state organized counter-rallies and initiated criminal cases. The largest crackdown came following protests on May 6, 2012, the day before Putin’s inauguration. Police violently dispersed demonstrators at Bolotnaya Square and arrested hundreds. Over 30 individuals were later prosecuted in what became known as the Bolotnaya Case, including leftist opposition leader Sergei Udaltsov.
Though the protest wave initially gained momentum, the movement began to decline following Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012 and the aggressive prosecution of protest leaders. Many protests were banned outright. Public enthusiasm and momentum declined, returning the opposition to the margins. It still saw success on the street, but never returned to the same level.
The Post-Bolotnaya Crackdown
With Putin’s return to power, the loosening under Medvedev was swiftly reversed, and the harshest crackdown on protest, which the Kremlin correctly recognized as a larger threat than anything the opposition could achieve at the state-controlled ballot box, began.
Within a month of Putin’s third inauguration, the Duma raised penalties for unsanctioned demonstrations, increasing fines for protesters up to ₽300,000 and organizers up to ₽1,000,000. In July, Putin signed the now-notorious ‘foreign agent’ law against NGOs, forcing any civil-society group with foreign funding engaged in broadly defined “political activity” to register as a “foreign agent.” These groups would face heavy audits and fines, essentially tanking any of their abilities to resist the regime.
By the end of the crackdown, Putin had successfully reduced the opposition away from the national force at the height of the Bolotnya protests. Despite this, opposition activity continued during 2012 — Boris Nemtsov helped form the new People's Freedom Party (PARNAS) alongside longtime activist and former Solidarnost leader Ilya Yashin, and Alexei Navalny focused on anti-corruption investigations, increasingly the lifeblood of the popular opposition, and street campaigns. Leftist leader Sergei Udaltsov, though being accused and investigated by the government of plotting a violent coup, remained free and actively participated in joint opposition actions during this period.
Navalny’s Campaign and the Peace Protests
By 2013, excluded from national politics, the opposition turned its energy to municipal and local efforts. The highlight of this new direction was, undoubtedly, Navalny’s mayoral bid in Moscow. Running as a PARNAS candidate and with the help of the FBK, he unexpectedly won 27.2% of the vote in a Kremlin-controlled election, nearly pushing the by-far most important city in the country to a run-off in a highly unfair electoral environment. A series of protests followed the election, demanding a recount.
Shortly before the election, on 18 July 2013, Navalny was convicted (again) in the “Kirovles” timber embezzlement case and sentenced to five years in prison. The harsh verdict, seen as political retribution, immediately provoked a backlash, and thousands of demonstrators gathered outside the Kremlin courthouse. The next day, an appeals court unexpectedly overturned the jail term, leaving Navalny free to stay in the race.
Local and regional issues also saw demonstrations against the regime. Protests erupted against unwanted development projects in cities like Novosibirsk and Sochi. In Sverdlovsk, residents demanded better public transport. However, these campaigns mostly remained confined to municipal venues.
In 2014, however, the opposition took on a new character around the crisis in Ukraine. After the annexation of Crimea, on 15 March 2014, tens of thousands of Muscovites marched in an unsanctioned anti-war rally. Independent media estimated the turnout at ~50,000 people, while the police claimed 3,000.
While Navalny and Udaltsov were absent, both under house arrest and having sympathy for the annexation, Nemtsov launched the “Spring March” in St. Petersburg in May against corruption and the conflict with Ukraine. However, attendance was minimal, and the opposition was further squeezed by the massive surge in popularity Putin received following the annexation of Crimea. In October 2014, the Kremlin cracked down on election observers and started exerting even harder pressure on dissent online.
The Assassination of Boris Nemtsov
On the 27th of February, 2015, Boris Nemtsov was assassinated on a bridge near the Kremlin, two days before a large anti-war march. The murder reinvigorated the opposition from its division over Crimea, sparking some of the last large-scale unsanctioned protests in Russia. The “March of Nemtsov” had around ~25,000 participants attending under heavy policing.
