What is going on with politically persecuted people? How did it change since February 2022 and fullscale invasion in Ukraine? Is the number of repression increasing? The answer to these and other questions is rapidly becoming outdated. The quickly changing reality requires new analytical approaches from us. These series of articles is an attempt to find such an approach. Everything you will read here is based on computational analysis of the most recent data.
What is repression? What is its role in contemporary Russia? Without an understanding of the scope and design of criminal political repression, we cannot come close to the answer. This understanding begins with the data. OVD-Info is an independent project which collects data covering political repressions in Russia since 2014. This page is based on our datasets.
Criminal political repression is one of the most visible tools that the state uses against its opponents and society as such. Yet, analysing them, we should remember that this is only a part of the repressive landscape of modern Russia. Criminal persecutions would not be so effective without mass administrative repressions, which entail heavy fines, imprisonment for up to 30 days, and significantly increase the risk of further criminal prosecution. Nor would they be effective without years of systemic discrimination against civil society and the usage of persecution practices outside the legal framework.
About the data
This project is presenting the data on political persecutions collected by the Russian human rights and media project OVD-Info. Data is updated every day as events unfold and information becomes available.
We started collecting this back data back in 2014. At that time, the idea was to bring together the information about the persecutions which were evaluated by other organisations, who have been assigning certain statuses such as ‘political prisoner’.
The beginning of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine has led to a surge of violence in Ukraine. But it also led to a sharp increase in the persecution of dissent in Russia. A significant number of politically motivated criminal cases remained not covered by other organizations. Given the increasing scale of political persecution, we thought it is important to paint the picture of repressions as wide as possible. Therefore, we decided to use our own concept and calculation in order to keep the data relevant to the current situation.
Today's data includes criminal cases that OVD-Info considers politically motivated. OVD-Info decides to include cases in the database based on the methodology and its definition of political persecution. This term is broader than 'political prisoner'. Sometimes a political motive in a case does not immediately become obvious, and sometimes it turns out that there was none in a case. That is why the data is updated not only in new cases.
The information gathered as a result of daily monitoring of the media and social networks, as well as the websites of Russian government agencies. In addition, information is provided to us by people who have directly faced political persecution and their relatives, as well as the lawyers who cooperate with us. We also use information from other human rights advocacy and research organizations working on similar topics.
About the persecuted people
Not all people in the presented data are political prisoners, but all of them are politically persecuted. Politically persecuted are persons who have become involved in politically motivated criminal cases, according to OVD-Info. There are all sorts of people here. The mere presence of someone in this data does not in itself imply any evaluation of their activities, rather it helps us understand the mechanics of state repression.
Sometimes the state uses the same tools to crack down on its yesterday's allies and persecutes them for false motives. And yet most of the people who end up in this base are innocent victims of the regime, whose stories should be known to humanity. To emphasise that behind each figure there are people and their difficult fates, we have made this tool to help you understand exactly who we are talking about.
You can click on any statistical summary underlined by
Who is this done for?
This series of articles is intended as a working tool for all those who somehow deal with the topic of repression: journalists, lawyers, researchers and other experts.
These materials are conceived as 'living' materials. The data in them should not become outdated, and the format of their presentation should evolve with user interest and demand.
If you have suggestions on how to develop this material, you can contact the author via [email protected]. If you are interested in more detailed data, you can contact the OVD-Info data department with specific request via [email protected].
Who made it?
This work is above all the result of the efforts of dozens of people working on a database of criminal political persecutions in Russia. In 2023, we revised this database as part of the international seminar ‘Political Repression in Russia, 2012-2023’. This series of articles is a continuation of the same work and is built on top of the contributions prepared as part of the seminar.
This work would not be possible without the support of two institutions:
- L'Archipel is a project devoted to improving knowledge and understanding of the past, present and future of human rights, law and repression in Russia
- OVD-Info is a human rights media project aiming at putting an end to political persecution in Russia
OVD-Info is a unique project that works largely thanks to private donations from people who believe, as we do, that repression should have no place. You can always support the work of OVD-Info with the donation here.