Voices of Resistance in Putin’s Russia: “La Russia che si ribella – repressione e opposizione nel paese di Putin” by Maria Chiara Franceschelli and Federico Varese9 min read
Russian society is often portrayed as apathetic. This picture overlooks the dynamics and peculiarities of Russian civil society, ignoring the historical context in which it has developed and the absence of democratic political infrastructures in the country. Published earlier this year, Maria Chiara Franceschelli and Federico Varese’s book La Russia che si ribella – Repressione e Opposizione nel paese di Putin (Russian rebels — Opposition and Repression in Putin’s Country) provides a different angle of analysis, tracing the trajectory of Russian opposition from Putin’s first mandate to the present day.
La Russia che si ribella gives voice to five stories of repression and opposition in Putin’s Russia. These testimonies form the core of the book, with the authors detailing the experiences of those who risk their safety and lives to express their dissent against Putin’s regime. The book offers an insightful report on state-society relations in Russia, urging readers to shift their perspective from asking, “Why don’t Russians protest?” to understanding, “How do Russians resist?”“With this book,” co-author Franceschelli told Lossi 36, “we aim to challenge the misconception of Russian society as apathetic. It is crucial to recognise that resistance can take various forms depending on the context in which it manifests. In today’s Russia, rebellion differs from what we typically envision: there may not be large-scale street protests, but a form of resistance does exist. It is an underground and unconventional form of resistance that does not yield immediate results.”
Untold stories
The protagonists chosen by the authors are remarkably diverse. “We chose to tell the stories of unconventional dissidents,” Franceschelli explains. “Each character has a unique experience and background, but they all share a common thread of alternative forms of resistance.”
There is the eighty-year-old Lyudmila Vasilyeva, who survived the siege of Leningrad and consistently contests Putin’s instrumentalisation of the myth of the Second World War. Among the book’s characters, she is the only one not to have left the country. She was detained three times for protesting during the early days of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. During her detention, she reminded police officers that being a hero does not mean finding a new enemy, but instead avoiding the horrors of the past. She has since decided to run for governor of Saint Petersburg, hoping to find a platform to advocate for peace.
Father Ioann Burdin is now a refugee in Bulgaria. During one of his services, he preached an anti-war sermon. By doing so, he became one of the first members of the Russian Orthodox Church to be condemned for holding an anti-war stance. A few hours after the service, he was detained by police, and he was later charged with discrediting the Russian armed forces. His story demonstrates the deeply-rooted complicity of the Russian Orthodox Church in embracing and spreading the Kremlin’s wartime rhetoric.
Grigoriy Yudin is a professor of political philosophy who now works at Princeton University. He was arrested together with his wife for joining an anti-war protest in the first days of the war. In his interviews with Franceschelli and Varese, he discusses the difficulty of conducting reliable surveys in a non-democratic regime, and reflects on Russian society and its indoctrination. According to Yudin, pockets of resistance still exist in Russia; however, he considers collective resistance impracticable now. Therefore, the only way to have a voice is to seek alternative spaces outside the public sphere.
Ivan Astashin has been a militant activist from a young age. In 2012, he was arrested for his involvement in an arson attack on an FSB building in Moscow’s South-West District and sentenced to 13 years in a strict regime colony. He was released in 2020 after his term was reduced to nine years. In the book, Astashin, who knows the Russian penitentiary system well, discusses the intricacies and arbitrariness of the Russian judicial system, which functions as a repressive machine that silences protests and revolts. He joined anti-war protests in early 2022 and was then forced to expatriate. He is now in Germany, where he has carried on his resistance by assisting other Russian anti-war political prisoners via the Zona Solidarnosti (Solidarity Zone) project. Through his interviews, readers can explore the topic of forced mobilisation, which prompted young people to leave Russia with little prospect of returning.
Lastly, there is Ekaterina (Katya) Martynova. She is one of the editors of DOXA, a media project that started as a student magazine at the Higher School of Economics of Moscow. Its editors soon began to address issues at Russian universities, such as cases of harassment, abuses of power, and censorship. Eventually, its focus shifted to political and civic matters following the 2019 electoral fraud of the Moscow City Duma elections. Martynova’s statements provide a comprehensive understanding of the role of Russian universities in suffocating students’ critical thinking. DOXA has continued to advocate for an academic environment open to discussion and debate, as well as to emphasise the importance of disseminating accurate and neutral information in Russia, though it still faces repression.
