About 116,000 people were persecuted during his fourth term Vladimir Putin (2018-2023), refers to the investigation of the investigative journalism website proekt, dedicated to Alexei Navalny, noting that about 50,000 of them were prosecuted for their statements.

“Russians are often criticized for not standing up to the regime. But in fact, the number of people sentenced for political reasons only during the last term of Vladimir Putin exceeded the rates of the USSR during the time of Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev,” writes the website proekt.

The number of people persecuted during this period exceeded the number of people persecuted during the reigns of Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnevthe research points out, calling it the “tip of the iceberg”.

This number refers to people who suffered criminal and administrative prosecutions, based on articles of the criminal and administrative code, not counting those who were prosecuted under articles on showing resistance to the police or for violations of the restrictions imposed in relation to Covid-19.

The proekt characterizes these persecutions as political as well as repression. According to the project’s calculations, 5,613 people were prosecuted between 2018 and February 2024 on charges of extremist activity, justification of terrorism, and so-called fake news and defamation of the Russian military. “However, if to this number are added those who refused to fight in Ukraine, as well as those accused of treason, espionage, etc., then this number will reach 11,442,” the website writes. Around 100,000 people were prosecuted for administrative offences, particularly for taking part in demonstrations that were not authorized by the authorities.

The website in question points out that during the Khrushchev and Brezhnev periods in the second half of the 1950s and early 1980s, fewer people were convicted under the articles of anti-Soviet propaganda and dissemination of information damaging to the Soviet system than ‘ those convicted in Putin’s last six-year term.

In the case of Khrushchev’s rule, the journalists doing the research chose the six-year period from 1956 to 1961, during which 4,883 people were prosecuted. For the Brezhnev period, the period 1968-1973 was chosen, during which, according to the proekt, 1,057 people were prosecuted.

In its research, the website proekt points out that during the Soviet Union period, most of them were monitored preventively, and the number of such people can be compared with the number of people who are fined for taking part in rallies today. “Dissidents, just like in the USSR, are expelled from universities, fired from their jobs, forced to leave the country, and those who do not want to leave are forced to publicly apologize and swear allegiance to the authorities. However, it is impossible to calculate how many people have gone through this kind of repression in practice,” the proekt says.

At the same time, the Soviet Union was a state with a dominant ideology to which all sectors of society had to submit, while Russia according to the Russian Constitution is a democratic state based on the rule of law and respect for human rights. The authors of the research dedicated to Alexei Navalny, who died in prison (the proekt refers to his death as murder), admit that compared to the terrorism that prevailed during the Stalin era, both the repression in the post-Stalin Soviet period and the repression under Putin is milder, while in modern Russia, at least from a legal point of view, the death penalty is not applied.