In Russia, no one is safe from prison
First published at Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung.
In the two-and-a-half years since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began, more than 1,040 Russian dissidents have been implicated in criminal cases, of whom over 300 have been convicted and sent to prison, according to calculations by the independent human rights project OVD-Info. Many of these prisoners belong to Russia’s liberal opposition, such as its iconic representative Alexei Navalny, who died under suspicious circumstances in a penal colony earlier this year. Figures like these, unsurprisingly, receive the most attention in the Western press and can create the impression that political opposition in Russia is solely organized by liberals and bourgeois democrats.
Yet repression in Russia is not limited to liberals by any means: left-wing activists have also been targeted, and indeed are increasingly attracting the attention of the Russian state’s repression. Nevertheless, despite numerous setbacks and the increasingly hostile atmosphere in the country, they continue to respond with solidarity. It is impossible to list all left-wing political prisoners in Russia in one text. One can only provide a brief description of the most typical cases, which in turn offer a glimpse into the scale and nature of repression in contemporary Russia, where denunciations, torture, provocations, lawlessness, and legal arbitrariness have grown commonplace.
The fight for intellectual freedom
The most famous left-wing political prisoner in Russia is 66-year-old Marxist sociologist Boris Kagarlitsky, who was prosecuted by the Federal Security Service, or FSB, for making a joke about blowing up the Crimean Bridge during a livestream. He was placed under arrest in July 2023 and fined in December, after which authorities hinted that he should leave Russia for his own safety. Yet Kagarlitsky stuck to his principles and remained in the country, for which he was sentenced to five years in a penal colony on 13 February 2024.
An international online conference entitled “Boris Kagarlitsky and the challenges of the left today” was held in his honour on 8 October. The organizers presented a new initiative, the Kagarlitsky Network for Intellectual Freedom (KNIF), designed to unite intellectuals in the struggle for freedom of thought and expression in Russia and the territories it occupies. Initially, the KNIF will focus “оn the growing threat to intellectual freedom, exemplified by the repression of prominent figures such as sociologist Boris Kagarlitsky, mathematician Azat Miftakhov, and other educators and researchers who have been imprisoned, branded as ‘foreign agents’, or otherwise punished for daring to think differently”.
Azat Miftakhov’s case became widely known before the war in Ukraine. On 18 January 2021, he was sentenced to six years in prison for allegedly breaking a window in the offices of the ruling party, United Russia. Miftakhov reported that he was tortured. It became quite clear that he was prosecuted not for the actual act, but for his political views — Azat openly called himself an anarchist, criticized the Russian authorities, and spoke out against the looming war with Ukraine. In prison, officials continued to harass him by distributing intimate pictures of him to inmates in an attempt to make him an outcast among his fellow inmates.
A large-scale campaign in Miftakhov’s defence was organized by the academic community, and two international committees were established in his support, the Azat Miftakhov committee and Solidarité FreeAzat. The campaign was modelled on the campaigns for Soviet mathematicians Leonid Plyushch and Yurii Shikhanovich, who were arrested in 1972, tried in absentia, and locked up in a psychiatric hospital for their “anti-Soviet acts”. One of the active campaigners for Azat’s freedom was French mathematician Michel Broué, who had previously assisted other dissident Soviet scientists.
Miftakhov was released on 4 September 2023, but detained again shortly thereafter. On 28 March 2024, he was convicted and sentenced to four years in a penal colony. According to an official investigation, Miftakhov, while watching TV with other prisoners in the colony, had expressed support for the anarchist Mikhail Zhlobitsky, who organized a suicide bombing in the Arkhangelsk FSB headquarters in 2018. One of Miftakhov’s closest friends in prison had testified against him. In neither instance, however, did he admit guilt.
The cases of Boris Kagarlitsky and Azat Miftakhov have received international coverage and high-level support due to the strong connections between left-wing intellectuals around the world. But there are dozens of other lesser-known political prisoners who also need support. Thankfully, the cases of Kagarlitsky and Miftakhov have raised the profile of left-wing political prisoners in Russia overall, and spurred the formation of solidarity networks in the country itself — something that did not occur around the cases of lesser-known activists.
