“Human security comes only with human rights and the rule of law. Human rights are the basis for creating strong and accountable states without which there can be no political stability or social progress.” – Irene Khan

Part I: Mikhail Gorbachev & The Rise of Democracy in 1980s Russia

The Soviet Union in the 1980s was reeling from a suffering economy, rampant corruption, and extreme wealth inequality; millions starved even as state officials traveled around in limousines and private planes. Accompanying this, the deaths of three consecutive Soviet leaders during the first half of the decade — Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko, destabilized the superpower even more than it already was.

Food shortages were a serious problem for the entire country. Significantly more money was being channeled into military projects, such as the disastrous war in Afghanistan that lasted for ten years from 1979 to 1989, and the needs of the people were being neglected, if not downright ignored. Agriculture declined, and the Soviet Union was forced to import large sums of wheat from their biggest rivals, namely the United States.

This was the atmosphere in which the then 54-year-old Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985. The Marked One, as he was named for the distinct birthmark on his forehead, he was one of the youngest members of the Communist Party and his goals were to reform and modernize the Soviet Union which had fallen — even without the kind of economic crisis they were facing at the beginning of his administration, into stagnation and recession. Gorbachev was a communist, but he believed that the methods of the USSR and the way that communism had been abused and executed by past Soviet leaders were devastating and wrong.

As he wrote, “Communist ideology in its pure form is akin to Christianity. Its main ideas are the brotherhood of all peoples irrespective of their nationality, justice and equality, peace, and an end to hostility between peoples. It is true that communism was used to camouflage a totalitarian regime. But in its essence communism is a humanist ideology, and it never had anything in common with the misanthropic ideology of fascism.”

In acknowledging what he called the corruption of communism by other leaders, including people like Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Kim Il Sung, and the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime of Cambodia who all used the label as a cover for their fascist and inhuman agendas, Gorbachev demonstrated a unique perspective on the subject of communism and proves that he possessed an idealized — perhaps even real understanding of the system that few ever did, and even fewer do. Still, his transition throughout his political career from a communist to a social democrat reflect that perhaps he grew to understand that communism’s flaws were just too many to be effective in practice, and that its name had become so stained with the blood of millions of innocents that it was a toxic label altogether.

It was with this mindset that Gorbachev became general secretary of the Soviet Union, and over the course of his six-and-a-half year administration, he would attempt to implement new solutions to radically transform and advance the Soviet Union, much to the annoyance of the older Party members who represented the entrenched system of oppression and control in the USSR’s history.

Gorbachev’s Reforms

His two main policies were perestroika and glasnost, which translate to “restructuring” and “openness” in English, respectively. The former was an attempt to modernize the Soviet economy by shifting away from absolute centralization to a more capitalistic and free market-based system, even if he did not use the label. Centralized production, Gorbachev understood, where all elements of business were controlled by the government and factories were told what to make, how much of it to make, and what their prices should be, was extremely ineffective and was causing the Soviet Union to fall far behind the free world fast.

Under this system, there was no competition, and people had no incentives to do better, causing stagnation rather than advancement. And despite the old Soviet doctrine that claimed absolute centralization was better for the people, many were being denied basic necessities. To remedy this, Gorbachev implemented a new market model to give businesses more autonomy with the goal of stimulating a freer market that would gradually and naturally lead to balance in the system.

The reforms saw that while the budgets of businesses were still set by the state, businesses could decide completely on their own what to do with that money. Workers were also allowed to elect their own managers which incentivized such officeholders to generate more profit, leading to greater efficiency and streamlining, though there were still quite a few instances where the reforms did not make things better.

Nonetheless, it was an unprecedented moment in Soviet and indeed Russian history. For the first time, private businesses opened up and competition in the market began to spark to life as independent citizens working apart from the government could start their own ventures. Under perestroika, the Soviet Union’s economy was beginning to inch towards a free environment where opportunity began to arise and growth began to emerge.

The second main reform of Gorbachev’s was glasnost. Translated as “openness,” the aim of the reform was to liberalize the Soviet social sphere, and started by dismantling the frameworks of repression that had long suffocated Russian media and culture, as well as corruption, which had long been a cause and symptom of the rot at the center of the old Soviet machine.

One of the most famous instances of this was the case of Yuri Cherbanov, who, at the time of his arrest on charges of embezzlement and corruption, was First Deputy Minister in the Ministry of Internal Affairs who held the military rank of general and was the son-in-law of Leonid Brezhnev himself. He had been part of the Uzbek cotton scandal and had protected the cotton mafia while helping them steal the equivalent of $6.5 billion from the Soviet Union. For his crimes, he was sentenced to 12 years of hard labor — he was guilty, and his actions were disgraceful of a public servant, but there is much also to be condemned about the inhumaneness of Soviet punishments.

Alongside rooting out corruption, Gorbachev also wished to increase transparency in the government to stop the kind of transgressions and indeed crimes that had been going on under the cover of secrecy. Part of this, and part of Gorbachev’s goals to create a freer Soviet Union was to scale back the suffocating censorship that had long been a hallmark of Russian government since the medieval days of the tsar.

Newspapers were previously forced to have everything approved by the state, and were strictly barred from printing anything else. Many outlets were even told exactly what to say by the government, as the media was one of the primary tools through which propaganda was disseminated. The freedoms of information and knowledge were denied in the absolute, the state controlled the narrative on every issue, and this form of control extended even beyond the airwaves and newspaper stands to people’s homes. The KGB jammed radio transmissions in cities all across the country, denying their citizens access to foreign broadcasts from outlets such as the BBC, Voice of America, or Freedom, etc. Yet many Russians found ways to circumvent the ban, sometimes by fashioning radios of their own and finding ways to boost their reception till they could just barely make out the words. And they did all this under constant threat, as the KGB was always listening in on the people, and anyone caught or reported consuming foreign media could, at best, face trouble at their jobs, or be imprisoned for anti-Soviet activity, not to mention having their surveillance intensified.

This was one of the violations of liberty that Gorbachev brought an end to during his administration. By decreasing censorship and allowing the press an unprecedented degree of freedom, Russians were for the first time able to access unbiased, objective information and were even allowed to criticize the government without fear of repression or being sent off to the gulags for “un-Soviet” and unpatriotic behavior.

Writers, academics, artists, and thinkers who had previously been forced to live in exile, away from their home, were now able to return to Russia and exercise their inalienable right to freedom of expression. As a result, Russian literature, culture, and art began to flourish. One notable example was that of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the famous Russian writer who had been condemned to eight years in a Stalinist gulag for criticizing Joseph Stalin, the so-called “Man of Steel,” in a private letter.

Later, he would go on to write The Gulag Archipelago, a thorough first-hand account of the inhuman conditions of the Soviet gulags. Based on his own experiences and the stories of other prisoners whom he knew, as well as letters and historical sources, the three-volume series written between 1958 and 1968 and first published in Paris in 1973 described the smothering and horrifying use of terror by the Soviet government against its own people. The detailed account of Stalinist atrocities and the barbarity of the regime shocked and disgusted readers around the world, energizing a new wave of criticism of the Soviet Union and causing sympathizers to reconsider their positions.

The book’s first two volumes describe how gulag victims were arrested and convicted, often for trumped up charges or completely fabricated offenses based on utterly unjust laws, and then transported to and imprisoned in the hellish camps. The third describes attempted escapes and how prisoners tried to resist from the inside. The book is dedicated to “all those who did not live to tell it” and all the proceeds from its sale, Solzhenitsyn later sent to the Russian Social Fund for Persecuted Persons and Their Families.

