Last year, 70-year-old Oleg Orlov published a post on Facebook in which he wrote that Russia has once again become a totalitarian state, a fascist one. The text was a Russian translation of an article which he wrote for the French Mediapart.
Now he is on trial for discrediting the Russian army. He faces three years in prison.
– I obviously don’t want to go to prison, even though I understand that it might be inevitable. But what should I do? Ask for forgiveness, cry and say I’ll never do it again, I’m not going to do it, Orlov told Reuters.
Received the Nobel Prize
He was for a long time one of the leaders of Memorial, Russia’s oldest and most reputable human rights organization. For their work, they received the Nobel Peace Prize last year, together with the Belarusian human rights activist Ales Byalyatski and the Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties.
A year earlier, Russia’s Supreme Court decided to dissolve the organization.
In court, Orlov is defended by another Nobel laureate, journalist Dmitry Muratov at Novaya gazeta.
– Those who filed a complaint against Orlov found a convenient opponent. However, they did nothing during the eight months that Prigozhin discredited the army because they simply did not dare, he says.
“The state interferes in everything”
Orlov compares Putin’s Russia to the situation that prevailed when Leonid Brezhnev was president of the Soviet Union in the 60s.
– Russia is going backwards. We have left communism but returned to a different kind of totalitarianism. I call it fascism. The state interferes in everything. Not only politics but also the economy and culture are subordinate to the state. Even privacy.
Putin supporters tend to dismiss the critics as Western-controlled voices for a small minority in Russian society.
– If they think that I and my like-minded people do not represent anyone, then why is the state machinery so intent on suppressing us?