Vladimir Putin has completed a remarkable career arc. He began the era of Putinism in the year 2000 by ending the war between organized crime groups and bringing stability to Russia. Over the past year, he has sent the country plummeting backwards into an orgy of violence.
The number of murders and assassination attempts is growing in Russia for the first time in 20 years.
Putin has thrown open the doors to Russia’s prisons, promising freedom and money to the worst killers and sadists if they go to Ukraine’s front lines for a few months before returning home to terrorize their communities.
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The number of armed crimes increased by 29.7 percent over the last 10 months, according to the Russian Ministry of Interior Affairs, and civil society leaders are predicting the wave of violence will only get bigger. The “echo of war,” as Russians describe crimes committed by soldiers coming back from Ukraine, can be heard all over the country.
One of them, Yury Gavrilov, returned home from Ukraine to his hometown of Sol-Iletsk and raped an 11-year-old schoolgirl. Others have committed murder, robbery and arson. Word has been getting out despite the Kremlin asking its propagandists not to cover news about the crimes committed by returning soldiers in October.
Putin was asked at his annual televised Q&A last month what books he was currently reading. Russian state agency TASS reported that Putin “said with irony,” “I will reread the Criminal Code.” To the independent media it was a clear signal.
Russia's President Vladimir Putin attends a meeting with service members, involved in the country's military campaign in Ukraine, at the Novo-Ogaryovo state residence outside Moscow.
ReutersTimur Olevsky, editor-in-chief of Insider, told The Daily Beast, “With his war in Ukraine Putin has killed thousands of people—both Russian and Ukrainian—in 2023, but he smiles and jokes, laughing at Russians. He has recovered, and regrouped with gangster tactics.”
So, why is Putin unleashing hell in Russia and remaking the gangster state?
“Putin is making moves to terrify society,” says Svetlana Gannushkina, a Moscow-based human rights defender and head of the Civic Assistance Committee.
She highlighted the release of Vladislav Kanyus, who did not serve his 17-year prison term for stabbing 23-year-old Vera Pekhteleva 111 times. “We see him pardoning a man, who stabbed his girlfriend dozens of times and who must just be mentally sick,” Gannushkina says. “Nobody should be surprised that the girl’s family is petrified to receive such news.”
Pekhteleva’s best friend from childhood, who does not want to be named, told The Daily Beast, that she is “terrified at night by every creak in the floor.”
In May, Russian authorities legalized the recruitment of criminals from prisons, after the state-funded military company Wagner recruited 50,000 convicts from Russian prisons all over the country. “They are specifically looking for killers,” Olga Romanova, the head of Russian advocacy organization Russia Behind Bars, told The Daily Beast. “It’s as if Putin promotes the death cult.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks as he meets with workers at the Obukhov State Plant in Saint Petersburg.
GettyDealing with crime and violence inside Russia has clearly not been a priority for the Kremlin. The more people are beaten and killed the better, it seems. Putin’s close ally Ramzan Kadyrov, leader of the Chechen Republic, said he would not punish his 16-year-old son after he was caught on camera beating up a defenseless prisoner. “Punish? For what? For beating him up? It would have been better if he killed him,” Kadyrov said last month.
A longtime Kremlin observer, Olga Bychkova, describes Putin’s descent into violence as the “evergreen story” of dictatorships which squash citizens at home while flexing their muscles abroad. “This year Putin has canceled justice by pardoning killers. He canceled the understanding of violence, as something that is outside of justified limits. Now everything is allowed, everybody can be violent, not just the state, that is the mandate for violence. Putin is just pushing the limits, making them blurry and unclear,” Bychkova told The Daily Beast.
The first groups to feel the pressure of Putin’s crackdown at home were minorities, as always; more than 500 political prisoners ended up behind bars, the long-persecuted LGBT Movement was banned as “extremist.”
Russian women also had their access to abortions limited—my home town of Nizhny Novgorod was among the first regions to propose to ban abortions at private clinics, while domestic violence was decriminalized with Putin’s approval and no local legislators proposed to change that.
There is an HIV epidemic that effects hundreds of thousands; there’s a shortage of affordable medicine; and millions of people are living in poverty or dying without the state’s support.
Police constantly detained ordinary Russians and journalists for speaking out against the war in Ukraine or even for commenting on social media.
The mask came off this year. “Before, Russia pretended to respect the Geneva Convention; they don’t bother any longer,” Anne Nestat, legal director of the Docket, the Clooney Foundation for Justice (CFJ) told The Daily Beast.
Dictatorships—including those that ruled the Soviet Union—can last for decades, but history shows again and again that their fall is inevitable, especially when dictators unleash hellish injustice on their people.
Russia's President Vladimir Putin awards service members with service weapons during a meeting at the Novo-Ogaryovo state residence outside Moscow.
Gavriil Grigorov / GettyRussia’s crimes are being carefully investigated, documented, and filed to international courts by human rights defenders like Nestat, who is based in Kyiv. “All of us have the right to live according to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; in the recent decades we were used to think that humanity values the right to live—that was before the Ukraine war, we have not seen such a scale of violence for a long time.”
Nestat and CFJ team have spent six months investigating and collecting evidence on three cases against Russian commanders’ crimes in Ukraine on behalf of 16 families of victims. She recently filed the cases to German federal prosecutors for further investigation.
So far, neither Western sanctions, nor the arrest warrant issued against Putin by the International Criminal Court earlier this year has slowed down the violent attacks of Russia against Ukraine.
Putin is busy telling Russians about his unchanged goals—“denazification, demilitarization and neutral status”—for Ukraine, where he claims “617,000 Russians are fighting.” U.S. intelligence reports on the cost of Putin’s war suggest more than 315,000 Russian troops have been wounded and killed since the Russian army was sent into Ukraine. Add to that startling figure the number who have died at home and it seems there is no death toll that Putin considers too high a price to retain his power at the upcoming 2024 presidential election, which will grant him another six years in the Kremlin.