After the first volume’s publication in 1973, the Soviet press under Brezhnev viciously condemned and denounced Solzhenitsyn, who was arrested and exiled the following year in February. He spent the next seventeen years in banishment until Gorbachev restored his citizenship in 1990, and returned in 1994, three years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. But before he even returned to his homeland, thanks to glasnost, excerpts of The Gulag Archipelago were for the first time allowed to circulate throughout Russia. It was first printed in the literary magazine Novimir in 1989.

Impact

The foundational reforms of perestroika and glasnost significantly altered the USSR’s relationship with the free world, and more importantly, with the United States. Under Gorbachev’s leadership, Russia and America made further and more significant strides toward peaceful relations than under any previous Soviet leader, and his unlikely yet close friendship with US President Ronald Reagan, built on shared principles and on Gorbachev’s honest desire for reform, helped facilitate the end of the Cold War that had defined global politics for nearly half a century.

The democratization that he oversaw in the Soviet Union, partly through his warming rhetoric on a multi-party system and acceptance of the rise of pluralism in the Baltics earned him immense praise in the West for which he was eventually awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990. The opening up of the Soviet Union to the world and to itself ushered in a new era of progress in ending the Cold War, perhaps symbolized no better than the opening of the first-ever McDonald’s in Russia in Pushkin Square on January 31st, 1990, where 38,000 people lined up to taste their first Big Macs.

In addition to internal liberalization and mending ties with the free world, Gorbachev also scaled back the sense of ideological struggle that had long been used to control the Soviet people. Fear and a sense of the constant need to be on alert are tried and true methods for authoritarian regimes to maintain a firm grip over their people, or their subjects, as many tyrants undoubtedly consider them to be. The Nazis had made their people afraid of Jews and non-Germans, making them believe that they were constantly under threat and then using that fear to justify extreme and inhuman policies, and viewed militarization, war, and conflict as necessary to the vitality of the German people. Imperial Japan did the same thing, adopting virulently hostile positions against immigrants and foreigners, and they built systems of institutionalized terror to keep their people in line.

In the same way, the USSR had long prevented dissent and encouraged blind loyalty by making the Soviet people fearful of their neighbors and under the impression that they were locked into an ideological struggle with the world which was bent on destroying them. In adhering to a humanist worldview, Gorbachev scaled back this militant behavior that history has proven many times lead only to devastating and tragic losses of life in unnecessary wars framed for the supposed security of the nation, or at best, suffocating tyranny in the nation whose government screams about these so-called threats or “poisons.”

The economic and social crises that had plagued Russia at the start of Gorbachev’s time as general secretary had also troubled the Soviet Union’s satellite states such as the Eastern bloc and the Baltics, and the freedoms that had been finally recognized and affirmed under perestroika and glasnost sparked a desire for change in these countries. Opposition to communism and one-party rule began to emerge en masse throughout Eastern Europe.

Under previous Soviet tyrants, any such opposition would have been crushed with brutal force, as it was during the uprisings in Hungary and Czechoslovakia in 1956 and 1968, respectively. Gorbachev ended this imperialistic and fascist policy, choosing not to stifle these developments. He brought an end to Soviet reprisals in Eastern bloc countries against democratic movements and thereby to the Brezhnev doctrine, which had declared it official Soviet policy to use force in its satellite states if they stood against communism.

It must go without saying that the advent of freedom, democracy, and pluralism in Eastern Europe was by no means the result of a one-sided push for change on the part of Gorbachev. An overwhelming amount of the credit lies with the heroic leaders in the region including, but by no means limited to the Polish Lech Wałęsa, who founded the first independent trade union, Solidarity, to be recognized in an Eastern bloc country, and the thousands of less famous, everyday people who stood against tyranny in the face of extreme danger. But it must also be said that Gorbachev’s reforms and humanist policies helped facilitate and indeed expedite the path to freedom.

In the wake of perestroika and glasnost and the renewed demand for change in Eastern Europe, drastic reforms of revolutionary scale swept through the bloc. In 1989, just four years after Gorbachev came to power, the Berlin Wall came down, and Poland held the first free and fair elections in the entire region since the Second World War, inaugurating the first non-communist government of Eastern Europe in forty-four years in September.

One by one, the communist regimes of the bloc fell, voted out by the people. At the same time, independence movements, most notably in the Baltics, which had struggled under brutal occupation for half a century, the first time for a year under the Soviets from 1940 to 1941, and then by the Nazis until 1944, and once again by the USSR until 1991, were reaching an all-time high. This was one of the rare times that Gorbachev responded to such movements with military force, as in January 1991, when Soviet paratroopers and tanks rolled into Lithuania and Latvia. 14 civilians were killed and hundreds more injured on January 13th, on what came to be known as Bloody Sunday. The violent crackdown did not stifle the desire for independence among the people of the Baltics, but rather strengthened their resolve. While Gorbachev’s actions here were wrong, it was no doubt at least partially a result of the pressure he faced from hardliners who threatened to undo everything he had done and prevent him from furthering his reforms for the entire Soviet Union.

Either way, eight months later, the USSR finally recognized the independence of all three of the Baltic states — Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia on September 6th. Gradual withdrawal of Russian troops from all three nations began two years later in August 1993, and was completed the following summer.

At the same time, major progress was being made in the establishment of democracy in Russia itself. In March, 1989, the first elections in all Russian history were held to fill the newly created Congress of People’s Deputies, the highest institution in the government. The Communist Party won only a third of the seats, reflecting an unprecedented degree of political pluralism that had been nurtured under Gorbachev. Then, just over two years later on June 12th, 1991, Boris Yeltsin was elected to the presidency of the Soviet Union with 57% of the vote, making him the first popularly-elected head of state in all of Russian history.

But, there were some who could not accept the inevitable current of change. In the wake of these groundbreaking strides toward democracy and liberty, and the fall of Soviet control over the Eastern bloc, a number of hardliners who still clung to the old and brutal order of the Stalinist era launched a coup against Gorbachev whom they viewed as the person who had destroyed the glory of the USSR. Just before the New Union Treaty that would preserve the Union while granting significantly more autonomy to the constituent republics of the USSR was to be signed, former representatives of the Soviet State, the Communist Party, the KGB, and military-industrialists imprisoned Gorbachev in his home in Crimea and, when he refused to comply with them, they feebly tried to install Gennady Yanayev as Acting President of the Soviet Union. The coup and its orchestrators were dogmatically opposed to the ideals of democracy and liberalism that Gorbachev had brought to Russia, and sent in tanks and troops to surround the White House of Russia, the seat of the Soviet Union’s legislature, the Supreme Soviet.

The people of Russia responded at once, loudly and strongly in condemnation of the coup. Up to ten thousand people gathered outside the building to protest the overthrow, but were held back by soldiers under the command of the insurrection’s leaders. But these troops soon defected and joined the overwhelming numbers of people who were championing freedom and standing bravely against the uprising.

Boris Yeltsin gave his famous speech from atop one of the main battle tanks parked outside the White House where he condemned the “reactionary, anti-constitutional coup” and declared the Russian march to freedom “irreversible”.

“We are absolutely confident that our countrymen will not permit the sanctioning of the tyranny and lawlessness of the putschists, who have lost all shame and conscience,” he said. “We address an appeal to servicemen to manifest lofty civic duty and not take part in the reactionary coup. Until these demands are met, we appeal for a universal unlimited strike.”

Faced with the prospect of mass arrest and a waning loyalty in the military, the coup leaders fled Moscow and the uprising came to an end. Gorbachev was rescued and the democratization of Russia was secured. For now, at least.

