Moscow protesters vow to rage against the regime

It was about 11pm when Georgy Vorontsov, an opposition activist in Moscow, returned home to find four men waiting for him outside. “They called me a traitor and a dreg of society,” he said. “And then they attacked me.”

Two of the assailants were armed with a type of gun that fires rubber projectiles. Vorontsov, 42, was hit several times at close range in the leg, back and chest and lost consciousness. When he came to, covered in blood, the men had fled.

A neighbour said he saw the unknown assailants run up the street and get into what looked like a police car. When Vorontsov went to hospital, a doctor told him: “This is your own fault. If you hadn’t gone against the system, you wouldn’t have been hurt.” Police refused to open an investigation into the attack.

Vorontsov had previously been arrested at protests both before and after Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in February. His car was wrecked by vandals after a police warning for displaying anti-Putin stickers on his windscreen. In the run-up to the attack, he had received a stream of threats, including anonymous telephone calls in the middle of night.

The Kremlin’s war has triggered a mass exodus from Russia of opposition supporters and independent journalists, with most fleeing to former Soviet states such as Armenia and Georgia, as well as to the Baltic region.

But some stubborn anti-government activists have refused to flee, remaining in their troubled homeland to stoke the embers of resistance. Vorontsov is one of them. “I am afraid right now, but this feeling will pass,” he said. “And then I will continue to fight against this regime. There are lots of good people here.”

Like Soviet-era dissidents or the White Rose student movement in Nazi Germany, whose members sacrificed their lives to counter Hitler’s propaganda, many activists portray their struggle as a clear-cut battle between the forces of good and evil. Although there have been no large-scale protests, there have been numerous examples of individual Russians taking stands against the invasion, often at the cost of their own freedom.

The stakes are existential. As Marina Litvinovich, an opposition politician in Moscow, put it in a Facebook post: “I’m prepared to die for the right to call black ‘black’.”

Instead of the underground printing presses used by their Soviet predecessors, these modern-day dissidents use the messaging app Telegram and VPNs, which mask an internet user’s location, to circumvent the Kremlin’s censors. Resistance is not just online — at least 11 Russian military recruitment centres have been attacked by unknown assailants armed with petrol bombs in recent weeks.

Earlier this month Igor Paskar, 46, was arrested in Krasnodar in southern Russia on charges of carrying out an arson attack on the entrance to the offices of the FSB state security service.

The Kremlin is in no mood to tolerate opposition in any form. Putin has described anti-war critics as “scum” and “traitors” who will be “spat out” by patriotic Russians during a period of national “purification”.

Alexei Navalny, the opposition leader who is serving nine years in prison on fraud charges widely viewed as politically motivated, has used his court appearances to encourage millions of ordinary Russians to protest against Putin’s war. “[The Kremlin’s] system is based on fear,” he said in May. “That’s why to be afraid is a crime against your own future, a crime against your own children and a crime against your own people.”

Not everyone is as brave as Navalny — and the Kremlin is doing everything it can to intimidate Russians into staying quiet. Under a new law approved in March it is now a criminal offence punishable by up a prison term of up to 15 years to spread “fake” news about the actions of the Russian army in Ukraine, including in online posts. More than 50 people have so far been charged, according to the OVD civil rights group. Some were “guilty” of nothing more than reposting articles by banned opposition websites.

As the death toll in Ukraine rises, it is Russian women who are increasingly risking everything to stand up to Putin. There are thought to be thousands of female activists operating under the umbrella of the Feminist Anti-War Resistance, a loose collective.

“We already existed as a network that fought against domestic and sexual violence,” said Daria Serenko, an activist who escaped from Russia shortly after the start of the war, having received deaths threats. “The authorities never took feminists entirely seriously as a political movement. That’s why there were more of us who were free to resist the war.”

They have paid a heavy price for their defiance, however, including arrest, raids on their homes and beatings by police officers and FSB agents, Serenko said. In St Petersburg, Alexandra Skochilenko, an artist, is facing a decade behind bars for replacing price tags in supermarkets with anti-war messages. She was named a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International last month.

About 15,000 have been detained at anti-war protests since February. People have been arrested for holding signs that read “Thou shalt not kill” and “Fascism shall not pass”. In St Petersburg a woman made a sign that read: “My mum said that I could not be detained for these words because Russia is a free country and VV Putin is the worthiest president! No war.” She was arrested within minutes of unfurling her placard.

Some celebrities have also taken a stand. Yury Shevchuk, the singer with DDT, a Soviet-era rock band, was charged with “discrediting” the Russian army for telling fans at a concert in Ufa, central Russia: “The motherland is not the president’s arse that has to be slobbered and kissed all the time.”

Not a single judge would agree to oversee the case, however, and many threatened to resign if they were forced to do so, according to an unconfirmed report. DDT, who were also outlawed during the Soviet era, have since been barred from performing in Moscow. “Rock’n’roll is still dangerous,” said Shevchuk.

Both independent and state pollsters say that about 70 per cent of Russians support what the Kremlin calls its “special military operation” in Ukraine. However, Alexey Minyaylo, an opposition activist who has researched attitudes to the war, argues that many people are afraid to answer truthfully. He estimates that genuine support for the war hovers around 50 per cent.

 “We encountered respondents who said, ‘If I answer this question, then the police will come and get me.’ Or, ‘I would like to answer honestly, but it’s a crime now,’” he said. “Polls in authoritarian countries are different from polls in democratic countries. Even more so during wartime.”

On the streets of Moscow there are few signs of the euphoria that swept Russia when the Kremlin annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 during a military operation that was carried out without a single Russian casualty. “The annexation of Crimea was a big feast, full of joy [for Russians]. Now, from the very first day, it is obvious that this war means not joy but death,” said Greg Yudin, a sociologist.

Among activists the topic of collective guilt for Putin’s war is hotly discussed. “I feel guilty. I don’t know what else I could have done, but when I talk to Ukrainian refuges, I want to cry,” said Tatiana Usmanova, an opposition activist. Not everyone feels the same. “People in Ukraine say, ‘Why don’t you get rid of Putin?’ But they have never lived in a dictatorship,” said Katya, another activist. “They just don’t know what it’s like here.”

For now, despite the horrendous risks involved in publicly opposing the war, many Kremlin critics are attempting to keep their spirits up by dreaming about what Navalny has called “the beautiful Russia of the future”.

“I made the decision to stay in Russia no matter what, even if the death penalty is reintroduced,” said Minyaylo. “When the regime finally falls, we are going to hold a huge rave in the centre of Moscow for a million people. It’s a big motivation. Because, you know, everything we do is aimed at making life as awesome as it should be. In both Russia and Ukraine.”