The fil rouge that connects these individuals is their determination to resist and make their voices heard, often doing it alone. With the exception of Vasilyeva, they share a fate of exile. Their testimonies mirror the experiences of other dissenting voices who either chose to leave the country or carry on their fight by channelling their resistance through alternative acts of dissent.
Through these five stories, the reader gains insight into the authoritarian shift Russia has undergone since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Over the past two years, the authors have meticulously followed the lives of their interviewees, documenting the changes they have experienced. As Franceschelli and Varese emphasise in the introduction of their book, “This is not an instant book,” but a project which saw two years of thorough data collection and reporting. The transformation in the respondents’ lives mirrors the authoritarian trajectory Russia has followed since the invasion. As Franceschelli explains, “Rather than taking a picture, we tried to shoot a film.”
Repression and opposition in Putin’s Russia
The primary trend of Russian internal politics since the unprovoked full-scale invasion of Ukraine has been the tightening of existing instruments of repression. Russia has turned into a country shaped by Putin’s politics, “a country that is the result of a precise political willingness, moulded by Putin’s undisturbed politics,” Franceschelli says. Under Putinism, there is no longer room for political and social manoeuvring. This erosion is not inscribed to the events of the last two years, but can be approached as a process that began in the early 2000s.
The second half of La Russia che si ribella wants to build the chronology of this process; Franceschelli collected all key episodes of repression and opposition in Putin’s Russia, focusing on the time period from Putin’s first mandate to the present day. “It has been devastating to write down the chronology and report all key moments of the Russian authoritarian turn,” Franceschelli added. “It is a realisation of the worsening and [the] erosion of the Russian political context.”
The extensiveness of repression became evident in the first days of war, when people spontaneously took to the streets to protest the invasion. In the first two weeks of demonstrations, OVD.Info reported 14,000 detentions; as the numbers continued to increase, it soon became evident that any open anti-war stance would lead to harsh repression. Within this authoritarian framework, where an open act of dissent involves very high risks and nonviolent protests are repressed, dissenting voices rely on unobtrusive forms of disruption to symbolise their resistance. Instead of neat demonstrations, Russians have opted for less conventional yet powerful tactics. Franceschelli and Varese conclude their work by collecting those tactics in what they call the “glossary of resistance.”
With the glossary, the two co-authors provide a concise overview of the “main alternative forms of participation, resistance, and opposition” that emerged in the last two years. Anti-war stances inside and outside Russia gained a quiet nature, mainly relying on grassroots and performative initiatives. Where protests are not allowed, some have relied on solitary pickets to convey a public message, as well as acts of sabotage, resistance art, involvement in voluntary projects to help Ukrainians, and dissemination of accurate information about the war. Some others have relied on emigration or expatriation to find new platforms to channel their discontent towards the Russian status quo.
Returning to February 2022, Franceschelli stresses that expecting a revolt right after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine would have meant ignoring the context in which Russian civil society functions. She explains, “What I see, and we all see, is a radicalised and polarised country. The radicalisation has been gradual, and it is a result of a precise historical process. The country found itself without a proper infrastructure to channel dissent into a cohesive front that could systematically oppose the Kremlin. What has changed with the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine is the heightened intensity of the regime’s repression. There is no room for political and social participation. This trend has intensified since 2012, with Putin’s third term, and reached its peak in 2022. The problem of Putinism looms over the future; overcoming Putinism and its legacy will be a long and tortuous process.”
An essential read
In the concluding chapter of their book, Franceschelli and Varese clarify that their intention “is not to claim [that] Russian society is essentially dissident.” Rather, this book reveals a side of Russia shaped by Putin’s repression and difficult to glimpse in today’s debate. For those unfamiliar with Russia, this book provides an ideal opportunity to explore the complexities of its society.
La Russia che si ribella proves that Russian society is not a monolith of pro-war sentiment; it offers a concise overview of state-society relations in the country, shedding light on stories often overlooked by the mainstream narrative. This work represents a great testimony to the topic of exiled Russians. In 2022 alone, it was estimated that between 500,000 and one million people left the country. The experiences documented by Franceschelli and Varese allow the readers to empathise with those who oppose Putin’s Russia, both abroad and at home, and to acknowledge the ethical dilemmas these people navigate daily.
The reader is encouraged to set aside preconceptions and delve deeper into grasping the complexities and intricacies of Russian society, thanks to Franceschelli and Varese’s ability to narrate stories of daily resistance with simple yet powerful writing.
Book details: Franceschelli, Maria Chiara and Varese, Federico; La Russia che si ribella, repressione e opposizione nel paese di Putin; 2024, Altreconomia. Buy it here.