The coup had seismic and irreversible consequences for the fate of the Soviet Union. Many of the USSR’s member states no longer wished to remain part of the same supranational organization. Over the course of the following four months, beginning with Latvia on August 21st, 1991, one by one the member states of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics declared independence.

On December 25th, 1991, nine days after Kazakhstan separated from the Union, Mikhail Gorbachev delivered his farewell address where he announced his resignation as the last president of the USSR. The Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic was renamed the Russian Federation, and the following day, the upper chamber of the Supreme Soviet voted one last time to dissolve both itself and the Soviet Union. By New Years’ Eve, all remaining Soviet institutions had ceased operations.

And so it was that on December 26th, 1991, just four days short of the sixty-ninth anniversary of the creation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and over seven decades since the October Revolution ushered in the age of communist rule in Russia, that the Soviet Union came to an end.

The Legacy of The Red Empire

The Soviet banner had overseen decades of brutal tyranny marked by the gulags that symbolized a bleak and cruel regime devoid of humanity that massacred dissenters and executed the unnatural smothering of the human condition. Under Stalin, who epitomized the machine of terror and suffering that characterized the Soviet Union, no less than 7 million men, women, and children were slaughtered as a result of his genocidal and fascist policies, according to historian William D. Rubinstein’s conservative estimate. A mass murderer, he created the Holodomor, a mix of Ukrainian words which mean “death by hunger.” Recognized as a crime against humanity and genocide, the instigated famine started by Stalin deliberately setting exorbitantly high wheat procurement quotas killed 3.9 million Ukrainians.

The famine lasted for two years, beginning in 1931, and pushed the people of Ukraine to the brink. Starvation, death, and cannibalism ran rampant. This tragic and horrible loss of life was deliberately engineered by Stalin to wipe out the independence movement in Ukraine and to punish those who opposed Soviet rule, as the region had long been the USSR’s most resistant.

Stalin would go on to commit countless disturbing atrocities throughout his 29-year-long reign of terror, and built a cult of personality around himself, forcing the people of the Soviet Union to worship him or face unimaginable consequences. Anyone who spoke against him or criticized him was imprisoned and/or killed, and all trace of their existence was removed from reality. He utilized the ability to doctor photos to remove people who had become opponents or rivals, and to erase from the public consciousness all memory of those he deemed “traitor” for simply standing up to him and his monstrous ways or failed to carry out his plans.

The era of oppression, greed, and death that had defined Stalin and his rule made the Soviet flag a symbol of tyranny red with the blood of its victims, and prompted his successor, Nikita Khruschev, to pursue a policy of de-Stalinization and attempt to rehumanize the Soviet Union. Under him, the tradition of political repression declined, if only a little, the USSR made serious strides in the space race, sending the first human to space in 1961, and he navigated several complex geopolitical crises with the United States, most notably the Cuban Missile Crisis, with an air of grace, reason, and diplomacy uncharacteristic of Soviet leaders.

He was willing to cooperate and negotiate with US President John F. Kennedy, and ultimately the two superpowers were able to reach a mutually beneficial agreement and stave off nuclear holocaust. For his unwillingness to act with force against the United States, the supposed nemesis of the Soviet people, and to risk global annihilation, he was removed from office and replaced as first secretary of the Communist Party and premier by the infamously aggressive and militaristic Leonid Brezhnev and Alexei Kosygin, respectively.

The emphasis on peace that Khrushchev at least appeared to uphold and what little progress in moving the Soviet Union forward had been achieved under his administration were undone by the policies of Brezhnev which saw tragic episodes of bloodshed like the one that unfolded in Czechoslovakia in 1968. Over the following decades, the Soviet Union would engage in several wars of opportunity with their goal being either to secure or extend their sphere of influence with no regard for human life. The most notable of these was the devastating Soviet-Afghan War which began in 1979 when the USSR, under Brezhnev’s rule, launched an invasion of Afghanistan to prop up the communist government in the country. The war lasted ten years and bore witness to a long line of heinous war crimes, including the cold-blooded massacre of thousands of men, women, and children. The war took the lives of up to 2 million Afghan civilians and 95,000 mujahideen freedom fighters, not to mention over 14,000 Soviets and nearly 42,000 Afghans who fought for the communist government. Displacing over 7 million people, robbing them of their homes, their livelihoods, their futures and their dreams, orphaning children and destroying families, it also triggered a civil war and laid the foundations for the Taliban to emerge in 1994 and for Afghanistan to fall to terrorist rule in 1996. The nation of Afghanistan and its people have been consumed by war and death ever since.

This was the legacy of the Soviet Union, and the sins that had been committed across the USSR’s history were the grave violations of human rights that Mikhail Gorbachev was attempting to move away from during his administration. Not by twisting history to paint a more flattering picture of the Soviet Union, but rather through emphasizing the importance of humanity did he seek to move forward. His policies were all aimed at giving freedom to a people that had never known it, and he did this under the constant threat of hardliners who were staunch crusaders of the brutal Stalinist order.

Through groundbreaking and unprecedented reforms such as glasnost and perestroika, he fostered an atmosphere of civic participation, dialogue, freedom, and democracy in Russia, unlike anything that had ever been seen before. The dismantling of censorship and repression finally allowed the human condition to emerge, and even if not entirely a direct result of Gorbachev’s actions, the conditions for a thriving, pluralistic, and open democracy were beginning to take root. In a country that has long languished in the shadow of oppression, freedom takes time to develop and institutionalize, to replace the habitual chains of tyranny and become an integral pillar of the national culture. Gorbachev was laying the foundations for this to take place.

His actions and its knock-on effects, with the rise of academic freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, literature, and art, put Russia on the path to becoming a free country. That alone makes Mikhail Gorbachev one of history’s greatest leaders. But tragically, the future he had envisioned and the road he had fought so hard to pave were very quickly destroyed in the years following his resignation. It’s been over three decades since the fall of the Soviet Union, and Russia has been dragged back into the bottomless pit of political repression, assassination, censorship, propaganda, corruption, militarism, oligarchy, nationalism, and crimes against humanity by a tyrant who has managed to build a totalitarian regime on the back of a democracy.

Part II: The Suffocation of Modern Russia

The brief era of Russian democracy died with the end of Gorbachev’s administration in 1991. Since then, the Russian Federation has been thoroughly gutted and transformed from a nascent democracy into an autocratic regime operating under the guise of illiberal democracy, a system where a state hides its authoritarianism behind the trappings of freedom, maintaining the appearance of democracy while actually weakening its very mechanisms such as free and fair elections, the rule of law, and civil liberties, all cornerstones of democracy. Under Yeltsin, elections were held, different parties were technically allowed to contest, and these elections were relatively free and fair, but there was no expectation to transfer power. The electoral process was rigged just enough to secure Yeltsin’s presidency.

But while Russia’s backslide into tyranny began under the Federation’s first president, it was only after him that the nation was really consolidated into an autocratic regime. Having first come to power on December 31st, 1999 as acting president upon Yeltsin’s resignation after having briefly served as prime minister, Putin was elected to the office in his own right the following year on March 26th with over 53% of the vote in a relatively free and fair election. Over the following years, the already vulnerable institutions of democracy that had managed to survive the Yeltsin presidency would be even further eroded, and elections went from being semi-free and fair to being entirely rigged with no chance of any transfer of power.

But in the establishment of an autocracy, it is not just elections that would-be tyrants stifle. Accompanying that is also a crackdown on the very environment that supports democracy. That means the suppression of free press, creating a false sense of emergency, or weariness, overhauling the government by appearing to work within the confines of a democracy, and perhaps more importantly, it involves a manipulation of the culture.

