Anna Narinskaya in The Ideas Letter:
In 2024, the Russian medical student and activist Daria Kozyreva, now 20, was arrested in part for posting in the streets of Saint Petersburg verses by the nineteenth-century Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko that called for resisting the Russian Empire. In her final statement in court last April, just before receiving her verdict, Кozyreva said that she dreamed Ukraine would regain every inch of its land, including Crimea.
For the posters, she was sentenced to nearly three years in a penal colony—for those last words, she was sentenced to a substantial fine. Repression in Vladimir Putin’s Russia is endlessly perverse.
As of last year, the Russian authorities have been bringing charges—such as “discrediting the army” or “justifying terrorism”—against defendants in political trials for the statements they make before judges, including in their own defense.
The state seems to have understood that until then the glass box or the barred cage in which a defendant sits in Russian courts had been, paradoxically, one of the last places in the country where free speech was still possible.
Total censorship in the Soviet era did not allow defendants’ speeches to become publicly available. What did get out there from Stalin’s show trials were either subdued statements or forced confessions. In the 1970s, under Leonid Brezhnev and zastoy (the period of stagnation), secret transcripts were distributed by the underground press known as the samizdat. Repression under Putin today is both similar and different: It too is sweeping and self-serving, but it is taking place in a different context—politically and technologically.
When political trials first became common again in the 2010s, Russia still had a relatively free press. Proceedings were covered in detail, and defendants used their cage as a platform to speak the truth to a system that was persecuting them. Then, as censorship on traditional Russian news outlets increased, it was social media that took over relaying information about the trials.
But why was even that possible at all?
More here.
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