Building a prisoners’ fund
These two cases became important points of mobilization for Russia’s disoriented Left, struggling under conditions of military censorship and bans on demonstrations and even organization. In June 2024, left-wing activists, journalists, friends and relatives, and members of political prisoners’ support groups established the Left Political Prisoners Support Fund. The first post in the organization’s Telegram channel stated:
The Russian oligarchic dictatorship’s machine of repression is gaining momentum against the backdrop of worsening international imperialist conflicts and the impossibility of maintaining “stability” inside the country except by tightening the screws. The total number of political prisoners is growing, and the list of people of left-wing views among the repressed is inexorably increasing. These are anarchists, communists, social democrats, these are people of internationally known and ordinary activists. Seeing this situation, realizing its bleak prospects and having the experience of supporting individual comrades, we [...] decided to unite our efforts for a more effective support of comrades and to create the initiative.
The team is currently developing a website in several languages, which will maintain a list of left-wing political prisoners in Russia. In the meantime, the fund coordinates media work, supports solidarity campaigns, and provides targeted payments to political prisoners. In September 2024, the fund collected 213,119 roubles (2,000 euro) in private donations and spent 230,900 roubles (2,200 euro), of which 200,000 went to pay off a 300,000-rouble fine for Yuri Chilikin, who was released from a pre-trial detention centre in July after six months of imprisonment.
In July 2023, Chilikin posted a photo of a mobile recruitment centre for the war in Ukraine on his personal Telegram channel with the caption, “It’s asking for a Molotov cocktail.” The post triggered a criminal case for “public calls for terrorism on the Internet”. The prosecutor requested six years in a penal colony, but the court, although finding him guilty, merely fined Chilikin and banned him from administering websites for one year.
So far, this is all the Russian Left’s fragile solidarity networks can do to counter the relentless machine of repression. But even this little help can make a difference for a political prisoner. In Russia, supporting prisoners from the outside is called grev or literally “heating”, because in a country of endless cold, everyone needs a little warmth, even behind bars. “No one should be left alone with the system”, says the motto of OVD-info.
Playing Russian roulette with prisoners’ lives
It ought to be noted that Chilikin’s case was an exception with an unusually happy ending. According to Supreme Court statistics, the Russian court system had a 0.26-percent acquittal rate in 2023, and terrorism, state treason, discrediting the military, and fake news about the military were added to the usual set of political articles.
Generally speaking, the Russian (in)justice system is characterized by three rules: haphazardness, ruthlessness, and snitching. These have become so ingrained into the fabric of Russian reality that they have become an integral part of it. “Lawlessness” or “ bespredel” is the best definition for Russia as a borderless space in which one half of the population hides and the other half seeks to catch them. The widespread use of sexualized torture adds a horrifying dimension to the existence of left-wing activists in this man-made hell. The memes “ squat on a bottle” or “ mop rape” have become part of mass culture in Russia, as they successfully play on the savage torture ingrained in Russia’s correctional system.
Punishments for political offenses are haphazardly distributed as part of an overall strategy. The boundaries of what is permissible are extremely blurry, and their violation can be interpreted differently depending on the context or, more often, the mood of the officials involved. The logic of this repression lies in its utter unpredictability: anyone can end up in prison for anything, it’s everyone's fault in advance, and whether one is already in jail or not is a matter of time and law enforcement’s persistence.
The absence of clear rules concerning which specific words or actions can lead to arrest turns the legal system into a wicked game of chance, as echoed in the Russian proverb, “no one is safe from poverty and prison”. This uncertainty serves to create an atmosphere of fear that stifles dissent in the context of a growing political and economic crisis, which in turn increases the population’s sense of vulnerability and hinders the growth of an opposition.
The case of Husyn Dzhambetov illustrates this dynamic well. In March 2022, Dzhambetov was fighting on the Ukrainian side with other Chechen volunteers under the call sign “Bandera”. In a video, he beseeched Allah to destroy “Putin, an enemy of the civilized world”, for which he was put on Russia’s wanted list. Yet after he suddenly switched sides in 2023 and published a video glorifying the “father of Chechen nation”, Ramzan Kadyrov, he suffered no consequences. Dzhambetov — who did not just brag on the Internet, but actually killed Russian soldiers — was not only forgiven, but even promoted.
The lack of a systematic approach to repression is compensated for by the extreme ruthlessness inherited from previous iterations of the Russian penitentiary system. The Russian practice of punishing political dissidents, rooted in the tsarist penal camps known as katorga, persisted into the Soviet correctional labour camps of the Gulag, and was inherited by modern Russia in the form of colonies and prisons maintained by the Federal Penitentiary Service, or FSIN. Russia’s system is now returning to its historical roots, functioning not only as an instrument of punishment, but also as a means of intimidating anyone who might be perceived as a threat to the regime. The war and the feeling of being under siege gave Russia’s repressive apparatus fresh momentum. This process has been accompanied by a growing disregard for basic human rights, with sentences becoming as brutal as possible and political prisoners increasingly subjected to torture.