These kinds of measures are distinguished as hard and soft policy tools. The former refers to legal reforms, centralization of power, coercion, electoral fraud, militarism, and control of the media. Soft policy tools, on the other hand, are a lot less clearly defined and are more based on ideology. They seek to stoke emotions, especially fear and anger, which make the transformation of a democracy into an authoritarian regime significantly easier and are far more effective than the legal measures alone. For laws without the culture to give them credit are meaningless. A restrictive law that even hints at encroaching on civil liberties in a nation where there is a strong belief in the principles of freedom and popular sovereignty will be met with severe backlash, and will be resisted and overturned. But a law that blatantly violates the same civil liberties in an environment where people don’t care about them or worse, condemn them, will be wholeheartedly accepted and enforced. That is where erosion of democratic culture and unjust legislation combine to create an entrenched tyranny.

The Deadly Crackdown on Free Press

One of the first things the regime did in destroying Russia’s fledgling democracy was cracking down on the free and fairly vibrant and independent media that had developed in the country since the implementation of glasnost by Gorbachev. Over its roughly 25-year-reign, the longest that government has ruled Russia since Joseph Stalin was in power for 29 years, it has incrementally, but noticeably, stifled journalistic freedom and eroded trust in independent media, virulently denouncing them as supposed enemies of the people out to spread lies. A common tactic in many dictatorships, the regime claims that these outlets cannot be trusted, and that only they and media aligned with it are telling the truth. The most recent example is that of Russia’s very last independent news outlet Novaya Gazeta.

The investigative paper announced recently in March 2022 it was suspending all further publication until Russia’s war with Ukraine was over after receiving two warnings from state communications regulator Roskomnadzor about its reporting, which did not strictly conform with the Kremlin’s narrative. For their own safety, they have shut down their print and online reporting and their social media networks. All output from Novaya Gazeta has ceased, silencing the last independent news outlet in all of Russia, leaving the people now completely at the mercy of state-run propaganda mills.

Under the current regime’s several administrations, the Russian government has bought up most of the small independent outlets, with state-affiliated companies buying up the rest, such as Gazprom, the oil conglomerate that owns the largest share of Russia’s media outside of the government. But the state didn’t just rely on buyouts to take control of the narrative. In several instances, journalists and news companies have been threatened and harassed, and individual reporters have been assassinated.

September 21st, 2000 – Iskandar Khatloni, a reporter for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty was killed in his apartment with an ax for investigating human rights abuses in Chechnya.

April 29th, 2002 – Valery Ivanov, editor-in-chief of Tolyattinskoye Obozreniye, a paper famous for investigative reports on government corruption, was shot eight times in the head outside his home.

October 9th, 2003 – Aleksei Sidorov, a friend of Valery Ivanov’s and editor-in-chief also at Tolyattinskoye Obozreniye was murdered by stabbing near his apartment.

July 9th, 2004 – Paul Klebnikov, chief editor of the Russian edition of Forbes who revealed how the country’s oligarchy operated, was shot several times outside his office in Moscow.

October 7th, 2006 – Anna Politkovskaya, a reporter from the previously mentioned Novaya Gazeta, was famous for her coverage of the Chechen conflict and human rights violations committed by Russian armed forces, which repeatedly attracted the wrath of the Russian government. Throughout her career, she had been threatened, jailed, forced to flee her homeland, and poisoned, constantly terrorized until she was found dead in her apartment in Moscow.

The list goes on. Every single one of these people were murdered for speaking about the crimes of the Russian government, just as critics or dissidents during the Stalin era were disappeared and/or brutally murdered for challenging his repressive and bloody rule. And also like Stalin, many Russian officials — not just journalists, who were in the process of an investigation against the government were also found dead. One famous case was that of Sergei Yushenkov, a veteran politician who was the leader of the opposition party Liberal Russia. He had been leading an investigation into the apartment bombings of Buynalsk, Moscow, and Volgodonsk which killed more than 300 people, injured more than a 1,000, and terrorized the entire country. Yushenkov’s investigation was aimed at finding out whether the Federal Security Service, or FSB, was involved in the bombings which were very quickly used as a pretext to begin the Second Chechnyan War. He was shot dead outside his home.

While suspicion points to his assassination having been carried out as a response to his investigation of the apartment bombings, former FSB officer Aleksander Litivenko, himself murdered for revealing the regime’s crimes, suggested that he was murdered because he knew that the Federal Security Service had actually been the mastermind behind the Moscow theater hostage crisis in 2002 when the Dubrovka Theater was supposedly seized by Chechen separatists and which led to the deaths of nearly 200 people, and provided the excuse for the intensification of Russian military operations against Chechen separatists after the country was set to reduce its presence in the breakaway republic.

The list of journalists, politicians, whistleblowers, and dissidents of any kind that have died as a result of speaking out against the regime’s policies is a long and bloody list. The murder of reporters remains an especially alarming trend. But even those who aren’t killed face constant harassment in an environment deliberately engineered to pressure reporters and average civilians alike, for that matter, into self-censorship. Reporters who criticize the government or present a narrative that contradicts with the regime’s are, if not killed, pressured to resign and are discredited. This forces many smaller journalists and news outlets to reluctantly conform with the Kremlin’s draconian laws, or risk danger to themselves and their families.

Trappings of Democracy

Alongside the destruction of the free media, the regime also implemented several sweeping legal reforms as part of its hard policy toolset to consolidate and increase its power. The Russian Constitution of 1993 limited the president to two consecutive terms of four years each. Unlike the US Constitution’s 22nd Amendment which says, “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice,” leaving no ambiguity as to the maximum amount of time one can hold that office, the Russian Constitution stated under Chapter 4, Article 81, paragraph 3, “One and the same person may not be elected President of the Russian Federation for more than two terms in a row.” This allowed for a contender seeking three or more terms simply having to not seek a third consecutive term and wait for the next election to stand again. This is why Putin, after serving as president for two consecutive terms from 2000 to 2008, stepped down and served as prime minister until 2012, when he was elected to this third term as president.

He has now held the office for 12 years straight, as of 2024. This was achieved by a constitutional amendment in December 2008, seven months after Putin first left office, that extended the term of the presidency from four to six years. Thus, with two 6-year terms nearly over, Putin, under the old Constitution, would be forced to not seek re-election and wait for 2030. But a seriously devastating amendment to Russia’s democracy in July 2020 effectively “zeroed out” the president’s previous four terms.

The Unconstitutional Amendment

Earlier, in March, State Duma member and former cosmonaut, Valentina Tereshkova, had proposed a last-minute amendment that would reset the clock on the presidency, stating that the presidency’s two consecutive term limit “applies to a person who holds or has held the office of the President of the Russian Federation without taking into account the number of terms in which he held or occupied at the time the amendment to the Constitution of the Russian Federation enters into force.” This convoluted mouthful essentially means that as far as their Constitution is concerned, Vladimir Putin has never been president before and he would only be beginning his first term if he wins in 2024. The bill was very quickly approved by the regime’s loyalists who dominate the State Duma in both the lower and upper houses of the federal parliament, and approved by the nation’s 83 regional parliaments. This law will allow the current president to almost definitely remain as president for at least another 12 years until 2036, if the regime does not find another way to extend its rule.

