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Friday, 15 November 2024
Illustration by Mick Wellington, CC BY-SA 4.0
 
Russia is haunted by the ghost of Joseph Stalin. Dozens of monuments to the Soviet leader dot the country; his angular face beams from billboards, bookshop displays and subway station walls; multi-episode shows depict him on national TV. 

It seems a strange twist in Russia's story to rehabilitate a highly repressive leader from the former USSR but it makes sense too. Under Stalin, Russia emerged from World War II victorious and with many countries under its control, which chimes with Vladimir Putin’s insatiable desire to restore Russia as a global superpower.

It's not just Stalin's image that haunts Russia today - it's his tactics. The political abuse of psychiatry that was developed towards the end of Stalin's rule, for example, is being used once again against the Kremlin's critics. You can read a piece about this from Russian journalist Alexandra Domenech here. This week we were made aware of another tactic straight out of the Stalin playbook - using everyday people to denounce each other. A growing number of people are ratting on their friends, family, colleagues, or in the most recent case - their doctor. On Tuesday a Russian court sentenced a 68-year-old paediatrician, Nadezhda Buyanova, to five and a half years in jail for allegedly criticising the war (she denies these claims). The monitoring group OVD-Info (also former Index award winners) has recorded 21 such criminal prosecutions since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and a further 175 people have faced lower-level administrative cases for "discrediting" the Russian army because of people informing on them. The word "chilling" is overused in the human rights world, but this is really chilling. 

So too is what's happening to dissidents in the countries that Putin supports. In Venezuela under Moscow-allied President Nicolás Maduro there has been an intensification of attacks against the leading opposition figure Maria Corina Machado and those who support her since the July elections. Arbitrary detentions, torture, and sexual and gender-based violence by the country's security forces are rife. One such target was 36-year-old opposition activist Jesus Martinez, who died yesterday in custody from a heart problem associated with complications from type II diabetes. Martinez was a member of the Vente Venezuela party run by Machado; Machado has denounced Maduro's election to a third term as fraudulent. He was arrested without a search warrant and with no reason given, according to Machado. At yesterday's Magnitsky Awards, which I was privileged to attend, Machado was given the award for outstanding opposition politician. Speaking from captivity, she dedicated her award to Martinez.

Russia's other ally, Iran, continues its reign of terror too. This week a Kurdish political activist and women's rights defender, Varisheh Moradi, was sentenced to death. Iran h as not yet carried out the death sentence, so there is still a window of time to make noise and we know from our own campaign to free Toomaj Salehi that noise does work. That is if the noise comes internationally. Within Iran itself the regime has less interest and the enormous emotional strain caused by living under that level of repression was laid bare on Wednesday when former VOA Farsi journalist Kianoosh Sanjari jumped to his death after his demands to release four high-profile political prisoners (one being Toomaj Salehi) were not met. 

We're wrapping up with a final friend of Putin - Donald Trump - whose first term can be remembered by him using the very Soviet phrase "enemy of the people" to describe the press. News has just emerged of Trump sending legal letters to The New York Times and the Penguin Random House over their critical coverage of him. Can a leopard change its spots? It seems not.

His re-election last week made many question, with despair, what had happened to the hope that filled the air following the fall of the Soviet Union. This week's news has done little to stop that despair. Perhaps then Stalin's ghost doesn't just haunt those in Russia - it haunts us all.
 
Jemimah Steinfeld, CEO
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Democracy, but not as we know it
President Donald Trump welcomes Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban at the White House in 2019.
Photo by Ting Shen / Xinhua / Alamy Live News

Hybrid regimes, illiberal democracies, democraship, democratura: these are all slightly terrifying new terms for governments drifting towards authoritarianism around the globe. We have been used to seeing the world through the binary geopolitics of the more-or-less democratic free world on one side, and the straightforward dictatorship on the other. But what is Hungary under Viktor Orbán? Or Narendra Modi’s India? And, as the world comes to terms with the reality of President Trump’s second term, will America itself become a hybrid regime dominated by tech oligarchs and America First loyalists, asks Martin Bright?

How Putin’s Russia is weaponising psychiatry against its critics
Police escort Viktoria Petrova to a hearing in St Petersburg in March 2023. Photo by Associated Press / Alamy

There is no bigger crime than the killing of the soul. "Stop punitive psychiatry!” read the sign held by activist Oksana Osadchaya at a solo protest in the centre of Moscow in June.

The activist – who is visually impaired – was making her protest even though the tiniest acts of dissent can lead to severe punishment. She was taken to a police station where she wasn’t allowed to meet her lawyer at first, and was released without charge only after being held for several hours.

Osadchaya’s desperate act of protest was meant to draw attention to the use of enforced psychiatric treatment in Russia against defendants in politically motivated cases, writes Alexandra Domenech.

SLAPPS and Iceland's Fishrot scandal
A panel on the role of civil society in countering SLAPPs earlier this week. Photo by ECPMF

London's high court has sided with Icelandic fishing firm Samherji against the artist Oddur Eysteinn Friðriksson (Odee) in a case that has pitted intellectual property rights against artistic rights. For his 2023 work We’re Sorry, Odee copied the corporate identity of Samherji and uploaded a statement titled “Samherji Apologizes, Pledges Restitution and Cooperation with Authorities” onto a spoof website. This referenced the corruption scandal known as the Fishrot files (you can read more on the whistleblower who exposed the scandal here). Samherji filed a complaint accusing Odee of trademark infringement and malicious falsehood and won.

The case underscores the urgency to stop SLAPPs and our work here continues apace. This week we were in attendance as the European anti-SLAPP conference took place at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg this week. Organised by the European Centre for Press and Media Freedom, the Coalition Against SLAPPs in Europe and the Council of Europe, the conference saw people from around the world come together to discuss the ways in which abusive litigation hinders freedom of expression, and the measures we can take to combat it. Index's Head of Policy and Campaigns Jessica Ní Mhainín moderated a panel (see above) on the crucial role of civil society in countering SLAPPs.

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New issue: Inconvenient truths
The latest issue of Index has now landed with subscribers. In the autumn 2024 issue, we dig into how scientists are being silenced around the world, exploring the science in China that is served with a side of propaganda, the deadly world of scientific censorship in Iran and the pathologists in Uganda being stopped from uncovering the truth behind mysterious deaths.

We hear from Murong Xuecun, Marina Litvinenko and Boris Akunin, amongst many other important voices.

If you want the next issue of Index on Censorship through your letterbox, subscribe to our magazine today.

From the Index archives

The Intellectual

by Wael Sawah
January 1989

 

Today is the Day of the Imprisoned Writer, an awareness-raising event spearheaded by our friends at PEN. As the name suggests it spotlights persecuted writers worldwide. This year Index's Policy and Campaigns officer Nik Williams consulted with Scottish PEN on a list of writers as part of a briefing given to Ruth Maguire MSP, who then raised the case of imprisoned writers in Scottish parliament. On this day, we look back into the archive to 1989 when Syrian dissident Wael Sawah wrote this short story for Index during his ten-year imprisonment.
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