The assassination, which is widely accepted as having been conducted by the Kremlin, was a turning point for the opposition and the Kremlin itself. Previously, the Kremlin had never dared to harm a primary opposition leader, using mostly soft methods of suppression rather than state-sanctioned terror. (This is not to ignore the many heavily politicized killings of Russian journalists reporting on corruption and, especially, Chechnya.)
Now, the fear of paying fines or spending time in jail was fundamentally altered, while the opposition itself lost one of its most recognizable, well-spoken, and popular figures. After this point, more and more cracks in the already strained ‘big tent’ of non-systematic opposition efforts would expose themselves yearly. Not even a semblance of such an alliance exists today.
The Decade* of Suppression (2015-2022)
Following the assassination of Boris Nemtsov, the Kremlin would usher in a new age of suppression and censorship, making even the relatively free landscape of the early 2010s unrecognizable. By this point, the coalition against Putin had essentially collapsed, being divided by failures, suppression, the death of Boris Nemtsov, and the debate over whether to welcome the incredibly popular annexation of Crimea or to oppose it.
In May of 2015, the Duma passed the undesirable organizations law, allowing the Kremlin prosecutor to ban any foreign NGOs deemed a threat to state security or public order. In February, Navalny was arrested and jailed for 15 days for calling an unauthorized protest, just weeks after receiving a suspended sentence in a trumped-up fraud trial.
2016 saw an even greater cementation of this crackdown. The foreign agents law was expanded with a much broader definition, giving the authorities tools to target essentially any civil initiative that attempted to challenge public opinion or policy. The Duma passed the Yarovaya law package (374-FZ and 375-FZ), significantly expanding the state’s legal surveillance powers. The act would serve as another vessel for future amendments expanding its already unconstitutional powers to broader limits.
Meanwhile, in December, Navalny announced his plan to run in the 2018 presidential election against Putin and began opening campaign offices nationwide. Within two months, he had been convicted of an old embezzlement case with a suspended five-year sentence that barred him from running.
The opposition’s fortunes were revived in 2017 with a new set of large nationwide protests. Navalny’s anti-corruption efforts had quickly emerged as the biggest engine for the opposition, and the FBK’s exposé on then-Prime Minister and former President Dmitry Medvedev managed to mobilize the simmering frustration with the opposition into a nationwide initiative.
He Is Not Dimon to You (2017)
Navalny’s documentary exposed vast secret wealth and corruption, sparking outrage throughout the Federation. On March 26, tens of thousands of Russians in over 80 cities answered Navalny’s call for anti-corruption rallies. The major gatherings were reminiscent of the Bolotnya protests five years earlier, and the authorities reacted quickly and brutally. In Moscow, riot police arrested ~1,000 protesters in a single day, including teenagers, while over 1,500 were detained throughout the nation. Navalny was arrested for another 15 days alongside numerous allies, including Moscow councilor Ilya Yashin.
However, the opposition refused to lose momentum. The opposition pulled off another series of mass protests on June 12, Russia Day, which similarly saw hundreds arrested in Moscow and Saint Petersburg. Despite his suspended sentence, which made his 2018 presidential bid nearly impossible, Navalny pressed on with new campaign offices and regional rallies. The regime continued to resist this. Authorities in many cities denied his permits, and pro-Kremlin thugs, most notably Cossack militiamen, harassed his volunteers and campaign staff. Navalny himself was frequently targeted, with him being famously attacked with Zelyonka — an antiseptic dye widely used in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus — twice.
The Zelyonka attacks, which stain skin for days with a green hue, made the color a symbol of the Russian opposition.
In December, almost a year after announcing his intention to run for President, Navalny was officially barred from the 2018 elections by the Central Election Commission (TsIK) because of his criminal record. Navalny called for a boycott of the ‘predetermined elections.’