In addition, the amendment is actually ironically unconstitutional. Chapter 1, Article 1 of the Russian Constitution, part of the “Fundamentals of the Russian Constitution,” sets out that the country has a “republican form of government,” meaning popular sovereignty and representative democracy, similar to that of France, South Korea, and the United States. The Russian Constitutional Court, while not the highest judicial body in the nation, has the responsibility of judging the constitutionality of all Russian laws and measures, and has ruled before that a central pillar of said “republican form of government,” is the “rotation of power,” or smeniayemost. In 1998, the court did affirm the constitutionality of Boris Yeltsin’s second term as president that would last till 1999 — 2000, if he didn’t resign, whereupon he would have been president for 9 years despite the two term limit which translates to a maximum of 8 years. But this decision was based on the fact that the first 2 years of Yeltsin’s presidency from 1991 to 1993 had taken place before the ratification of the Constitution, and were exempt from consideration as a function of non-retroactivity, which means that laws do not apply to events that took place before their enactment. But the court also affirmed the two-term in a row limit, setting a precedent and creating the foundations of a culture of “rotation of power” and changing government.

Even the federal law passed in May of 2012 that limited governors of Russia’s numerous regions to serving no more than two terms in a row, much like the president, was yet one more precedent that institutionalized this core concept of democracy. Whether this particular law was created for that purpose is a different matter altogether, but it nonetheless had that effect, if only on a superficial level. Thus, the zeroing amendment, enabling the current president to hold the office for three or four consecutive terms, is a direct violation of the doctrine of “rotation of power” which governs all functioning democracies and which is clearly stated to be a core principle of Russian democracy.

But it doesn’t stop there. The measure also goes against the guarantee of the separation of powers in Chapter 1 of the Russian Constitution as well as the principle of popular sovereignty outlined in both Chapters 1 and 9.

Article 10 of Chapter 1 states that “the bodies of legislative, executive and judicial power shall be independent.” In a 1998 ruling by the Russian Constitutional Court that affirmed the principle of the separation of powers, it was declared that the functions of the different branches could not be concentrated into one, meaning acts that even unofficially but effectively transfer all power to the executive, or any other branch for that matter, is illegal. One also finds yet one more compelling rationale for term limits in a 2010 Colombian Constitutional Court ruling in which it barred then-President Alvaro Uribe Velez from running for a third term. It stated that such an extension of an administration goes against the principle of separation of powers because it would render a single presidency more entrenched against the changing legislature and other institutions designed to check executive power. It would “rupture the equilibrium,” as they wrote in the ruling and “distort the structure of the state created by the constituent power.”

This idea applies to Russia, where a third consecutive term would allow the president to exert even greater influence than the system can balance and undermine the institutions meant to check the office of the president.

The amendment also violates paragraph 1 of Article 3 of Chapter 1 of the Russian Constitution, which guarantees the idea of popular sovereignty by declaring that “The bearer of sovereignty and the only source of power in the Russian Federation shall be its multinational people.” One can make the argument that it also violates paragraph 4 of Article 1 which states, “No one may usurp power in the Russian Federation. Seizure of power or usurping state authority shall be prosecuted by federal law,” for this “zeroing” amendment, not even counting the many other strangling measures of the regime’s to increase its power and bulldoze the pillars of democracy, is an illegal — certainly unconstitutional, attempt to consolidate power at the expense of the system of checks and balances and popular sovereignty.

One more culturally significant element of the Russian Constitution that this provision blatantly violates — and to which the lack of opposition is frighteningly loud as a result of the regime’s intimidation tactics, is the protection of the Fundamentals of the Russian Constitution outlined in Chapter 9 under Article 135. It states that the legislature cannot simply amend that section of the Constitution, and to do so requires a “Constitutional Assembly” to draft a new constitution that must be ratified by two thirds of said Assembly or by the majority of Russians in a formal referendum. By protecting the Fundamentals, this system was designed to ensure that nearly no amendment could change the underlying bedrock of the Russian Federation which was supposed to be a vibrant and open democracy.

In utter disregard and violation of this, the “zeroing” amendment essentially nullifies the principle of republican government based on popular sovereignty and the separation of powers by concentrating power in one single individual. It changes the core, fundamental aspects of the Russian Constitution and it, together with the package of reforms that were presented to the Russian people in the winter of 2020, was passed and implemented by way of a simple majority vote in a plebiscite that presented voters with 206 different amendments, and they could only vote yes to or all of them or no to all of them. It was a shell of a democratic procedure, not to mention legally bankrupt, as the aforementioned Constitutional Assembly, a much more elaborate and deliberate method of the people’s expression of power is required for a constitutional amendment such as this one than a simple plebiscite.

 All of this points to the extremely authoritarian markings of the unconstitutional amendment which violate all the main values that form the holy trinity of democracy – popular sovereignty, separation of powers, and rotation of power.

Overhaul

This was just one of the more recent measures taken in Russia to destroy democracy, for in fact the diminishing of popular sovereignty has been going on for years. One of the other ways this was achieved besides directly giving more power to the president was giving the regime’s party, United Russia, a manufactured supermajority in both the State Duma and the Federation Council, the lower and upper houses of the Russian legislative branch, respectively, and comparable in intended function to the United States House of Representatives and Senate. As of 2024, United Russia holds 325 of the 450 seats in the State Duma, or 72%, and 136 of the 178 seats in the Council, or 76%.

One of the things that was done to achieve this was to change the electoral rules to suit the party. To understand how this happened, we must first understand two electoral systems, both of which were present in the young Federation – single member district and proportional representation.

The latter simply means that the percentage of votes won by any party is the percentage of seats they get in parliament or whatever that nation calls its legislative branch. This ensures that everyone, even the tiniest minorities, are represented, and that elections are not a winner-takes-all situation where supporters of the losing party — the faction that is not large enough to form the government, are shut out. Countries around the world, including most of Europe, Australia, Japan, and Indonesia, among several others, use this system, or some form of it.

On the other hand, a single member district system is where a particular region is represented by one officeholder, as opposed to many, much like in the case of the United States where it is combined with first-past-the-post voting that results in a candidate with no less than 50% + 1 of the votes winning the race. What you get is the US Congress, where each senator or representative was elected by simple majority and is the sole representative of their half of the state or their district.

Russia had both of these, meaning that while each district in the country was represented by one officeholder alone, proportional representation was supposed to ensure a more inclusive political system and not only the winners had a seat in the Duma. Putin changed this and got rid of the single member district system to favor proportional representation, or PR, alone. This benefited United Russia because they were the larger party with the most resources. Under this system, the party kept winning parliamentary elections, accumulating seats until it finally achieved supermajority and used their overwhelming power to approve anything and everything the regime wanted.

The regime also significantly undermined the judicial branch, as evidenced by the unconstitutional amendment that was made in 2020 and even the measure taken to extend the president’s term from four to six years back in 2008 being met with little resistance. It further consolidated power by making it so that governors of Russia’s 83 different regions, comparable to US states, were appointed by the president with a law passed in December 2022. Technically, governors must still stand for election, but without the president’s nomination, they will not be funded or supported and their campaigns will be buried in the mud.

Part III A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing

Together with the regime’s foundational reorganization of the Russian legislative branch were other hard policy tools — coercive measures, that it used to silence opponents, methods that are a lot more subtle and difficult to prove than killings and assassinations. One of these ways was through the textbook Soviet method of accusing someone of wrongdoing. The aim was to document a political enemy doing something illicit or controversial, or, if they did no such thing, to frame them. If their actions were not illegal, and they couldn’t be arrested, short of fabricating charges, these controversial secrets would be used to blackmail politicians or critics. This is known as kompromat.

Vladimir Putin is a master of kompromat, and had in fact utilized it extensively to secure and strengthen Yeltin’s rule during his time as president. It was actually Putin’s success at shutting down Yeltsin’s critics that made Russia’s first president appoint him as his successor.