A telling example is the so-called “Tyumen case”, which became famous due to the scale of the violence — affecting six young men from three Russian cities — as well as the degree of lawlessness and use of inhuman torture. In this sense, it mirrored the infamous “Network” case, in which Russian officials, relying on testimony extracted under torture, “proved” the existence of a terrorist organization of anarchists and antifascists. Under torture, the Tyumen antifascists signed confessions that they were members of a “terrorist community ‘Vanguard People's Will’”, opposed the war in Ukraine, and plotted to sabotage military offices, police stations, and railroads. Relatives of the defendants launched a campaign, but because of the war, the Tyumen case has not received as much publicity as the Network case. All defendants in the Tyumen case face 15 to 30 years in prison. For 29-year-old Nikita Oleinik, the alleged organizer, the maximum punishment could be life imprisonment.
Suppression, spies, and empty symbolism
The degradation of law enforcement standards and the decline in the rigor of evidence collection have led to the prosecution’s growing reliance on a system of informants, severely undermining the judicial process. As a result, many political cases are based on testimonies from so-called “secret witnesses” or from undercover agents acting as provocateurs. The use of anonymous witnesses, whose identities are concealed under the pretext of security, raises serious ethical and legal concerns, as it prevents defence attorneys from cross-examining these individuals and verifying the credibility of their testimonies. These practices not only compromise the rights of the accused, but also signal a fundamental erosion of judicial integrity.
This deterioration of legal institutions has become a critical tool in the suppression of political dissent, as it allows the state to fabricate charges based on unreliable, unverifiable sources. In turn, this reinforces a climate of fear and discourages civic engagement, as people know that their actions could be used against them in politically motivated trials.
The case against a Marxist circle in Ufa, for example, was based on the testimony of a person whom the defendants claim is a provocateur. Sergey Sapozhnikov, a bus driver from Ukraine, fought on the side of the Donetsk People’s Republic and was arrested in Russia in 2017 at the request of the Ukrainian side on charges of robbery and car theft, but miraculously escaped punishment. Activists believe he received his freedom in exchange for promises to work as an agent. He joined the Marxist circle in 2019 and began pushing activists to begin combat training and obtain military gear. He told the FSB that members of the circle were “waiting for an unstable situation to seize power, kill police officers, politicians”.
On 25 March 2022, law enforcement officers opened a criminal case against the circle for attempting to “forcibly change the foundations of the constitutional order of Russia”. Five members face up to 20 years in prison, while the alleged leader faces life imprisonment. Investigators equated Marxism-Leninism with extremist ideology, and interpreted the members’ call for a workers’ union to protect their rights and overthrow capitalist “slavery” as “incitement to violently alter the constitutional order of the Russian Federation through armed seizure of power”.
Paradoxically, while Putin’s government glorifies the Soviet past, those who engage seriously with that legacy are often criminalized. This duality underscores the Russian bourgeois state’s approach: celebrating the USSR as a symbol of strength, while suppressing ideologies that genuinely reflect its revolutionary heritage.
And break your heavy chains
Despite the international coverage of the Kagarlitsky and Miftakhov cases, authorities refused to release either of them, as this would have constituted a tacit acknowledgement that justice had not been done. Maintaining support for political prisoners and building a public campaign nevertheless is crucial to curbing abuses within the penitentiary system. Making the prison administration aware that political prisoners are closely monitored from the outside can significantly improve their living conditions and help prevent the use of violence. Of course, it goes without saying that the close attention devoted to Alexei Navalny was not enough to save his life.
Despite the despair gripping the Russian Left, some, like 18-year-old antifascist Yuri Mikheev, have tried to interfere directly with Putin’s war machine. On 10 November 2023, he was detained on the grounds of a military base in the Moscow region. The FSB accused the young man of planning to set fire to military equipment. Now he faces up to ten years in prison, but struggles to raise enough money to even hire a lawyer.
Numerous sincere young activists, like 18-year-old communist Darya Kozyreva, went to jail simply for speaking out against the war. On 24 February 2024, on the second anniversary of the invasion, Kozyreva laid flowers at a monument to Ukrainian artist Taras Shevchenko and attached a poster to its pedestal with an excerpt from his poem “Testament”, after which she was arrested. The poem reads:
Oh bury me, then rise ye up
And break your heavy chains
And water with the tyrants’ blood
The freedom you have gained
Anastasia Spartak is a Russian social researcher.