Putin outdoes all USSR leaders except Stalin in terms of repression

Journalists of the Russian news outlet Proekt (Project) have estimated that more people have been convicted in Russia during Putin's rule than during the rule of Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev in the USSR. Source: Proekt; Latvia-based Russian media outlet Meduza Details: The news outlet reported that over 116,000 people have become targets of repression over the past 6 years, including 11,442 people prosecuted under felony charges and about 105,000 brought to administrative responsibility for expressing their views and participating in rallies.

In 2018-2023, the courts received cases against 5,613 people accused under articles that human rights activists consider repressive (extremism, justification of terrorism, fake news and discrediting the army).

Journalists noted that more people were tried in Russia under articles on disclosure of state secrets and espionage than during the Cold War. The Russian courts received cases against 4,642 people who refused to fight since the beginning of Russia's war against Ukraine. The most common article for servicemen is unauthorised abandonment of a unit, with 4,373 people convicted in six years.

Courts considered 527 such cases in 2021. The second most common felony is failure to comply with an order: Russian courts received cases against 289 people in 2023, compared to only nine instances in the previous five years. Proekt's authors have concluded that, in terms of the scale of repression, Vladimir Putin "has long since outdone almost all Soviet leaders, except for Joseph Stalin".

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