Another element that characterizes the autocratization of Russia, if you will, in conjunction with the violence against journalists, the discrediting of any voice that criticizes the regime, the claim that it alone is trustworthy and the gutting of the democratic system is the over-emphasis on militarism and nationalism.

The regime pushes a kind of toxic patriotism that is more focused on blind fanaticism to the country and to it over honest loyalty. It is the exact opposite of what the journalist Sydney J. Harris was talking about patriotism when he said, “The difference between patriotism and nationalism is that the patriot is proud of his country for what it does, and the nationalist is proud of his country no matter what it does; the first attitude creates a feeling of responsibility, but the second a feeling of blind arrogance that leads to war.”

The regime manufactured a sense of urgency and danger, much like the one that the old Soviet order under Stalin and many of his successors perpetuated to keep the people in line. For a society crippled by fear is less likely to oppose or question the policies of the state. A narrative was crafted that pitted Russia against the free world in a supposed ideological struggle and that they were meant to resist international norms which has translated into a disregard for human rights, which should be the most non-political element of our civilization.

In the specific context of extreme militarism, similar to the kind that characterized the rabidly belligerent and warmongering regimes of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, the regime has used military conflicts and created military crises as a means to boost its popularity and frames them so as to make war and victory symbols of glory and progress. It is a very dark and disturbing world view that relegates peace, compassion, and understanding to the backburners of scorn and derision while elevating destruction and force to the pedestal on which we ought to place the principle of human rights.

Russia’s significant military budget is reflective of this stance that is similar to that of the Soviet Union’s before Gorbachev when the government was spending far more resources and money on weapons and wars than on serving the basic needs of their people. In 2016, Russia’s GDP stood at $1.27 trillion. That is already low for a country of 144 million people, if we follow data from that year. Furthermore, Russia’s GDP per capita was as low as $8,704. Smaller, much less powerful nations such as Malaysia with a GDP of $301 billion – nearly a fourth of Russia’s, and a population of 31.5 million in 2016 saw a GDP per capita of $9,555.

Meanwhile, the United States, which in 2016 had a GDP of $18.7 trillion and a GDP per capita of $57,866 with a population of 323 million – only three times greater than Russia’s, and who also spends more on their armed forces than the next ten nations in the list of top ten military spenders combined at $611 billion, has a defense budget that only added up to 3.27% of their total GDP.

Russia, on the other hand, spent $69.2 billion on their military, which is a whole 5.4% of their gross domestic product, over 2% more than the United States. Yet at the same time, Russia faces a failing public healthcare system with hospitals lacking funds and proper equipment, and doctors and nurses not being paid proper salaries. Sometimes, doctors even have no choice but to recommend transfer to hospitals outside the country for patients to receive care that Russian health centers are unable to provide. But these options are incredibly expensive for the average citizen to afford, especially on Russia’s minimum wage of 6500 rubles per month in 2016, or $97.50. Today, in 2024, the country’s minimum wage has been raised to 19,242 rubles, or about $212, yet the average cost of living is $1213 for a single person and nearly $2400 for a family of four, according to Expatistan.

At the same time, Russia does seem to have a low poverty rate at 9.8% at the end of 2022, and a decent education system that focuses on science, technology, engineering and mathematics, or STEM. Yet on the other side of this the country faces a crippling brain drain problem as the nation’s young and talented emigrate to other nations in the face of little opportunity, restriction, and financial difficulty.

All this goes to show the many problems that Russians suffer from, many of which can actually be addressed and improved on by utilizing the vast resources that the nation has and the infrastructure that had been set up in the late 1980s and early ‘90s. It is thus even more shocking to hear that as their people struggle with these crises, the government spends more attention and money on their military and on engaging in numerous unnecessary wars of control from Georgia to Chechnya and now to Ukraine which only destroy and kill while their people gain nothing, and in fact pay dearly, for their destructive agenda, while those in charge lose nothing.

The disproportionate emphasis placed on the military is an expression of the obsession with force and control that the Russian government in recent decades has pushed onto its people. Harking back to what was said earlier about war being made to look like a symbol of glory and progress, Russia’s campaigns against the Chechnyan rebels in the Second Chechnyan War of 1999 to 2000 were characterized by excessive force and human rights violations. In 2014, the regime illegally and baselessly annexed Crimea and went on to support rebels in eastern Ukraine who wished to breakaway from the country. And over the next 8 years until 2022 when the government launched its all-out invasion of Ukraine, the regime spent a great deal of time and energy on sowing chaos and fostering a false sense of urgency and fear, both in Ukraine and in their own country.

They peddled the lie that ethnic Russians in Ukraine were being tortured and killed and that the country was under occupation by Nazis. To complement this, the regime also cultivated the idea that being militaristic and aggressive was synonymous with being Russian. To be Russian was to support the military and any and all of its exploits. Thus anything the Russian military did needed to be staunchly supported by the people. And so it was that on one side, wars were framed as supposedly necessary struggles and on the other that opposing them, even out of concern for human life, was unpatriotic.

From here, one can already tell how dangerous of a dynamic this is. Nationalism, the twisted and corrupted ripoff of patriotism, is a system that is very good at singling out people who dissent or challenge and casting them out as “others.” Coupled with other elements that characterize nationalism, such as unquestioning fanaticism built on the notion that any sort of challenge to the idolized regime means going against one’s country, this leads to those who are deemed as outsiders facing threats to their reputation, their opportunities, and in extreme cases, their very lives.

Insidious Manipulation

Earlier on in this article we discussed the use of hard and soft policy tools in Russia to create an authoritarian regime out of a democracy. We have covered much of the former, from the legal overhauls to the demolition of the free press and the fostering of rampant militarism. Now, we turn our attention to soft policy. And as scary as the first set of means by which tyrannies rise are, these are even more terrifying.

The author Robert Greene wrote in his 1998 book, The 48 Laws of Power, “The greatest manipulation is to convince others they are in control, when in fact, you are the puppet master pulling the strings.” That statement resonates deeply in all situations everywhere, and in Russia it has become once again a perfect explanation of the environment that has arisen in the nation in the past two decades.

Manipulation and the distortion of reality, driven by the engine of disinformation and propaganda, are on their own more effective than all the legal reforms and media crackdowns that a tyrant may carry out, for these modes of control fire up people’s emotions and build on them, guiding them to exactly where the regime wants them to be, with not a single chain around their hands, but a giant lock upon their minds that will only allow their words and their lies in. In Russia, nationalism, militarism, and religious fervor are just some aspects of the way the regime tries to take control of its people, in an unnatural violation of the original human condition which is to be free, with liberty and responsibility combined for the collective wellbeing of society, not shackled by the whims of petty tyrants.

Religion is not bad. Love of country is not bad. But in Russia, just as support of the military has been fused together with the Russian identity, so too has being part of the Orthodox Church. Under the regime, being Russian means being Orthodox, and not being part of the Church attracts the ire that that concept of “otherness” brings.

An emphasis on aggression has also been on the rise in 21st century Russia. Over the last twenty years, extremely exclusionary laws have been passed with regards to gender and individual lives. Most recently, the Russian Supreme Court declared the “international LGBT movement” as an officially extremist effort, in line with the dehumanization of people that has worsened under the regime, as well as a general disregard for human rights. There is no international LGBT movement, but the ruling will make it even easier for state authorities to target and persecute anyone who stands up for human rights, for under Russian criminal law, taking part in or financing supposed extremist organizations can be met with up to 12 years in prison. Anyone who displays the symbols of the group can be subjected to 15 days in detention for a first offense and as many as four years in prison for a repeat offense. Anyone suspected of being part of the movement can also have their bank accounts frozen, trapping them and cutting them off from any chance at a fair trial or to properly face their accuser in any way, not to mention escape.