By the end of the year, the Kremlin had furthered its suppression capabilities. Putin signed an amendment allowing the government to label media outlets as ‘foreign agents,’ which was initially deployed against Voice of America and Radio Liberty. For the opposition, 2017 was a year of hope and optimism—an island of success in a sea of oppression. The sea would swallow more and more of the shore.
The 2018 Elections & Pension Protests
The year opened with Putin cruising to his fourth six-year term unopposed as the TsIK eliminated any relevant opposition that dared to try to enter the elections.
Being entirely excluded from the election, the opposition quickly labelled it a farce and began a boycott. Wary of elections as a catalyst for opposition successes and unprompted protests, the Kremlin preemptively deployed police to round up activists distributing boycott leaflets. A month before the vote, on January 28, protests flared up in a dozen cities against the validity of the election.
“What we are being offered right now are not elections, and we must not participate in them,”
- Yevgeny Roizman, mayor of Yekaterinburg (2012-2018)
Putin won the election with 77.5% of the vote, the highest percentage in post-1991 Russian history, winning the majority of the vote in every single federal subject. However, if the Kremlin hoped for a peaceful year, it quickly undid any such dreams.
On June 14, the first day of the FIFA World Cup in Russia, P.M. Medvedev announced United Russia’s plan for a major reform of Russia’s pension system. The changes would increase retirement age from 60 to 65 for men and from 55 to 63 for women. Less than a month later, a poll found the change was unpopular with 90% of Russians.
Protests were banned because of the FIFA World Cup until its conclusion, but they erupted immediately afterward. These protests weren’t a democratic or oppositional matter, but an economic one that attracted millions of people in Russia. Notably, even the Communist Party and A Just Russia cultivated protests against the actions, leaving the United Russia party virtually alone — a shocking action that hadn’t happened in decades and hadn’t been considered plausible since the crackdown of the Bolotnaya protests.
Tens of thousands of Russians turned up for protests in over 80 cities throughout Russia, consisting of many ordinary citizens who had never before been to demonstrations. Throughout the country, hundreds were arrested. However, even a heavy-handed response couldn’t shield the Kremlin from the sheer unpopularity of the law and the drop in Putin’s approval, and amendments softening the law were quickly proposed after it had already passed in July.
The protests were a test for Putin, whose public approval did not recover until the invasion of Ukraine, which is speculated to have been at least partially motivated by wanting to recreate the public approval rally that followed the 2014 annexation of Crimea. The enduring disapproval also likely contributed to the fall of Medvedev’s second cabinet as prime minister, after which he has been increasingly marginalized in government.
The 2019 Moscow Protest Summer
In 2019, a historic number of independent candidates, including well-known activists like Lyubov Sobol, Ilya Yashin, and Dmitry Gudkov, sought to run for the Moscow City Duma. They attempted to ride the unpopularity of the United Russia party to hopefully break their monopoly in the institution. In a watershed moment for the Kremlin’s campaign to eliminate the non-systematic opposition, election officials disqualified nearly all of these candidates on various technicalities by July.
These blatant exclusions ignited public outrage in Moscow, triggering waves of weekly protests in the capital throughout July and August. Every weekend, thousands of Muscovites would take to the streets to protest for fair elections, facing some of the harshest repression seen in post-Soviet Moscow. On July 27, riot police sealed off a protest and arrested over a thousand people in one afternoon, some of the highest numbers seen in this article. The crackdown did not spare the opposition candidates themselves. Ilya Yashin, Lyubov Sobol, and several others were arrested and given 10 to 30-day jail terms simply for calling on voters to meet them, effectively criminalizing campaigning for the opposition.
Protestors returned on August 3 and again on August 10, meeting the same fury with more mass arrests (well over 1,000 people) and brute force. In a notorious incident, a National Guard officer was filmed punching a young female protester in the stomach.
The aftermath of the summer was even more ominous, and the true culmination of the Kremlin’s slow build-up of its tools of suppression throughout the preceding years. Authorities quickly launched a criminal investigation into the aforementioned July 27 protest, detaining dozens of protestors and bystanders. Some unlucky individuals in this group, primarily young, received multi-year prison sentences in show trials held later in the year. One 23-year-old, Vladislav Sinitsa, was sentenced to 5 years for an angry tweet about the protests. Another, Konstantin Kotov, got 4 years for attending multiple rallies as repeat protest participation had been criminalized.
