How Putin’s crackdown on dissent became the hallmark of the Russian leader’s 24 years in power
By DASHA LITVINOVAUpdated 7:45 PM GMT, March 6, 2024
TALLINN, Estonia (AP) — When charismatic opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was gunned down on a bridge near the Kremlin in February 2015, more than 50,000 Muscovites expressed their shock and outrage the next day at the brazen assassination. Police stood aside as they rallied and chanted anti-government slogans.
Nine years later, stunned and angry Russians streamed into the streets on the night of Feb. 16, when they heard that popular opposition politician Alexei Navalny had died in prison. But this time, those laying flowers at impromptu memorials in major cities were met by riot police, who arrested and dragged hundreds of them away.
In those intervening years, Vladimir Putin’s Russia evolved from a country that tolerated some dissent to one that ruthlessly suppresses it. Arrests, trials and long prison terms — once rare — are commonplace, especially after Moscow invaded Ukraine.
Alongside its political opponents, the Kremlin now also targets rights groups, independent media and other members of civil-society organizations, LGBTQ+ activists and certain religious affiliations.
“Russia is no longer an authoritarian state -– it is a totalitarian state,” said Oleg Orlov, co-chair of Memorial, the Russian human rights group focused on political repression. “All these repressions are aimed at suppressing any independent expression about Russia’s political system, about the actions of the authorities, or any
Under Stalin:
……….after the kulaks. Generally, kulaks were only marginally better off than other peasants, but the party claimed that the kulaks had ensnared the rest of the peasantry in capitalistic relationships. In any event, collectivization met widespread resistance not only from the kulaks but from poorer peasants as well, and a desperate struggle of the peasantry against the authorities ensued. Peasants slaughtered their cows and pigs rather than turn them over to the collective farms, with the result that livestock resources remained below the 1929 level for years afterward. The state in turn forcibly collectivized reluctant peasants and deported kulaks and active rebels to Siberia. Within the collective farms, the authorities in many instances exacted such high levels of procurement that starvation was widespread. [Source: Library of Congress, July 1996 *]
“Collectivization” caused hardships particularly in the Ukraine and the Volga-Don region, the heart of the farming belt, where hundreds of thousands of farmers, many of them “kulaks”, resisted. Many were killed or sent to labor camps or remote areas of Siberia to start new villages and had their grain, homes and possessions were seized. Other protested the action by killing all their animals: sheep, cattle, pigs goats and even the horses and oxen that pulled their plows.
Great Famine in the Early 1930s
The two greatest famines in the 20th century were in China in the 1960s and the Soviet Union in the 1930s. The famine created by Stalin policies between 1929 and 1933 is believed to have caused 5 million and 40 million deaths. The hardest hit area was the Ukraine. The historian Robert Conquest estimated that 14.5 million people died, half of them children and 6.5 million of the kulaks, making it the second or third worst famine ever.
The famine was its worst between the spring of 1932 to the summer of 1933. Much of it was caused the decline of food production that accompanied collectivization. This in turn was caused when the people who worked the land were driven away or killed. At the time of the famine four fifth of the Soviet population was made up of peasant farmers.
There was initially plenty of food, but to fulfill the unrealistic quotas, nearly all of it was handed over the state. Some farmers stopped growing grain. There was no incentive to grow it because they had to turn it over to the state, with very little compensation. Those who didn’t turn over their grain were accused of “hoarding” and imprisoned or killed. Marxist brigades searched houses for food; peasant who looked healthy were singled out for intensive searches.
Farmers starved to death while working in the fields. Entire villages perished from starvation. One Ukrainian farmer who returned to his farm in 1933 after a year’s absence, found his village “almost extinct” and survivors living on grass, bark on and occasional rabbit. His brother told him when the food sources gave out: “Mother says we should eat her is she dies.” Survivors of the Great Famine recall piles of bodies and monasteries turned into orphanages. Many children were raised by their grandparents or in orphanages.
Book: “Harvest of Sorrow” by historian Robert Conquest.
https://factsanddetails.com/russia/History/sub9_1e/entry-4968.html