A law passed in December 2022 has criminalized anyone saying that non-straight orientations are “normal”, threatening a fine of over $6000. Combined with the recent Supreme Court ruling, and the series of progressively suffocating laws passed before it, the crackdown on human rights has been getting worse. A toxic and corrupted picture of masculinity also accompanies the twisting of the Russian social landscape at a fundamental level. Masculinity is by no means a bad thing, but under the manipulation of the regime, carried out through far more subtle and subliminal means by way of propaganda, media, and pop culture that is designed to normalize a certain behavior, aggression and superiority, notions that always lead to abuses of the most horrid sort, have been unjustly co-opted with the term of masculinity, subjecting women and girls to numerous dangers and forcing both young boys and girls into a strict and narrow cage that destroys their souls, their self-worth, and their livelihoods.

This is all part of the cultural and social manipulation that has plagued Russia for years now and is indeed killing the country. Opposing rights and equality for minorities, for one, has been presented also as being a core part of what it means to be Russian, making it very difficult to highlight violations of human rights without drawing the vicious ire of nationalism. Reality, in effect, has been distorted. As George Orwell said, “The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.” And this horrifying phenomenon can only be achieved with the most insidious and systemic disinformation that strings people up and whirls them around like puppets while making them believe they are in control and that the regime strangling them is defending their liberty.

In line with this is the notion that Russia was once a great empire — many references are often made to the Soviet Union, and that there is the urgent need for a return to that, to supposedly rebuild Russia’s greatness. The government’s irridentist claims of taking back lands that were formerly part of the Soviet Union, Ukraine most notable of them, the obstinate opposition to the basic principles of human rights and democracy–these all feed into the narrative that is aimed at creating a militaristic, aggressive, and weary people, in the wake of which tyrants can usurp power from the rightful sovereign and consolidate it.

In Russia’s case, the series of events that have unfolded over the past 25 years has dragged its people down into the dark and bottomless depths of suffering and despair. Amidst the dense web of oligarchy, corruption, disinformation, violence, and cruelty, the Russian people have been subjected to injustices beyond count. But like in any situation, the butcher’s bill of tyranny does not end there. For it is both the subjects of the tyrant under which the nation slaves and the people outside its borders who suffer greatly. Indeed, the entire world suffers greatly. As Martin Luther King Jr., said, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

Over the last two and a half decades, Russia has interfered and sabotaged the elections of many democratic countries to try and install their favored candidates in power. They have not succeeded in all their targets, but where they have, it has given rise to a destabilization in the current world order that is built on human rights, justice, the rule of law, and democracy. And where it has failed, it has still done great damage to the institutions of democracy that govern these nations by stirring up the unnatural ills of hate and fear.

Most glaringly obvious of the regime’s crimes is the current war in Ukraine, which itself, together with the worsening conditions in Russia, symbolize the darkest forms of control and tyranny, and has already killed nearly 200,000 people, including over 120,000 Russians, over 70,000 Ukrainian soldiers, and more than 10,000 civilian men, women, and children. Unspeakable crimes against humanity have been committed against the people of eastern Ukraine, and testimonies from Russian soldiers who have surrendered about the conditions in the Russian army and their treatment by their own officers paint a desperate and nightmarish specter of the senseless tragedy that is unfolding. But none of this could have happened, or at least with such scale and ease, without the world of lies that had been crafted with the use of propaganda and disinformation. Thus it is that another tragedy can be traced back to the eternally damned and vile phenomenon of lies and untruths that distort reality to make tyranny masquerade as security and oppression as some sort of twisted form of freedom where the oppressed don’t even realize they are being squashed beneath a boot, which is perhaps the ultimate definition of evil.

A Solution

So what do we get from all of this? Yes, many terrible things are happening. Yes, the crises that plague Russia and the trials that hound democracies and humanity around the world can seem overwhelming. And yes, everyday we are bombarded through the news and through social media such as the posts we see on FaceBook that the world is on fire and there’s nothing we can do about it. The very concepts of optimism and hope are beaten out of us, and for some, including myself at one point, the darkness just becomes too much and we turn away from the problems, thereby allowing them to fester and metastasize.

But we mustn’t despair. We cannot. For in turning a blind eye to the darkness we are giving the forces that seek to steal from us our freedom and liberty, and indeed our sanity, the very power they need to succeed. This is a matter that transcends the pettiness of divisive politics and ideology. It is tied to our very existence, and as such demands the attention of all of us, regardless of race, gender, nationality, religion, or social status. As the great liberal and conservative icons of the 18th and 19th centuries, John Stuart Mill and Edmund Burke, said, respectively, “Bad men need nothing more to [accomplish] their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing,” and “When bad men [join together], the good must [unite]; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a [weak] struggle.”

Consider Nazi Germany. Hitler and his cabal of murderous fanatics may have kept the details of their sickening slaughter a secret from the general German public, but how could no one in Germany have known what was happening to the Jews, the gays, lesbians, the mentally challenged, and Blacks in their country? How did no one realize it wasn’t snow that was falling from the skies, but ash? How did no one connect the dots between the horrifying harassment in the streets against Jews and the constant bile that screamed from Goebbels’ radios, or the rounding up of Jews to be sent away from the cities with the gruesome and sickening torture and mass murder they faced in Nazi concentration camps? The answer is, they couldn’t have not. Even with the smothering censorship and propaganda that the Nazis endlessly droned on about, it would’ve been clear to anyone who observed with reason and clarity, the events unfolding around them.

Now, I am by no means suggesting that every single German was complicit in the crimes of Hitler’s regime. There were, in fact, many who strongly opposed the abominable world order the Nazis espoused. There were many brave Germans who stood up to the terrorist force that had hijacked their home, perverting the notions of country and patriotism to justify their atrocities and claiming to commit them in the name of their security. Anton Dey, a former politician and member of the Social Democratic Party from Mühlheim am Main, just east of Frankfurt, risked his and his family’s life to inform his fellow Germans about the truth of the Nazi Party and their sins. There were many others like him who formed the German Resistance, such as the brother and sister Hans and Sophie Scholl of Munich and their friends who wrote leaflets criticizing the anti-human nature of the Nazi regime. It called on people to renounce Hitler and maintain hope.

The two of them had in fact been outwardly proud Nazis during their early childhood, with Hans in the Hitler Youth and Sophie in the League of German Girls. Their childhoods had been smothered in Nazism, and they had no idea that it was wrong, probably as a result of not knowing the true nature of it. It was when they noticed the blind fanaticism of the Nazis that they began to question the propaganda they were being bombarded with. They woke up to the indoctrination that was turning even young children like them into unassuming followers of the Nazi agenda, and risked their own lives to similarly and heroically enlighten their fellow people. In the end, they paid the ultimate price for their actions, but their resistance left its mark.

But just as there were a great number of Germans who actively opposed Nazism, as well as those who personally stood against it but were terrorized into acquiescence, and there were a tragically large number who supported it, there were also those who might not have agreed with it, but did not care enough to do anything about it before they came into power, much less after. Their silence and their inaction allowed the Nazis to steal their country and destroy with their rhetoric and their actions everything that symbolized being German and to, in their name, commit barbaric acts more savage than we can ever really understand.

Evil prevails when good people do nothing, and in that state the triumph of barbarism is far more tragic than if their victory had been secured by utter destruction. For then the darkness that ensues is not just the fault of the evil, but also that of the good who could have made a difference but did nothing. One of the many lessons that the harrowing history of Nazi Germany teaches us is that inaction is never an option.