Parallel to its actions against street activism, the government continued to advance its tools of suppression legally. Throughout the year, a series of internet censorship laws were enacted, including a law in April that enabled authorities to isolate the Russian internet from the global web and another banning online content that disrespected the state or spread misinformation. The foreign agents law was also tightened, allowing the Russian government to brand individual citizens as “foreign agents” if they disseminate information and receive foreign funding. Soon, many independent journalists and human rights activists would be branded with the notorious “inoagent” label.
By the end of 2019, the Kremlin had closed virtually every outlet for dissent, whether in the streets, at the ballot box, or online.
A Plague, a Poisoning, and a War
The 2020s in Russia began with another constitutional amendment that effectively “reset” Putin’s term count, allowing him to remain president until 2036. Small-scale demonstrations against the constitutional overhaul were quickly snuffed out.
However, the new decade would quickly bring trouble for Russia and the rest of the world. The first case of COVID-19 was confirmed to have arrived in the country on January 31st — the day of border closure with China — and would bring immense destruction to the nation, alongside planting a new instrument in the regime’s toolbox of oppression. Having been eliminated from any official outlets for dissent, opposition to Vladimir Putin was quickly put in a state of severe depression by the bans on rallies and protests. The pandemic had allowed the Russian government to silence even single picketers — the last legal and relatively safe form of protest in the country.
Nothing, however, shocked the Russian opposition more than the near-fatal poisoning of Alexei Navalny. On August 20, Navalny fell suddenly, violently ill on a flight to Moscow after working in Siberia. The plane made an emergency landing in Omsk, and he was taken to a local hospital in a coma. Under international pressure, Russian officials allowed him to be evacuated to Germany for treatment, and he arrived in Berlin on August 22. There, medical workers confirmed Navalny had been poisoned with Novichok, a Soviet-era nerve agent used in past assassinations, successful and unsuccessful, by Russian security services.
Navalny narrowly survived after weeks in intensive care. He later managed, with the investigative outfit Bellingcat, to unmask an FSB operative squad that had trailed him for years and allegedly applied the poison to his underwear.
The following year, Navalny's return to Russia on January 17, 2021, began the Kremlin’s most aggressive campaign to eradicate the opposition. His plane was diverted to Vnukovo airport to Sheremetyevo to avoid large crowds of his supporters, and, upon landing, he was immediately arrested by masked police on a charge of violating parole for his time being treated in Germany. The arrest sparked massive street protests on January 23 and 31, with tens of thousands rallying in over 100 cities from Vladivostok to Saint Petersburg. The state began its most aggressive response in modern history, with more than 4,000 people detained on January 23 and another 5,000 on the 31st.
By early February, over 10,000 Russians had been arrested at rallies, and nearly every prominent opposition figure was behind bars or under house arrest. Navalny’s closest associates, like Lyubov Sobol, his brother Oleg, Anastasia Vasilyeva, Ilya Yashin, and others, were rounded up and charged under a new law for calling people to protest during the pandemic. Sobol, for example, was placed under house arrest and later given a suspended sentence, before fleeing Russia for her safety later in the year. The Kremlin was hellbent on not just crushing the protests, but also putting an end to Navalny’s movement entirely.
By the summer 2021 elections, the FBK and its nationwide network had been destroyed, most leaders arrested or chased out of the nation, and the authorities had even forced Google and Apple to remove Navalny’s smart voting app from their stores. The United Russia party easily won the rigged elections that year and quickly moved to expand the state’s legal ability to crush dissent again. By the end of 2021, nearly all remaining independent media and rights groups were destroyed or under immense pressure. The human rights organization Memorial – a pillar of civil society since the Soviet era – was ordered dissolved by Russia’s Supreme Court for minor paperwork violations of the foreign agents law. Investigative outlet Proekt had been declared “undesirable” earlier in 2021, forcing its closure, and journalists from respected outlets like Dozhd (TV Rain), iStories, and Meduza were branded foreign agents en masse. OVD-Info, the group meticulously tracking political arrests, was blocked by year’s end.
