” Every people, especially the Russian people, recognizes scum and traitors and can spit them out like a fly in the mouth. said Vladimir Putin on Wednesday March 16. Words justified this Thursday by Dmitri Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, evoking a “ purification of Russia in favor of the conflict in Ukraine. The discourse of the authorities is becoming more and more violent towards all those who dare to challenge them, as explained by Françoise Daucé, specialist in Russia at the EHESS.
RFI: Vladimir Putin speaks of a “ fifth column », of « traitors in the pay of the West whose objective would be to destroy ” Russia. Who is this speech aimed at? ?
Francoise Dauce: One can think of all those who spoke out against the war in Ukraine, all the citizens – and there were a great many of them – who signed petitions to protest against the conflict. And then, of course, there are all those who have already been targeted for a long time by the Russian authorities, and in particular all the organizations which have been classified as “foreign agents” since 2012, and which are likely to be victims of these threats of cleaning ” of the society.
Wouldn’t there also be the desire to send a message to the oligarchs who are not loyal to him? ?
Against the oligarchs, the threats were especially strong at the start of Vladimir Putin’s first term. We remember the case of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, arrested and imprisoned for almost ten years. Lately there have been threats against other groups in society, activists as Alexei Navalny and its Anti-Corruption Foundation which has been declared “ extremist organization in 2021. But it is quite possible that in the context of war, these threats will translate into arrests in different groups of society.
Seeing your opponents go abroad is also a way of keeping them away and getting rid of them
Does Vladimir Putin want to push people to flee Russia if they don’t agree with him, or does he want to launch a series of arrests and purges in society ?
The two movements are concomitant. On the one hand, we are witnessing a very important movement of exile of the most threatened militants in Russia. And you see a lot of Russian citizens trying to leave, having become aware of this violence and the possibility of the Russian state turning against them. This is a first movement that the government allows: seeing its opponents go abroad is also a way of keeping them away and getting rid of them!
And then the second movement which is concomitant is the repression against people who cannot leave or who choose to stay to continue trying to change the situation from within. For these people, indeed, the threat is very worrying and could be very violent. Especially since Russia left the Council of Europe and frees itself more and more from the rules of European and international law.
There was talk at one time in the ranks of the opposition, even before the war, of a return to 1937, that is to say to the Stalinist purges. But many said at the time that we could not make this comparison. Are we in the process today of switching all the same to something that is beginning to resemble it?
We have the feeling, with the start of the war, of witnessing a tipping point towards ever more violence inside the country, against the Russian population itself. We are not yet at the Stalinist purges of the 1930s, at the Great Terror. But this is what the violence of the speech given by Vladimir Putin suggests.
One can also think of all the repressions that can take place in a context of war against those who are considered the “ fifth column », the term used by Vladimir Putin to designate the « traitors “, that is to say all those who are not united, loyal to the cause of the government. So it’s both probably the reminiscence of the darkest hours of the Soviet period, and the mobilization of tools of repression specific to wartime.
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