In Russia today there are many who oppose the authoritarian regime that has subjected its own people to countless injustices and is currently meting out death and destruction upon its neighbor without hesitation or remorse or more importantly, any regard for human life. These people continue to resist today, and the world’s support lies with them as well. But the resistance of Russians who truly love their country is not enough. A wound upon the Earth like the one the regime is now inflicting and the screams of our fellow people demand that we, as “members of the human community,” as FDR once said, stand up for what is right and defend human life without the distracting mess of politics. For politics and faction have no place when it comes to human rights.

The scale of this crisis is, if one can believe it, far greater than the one that unfolded in Germany nearly a century ago now. We may not be in a global war, but the propaganda that brought about the one in Ukraine is able to reach the entire world and be tailored to fire up any conflict its masters wish. In Hitler’s era, Nazi lies were largely limited to the jurisdiction of the regime, and the rest of the world had a very clear view of what was right and wrong. Today, we do not have such clarity, and truth itself is under attack. People are only as strong as their principles, and tyrants understand that, as every other tyranny that has fallen throughout history can attest to. They understand that if they want to rule over an empire of oppression for their own gain, they must tear out from humanity’s heart its innate desire for freedom, or worse, turn it against us.

In so many of the episodes of history, we see this same pattern worming its way through society, gnawing at the very core of our civilization and the humanity that holds us all together with an atomic and divine strength. For millennia, there have been those who have tried to divide us, conquer us, enslave us, and turn us against each other, using ultimately nothing more than lies and deceit to poison our minds and send us running, rather than falling, headlong into chaos and violence. It is a vicious cycle of hate and greed and ignorance that has fuelled countless centuries of suffering and destruction. We might not be able to change history or do what should’ve been done, but we can break the cycle now.

When we look at the collapse of modern Russia and its once-promising democracy, or at the heartrending enslavement of the North Korean people, or the murderous forces of ISIS and the Taliban that terrorize the Middle East, or at the raging monsters of antisemitism on one hand and Islamophobia on the other, of violence against Muslims in the West and atrocities against Christians in the East, at ethnic conflicts among the nations of Africa or Southeast Asia such as in Myanmar, or even at the collapse of our global environment on one hand and the lack of progress to address it on the other, and the many other challenges we, as one species, deal with, we are tempted, and to a certain extent rightfully so, to focus on each issue as isolated tragedies that require vastly different solutions.

Now that is in many ways true. Each of these problems differ from one another in their unique characteristics that outline the details of each crisis and call for meticulous solutions. But where they are exactly the same is at their roots. All of these conflicts are born out of manipulation and lies, all geared at dividing and weakening humanity, thereby allowing those who have lost their way to greed to rise to power. Russia fell to the onslaught of corruption and oligarchy and a system that was wrapped around the singular and extreme obsession with wealth and power. North Korea was consumed by the power-hungry ambitions of a handful of self-serving saboteurs who forced a warped form of an already flawed ideology on a people who were otherwise happy and tore their home apart, consigning them to slave under smothering and brutal conditions reflective of a perverted sense of leadership.

In line with the cycle of violence, ISIS and the Taliban arose out of desperation and used that despair to fuel their misanthropic, anti-human schemes. They are a perfect and tragic example of the kind of extremization that indeed any group is vulnerable to if they are not aware. These terrorist groups exploit the suffering and destitution of people who had never known peace or freedom and had instead been shackled in the shadows of war and death their entire lives. These were people whose rights to education, to family, and to life itself had been denied by the whims of those too blind to see, such as how the decade of destruction and bloodshed that unfolded in Afghanistan during the Soviet invasion gave rise to the Taliban, sadly only one of several quintessential symbols of suffering and inhumanity. As the famous saying goes, monsters are not born. They are made.

The plagues of antisemitism, Islamophobia and violence against Christians and Westerners by groups like the terrorists we just discussed are no different. The cruel rationale behind the latter is nothing more than a corrupt and perverted sense of the need to control. The Taliban likes to tell their followers that the Qu’ran commands them to kill every last American and non-Christian on the face of the Earth. It tells them to kill those who are not Muslim, as well as those who do not conform to their perverted definition of Islam, and that their horrible atrocities are being done in the name of God, who shall grant them eternal life in heaven for their service. In reality, the Qu’ran asks of its followers the exact opposite. It calls on Muslims to show compassion and love and fellowship to all humans and indeed all lifeforms, regardless of whether they are Muslim or not.

In the West, we hear some influential figures and politicians demonize all of Islam for being a force of evil and destruction and claim that Muslims are an inherently violent group who only want to kill Christians and destroy the Western world. They terrorize their people into accepting, if not taking part in discriminatory policies and violent hate crimes and enable, if not encourage, ethnic and religious struggle. In the Middle Ages, the Church said that God made an exception to the Sixth Commandment which forbids murder for Muslims, claiming that God demanded the killing of those who weren’t Christian. It was the same twisted narrative groups like ISIS drone on about now. In the modern world, there is still virulently hostile rhetoric and actions against Muslims mirroring the vile words of the Middle Eastern terrorist forces as both sides convince their followers that these two ways of life are locked in an eternal struggle and that there is no chance for peace until one side is utterly destroyed. There is no chance for harmony otherwise, they say, energizing their followers to support the most extreme and barbaric of policies.

Of course, this isn’t a Christian problem or a Muslim problem, just as the many divisive issues today are not about the sides themselves, but regimes like these need chaos and fear to thrive. Without it, they lose their legitimacy and their reason to exist. That is one reason why Christians are, for these terrorist groups, just an easy target, and vice versa, regarding the general attitude in the West toward Muslims. They would just as soon target and demonize any other group if it suited them, and may all the forces of Heaven and Nature forbid, if any side succeeds in their misanthropic mission, they will not bring peace, but go right on to creating and fighting another eternal enemy.

These are the crises that now plague us. Many of these may sound unrelated to the Russian situation, but they all share a common origin. It can seem overwhelming. Trust me, I know. But against the unprecedented scale of this specter, we are actually able to stand strong. Thinking we’re powerless and alone is just one more of our would-be oppressors’ tactics to discourage dissent and resistance and most importantly, destroy hope.

To effectively do this, we must equip ourselves with the “arsenal of democracy,” as President Roosevelt said, and the tools to decipher the truth buried under the thick and suffocating layers of lies and propaganda designed to make us afraid. We must remember that the tyrants of the modern world will target our emotions to overwhelm us and make us blind to reason. The only way to resist this is to not let our feelings be played like a fiddle. We should subject any sensational article, video, social media post, or headline to extreme scrutiny. We should remember that we are all members of the human family and that we all care for the wellbeing of us all, that hate and fear are the most destructive and ultimately unnatural emotions. We should remember that our own survival and freedom is dependent on the survival and freedom of all people everywhere, and that love and compassion are much more natural to the human condition.

I will not be like the tyrants who presume to tell you what to think by telling you that these are undeniable and universal truths. If they are, then they will resonate with you, even if just a little, and if not, then I still wish you all the best as a fellow member of the human family and resident of this great green planet. But I would also like to say, try to look deeper. Beneath the politics, beneath the numbness that today’s media has inflicted upon us, and you’ll be surprised what you find you truly believe.

In my humble opinion, the world is at a crossroads. The next few chapters of human civilization will either be written in the ink of division, isolation, fear, and conflict, or it will be written with the spirit and energy of hope and compassion. As long as we stay aware and mindful of our common humanity, I truly believe we can choose the latter.

And as President Jimmy Carter said, “Everyone has a right to peaceful coexistence, the basic personal freedoms, the alleviation of suffering, and the opportunity to lead a productive life…”