This wave of brutal oppression, the harshest seen in the regime’s history, was not just a continuation of the trend but instead preparations for something that would fundamentally shake Russian society.
On February 24, 2022, Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The outbreak of war shocked members of the liberal opposition. It immediately caused anti-war protests in a dozen cities, with thousands of Russians on the streets to protest the war in the first days of the invasion. The Kremlin’s crackdown was brutal and massive. Within a week, over 7,000 peaceful anti-war demonstrators had been detained. By the end of March, that number swelled above 15,000. The last remnants of free media were shuttered as Roskomnadzor banned access to all independent foreign and domestic media. At the same time, over a million Russians, including many supporters of the opposition, fled the country abroad.
By the first year of the full-scale war between Russia and Ukraine, the Kremlin had finally achieved its goals of eliminating essentially the entire liberally-minded opposition in the country, either silenced, in prison, or in exile.
The Murder of Alexei Navalny
Alexei Navalny died in a maximum-security Siberian penal colony on the 16th of February, 2024, at 14:19 Moscow time. His funeral would be held on the 1st of March, after his mother won a prolonged fight with the authorities to gain custody of his body. The ceremony was attended by thousands of people and lasted multiple hours, with several opposition figures and foreign ambassadors in attendance.
Just seven days after his death, the invasion of Ukraine marked its second anniversary. During that period, the opposition had been entirely destroyed within Russia, and various exiled groups bickered over what was left. A month later, Vladimir Putin won his fifth term with 88% of the vote, the highest ever in post-Soviet Russia.
Analysis & Conclusions
This look at the opposition is almost definitely incomplete. I only briefly mentioned the regional issues, even though regional protests were often more successful and produced results.
More importantly, it is immensely difficult to capture the non-liberal opposition (the Communist or Far-Right angles) at any moment when it doesn’t fit in the same picture. The Western studies of this subject and tertiary sources almost entirely avoid mentioning these groups when they aren’t directly aligned with the well-known liberal opposition, and we only really see them mentioned during the coalition of 2012 and the universal pension protests of 2018. Otherwise, finding proper coverage of their activities is difficult, like during the minor but notable COVID-era resistance. The study of these unexplored movements will be critically important for the Russian opposition in the future due to their oversized role in forming a noteworthy, successful coalition.
It appears clear that the opposition’s largest successes came out of the 2012 coalition and its subsequent revivals after its untimely demise in ~2014. Projects pursued solely by the liberal opposition recognized worldwide still garnered support, but never rose to even half the heights of the coalition’s successes and were concentrated primarily in a couple of Russia’s foremost cities. Instead, the most significant threats to Putin’s regime originated from the cooperation of leftist, liberal, and nationalist movements around core economic or political topics, able to unite the liberal urban populations with those in rural environments to create a unified front against United Russia. While it doesn’t fit the conventional definition of the opposition, Prigozhin’s mutiny and subsequent assassination are potentially the closest an anti-Putin* force has ever come to power. A coalition between Prigozhin, whose war crimes and unfilitered evil I don’t ignore, and the liberal opposition can only be a mind exercise, even though hardline nationalists and liberals used to march side-by-side in the heyday of the opposition alliance. Still, it would have almost certainly toppled the regime.
I apologize for the delay in this article. It took longer than I expected, and I got caught up in a hectic time of schoolwork. The article that was meant to be published this month — The Russian Opposition After Peace in Ukraine — will instead come out in June alongside The Economics of Russia’s Energy Exports (though this hopefully won’t reach the same gargantuan size as this piece). However, I am considering reworking its core prompt due to the decreasing likelihood of peace this year and new perspectives that emerged while researching this topic.