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This article is part of Liberty Amplified, a series produced in partnership with the Hoover Institution’s Human Security Project and the Hoover Institution Library & Archives, featuring voices that challenge authoritarianism in pursuit of freedom. On the latest episode of Today’s Battlegrounds I had the privilege of hosting the courageous Russian opposition leader, historian, and journalist, Vladimir Kara-Murza. Our conversation debunks the delusion that Putin can be conciliated or brought in from the cold. Kara-Murza makes a compelling argument for confronting Putin’s aggression abroad and repression at home. Listen to our conversation here. —H.R. McMaster
Vladimir Kara-Murza’s first conscious political memory comes from August 1991. He was ten years old when ordinary Russians, including his father, took to the streets of Moscow to oppose a coup by Soviet hard-liners intending to restore what Kara-Murza calls the “Soviet totalitarian straitjacket.”
Russians were “armed with nothing except their dignity and their determination to defend their freedom,” says Kara-Murza. People stood in front of the tanks sent into the city, and the tanks did not open fire. A seventy-four-year-old regime formally collapsed in three days.
The memory and lessons of August 1991 guide Kara-Murza’s daily life as a Russian opposition leader who has survived two poisonings attributed to Russian security services and endured two years in solitary confinement in a maximum-security prison in Siberia.
Vladimir Kara-Murza’s message is this: “However strong, however solid, however powerful a dictatorship may appear, all that power, all that strength becomes meaningless when enough people are willing to stand up to it.” This message is historically backed by cases spanning from the American Declaration of Independence in 1776 to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the flight of the Bangladeshi dictator in 2024. Regimes can buckle when people publicly withdraw their consent from a system of governance they do not agree with.
While Vladimir Putin’s Russia looks drastically different from what existed in 1991, the question remains the same: how can Russians continue applying pressure by standing up to this regime?
Elections are one such opportunity.
Last week, Russians went to the polls to elect members to the State Duma, the Kremlin’s rubber-stamp parliament. While elections in authoritarian states are not free or fair, Putin and other dictators do put effort into holding them as a form of legitimizing their rule. This is a subtle acknowledgement from authoritarians themselves that governments should derive power from the people through democratic processes. Despite barriers imposed by regimes, elections create moments of opportunity for the democratic opposition to mobilize the population.
The State Duma elections were particularly telling because the Kremlin went to great lengths to exclude Yabloko, the only opposition party that openly opposed Putin’s war in Ukraine. Yabloko, meaning “apple” in Russian, campaigned on the platform “For Peace and Freedom. For a Cease-fire Agreement. For a Life Without Fear.” According to Yabloko leader Nikolay Rybakov, the party’s popularity exploded over the summer, with more than thirteen thousand Russians applying to be party members this election cycle.
In July, the Kremlin’s Central Election Commission allowed Yabloko to register to be on the ballot. However, in August the regime changed course when Rodina (Motherland), a pro-Kremlin nationalist party, filed a lawsuit against Yabloko accusing the party of copyright infringement and violating campaign spending limits. In only ten days, Rodina produced forty pages of arguments against Yabloko. According to the Russian Election Monitor, a group of European scholars and public officials, language in the arguments resembles language in documents written by the Russian Ministry of Justice and the FSB, suggesting that the Kremlin was involved in producing the case. The case went to trial, and the Russian Supreme Court subsequently banned Yabloko from the ballot. This sequence of events follows the playbook described in the book Spin Dictators—autocrats who prefer to cast their repressive acts as legitimate through show trials and other sham democratic processes rather than exclusive use of force.
The same day the party was banned, Yabloko deputy chair Lev Shlosberg was sentenced to eleven years and one month in a penal colony for publicly opposing Putin’s war. What would be considered free speech in the United States was referred to by the court as “repeated discreditation of the Russian Armed Forces.”
Kara-Murza’s response to these events is a question all observers of the Moscow regime should be asking: “If Putin is so popular, then why is he so afraid of allowing opponents on the ballot?” This question also encourages observers to focus on the regime’s actions rather than its propaganda.
Dictators hold elections only with pre-determined outcomes. Creating an opportunity for an opposition party to have electoral success is disastrous for the claimed legitimacy of a regime amongst its own people and amongst Western democracies. This was most clearly demonstrated in the 2024 Venezuelan presidential election, where dictator Nicolás Maduro declared victory without evidence while reports from independent observers and tally sheets published by the opposition indicate that Maduro lost to opposition candidate Edmundo González. The United States was one of a number of countries to publicly congratulate González on his victory and called for a peaceful transition of power.
Banning Yabloko is an acknowledgement from the Moscow regime that an anti-war party winning even a single seat is a threat to Putin’s power—therefore dissent will not be tolerated.
By American standards, Yabloko’s campaign may seem like a failure because it did not win representation in the State Duma. But authoritarian elections are not free and fair and cannot be judged by American metrics of success. Yabloko leaders voiced this perspective when they addressed their supporters after the election, saying, “Thanks to your activity, the whole country and the whole world have seen that millions of Russians stand for peace.”
The election was an opportunity to signal discontent and a break from the regime-imposed narrative that the so-called “special military operation” in Ukraine is supported by Russians. Yabloko is a sign of hope that even after twenty-seven years of Putin’s rule, another viewpoint exists.
Kara-Murza said it is particularly encouraging to see young people attracted to Yabloko because they are the “generation of people in Russia who have no other political memory, who only know Vladimir Putin.” Young people filled the crowd of protesters outside the court during the Yabloko hearing, and young people are the ones filming viral videos of themselves dancing with apples. Even though they have never witnessed a truly democratic election in Russia, young people mobilized by Yabloko are standing up to the regime.
In addition to young people, there are the Russians of Kara-Murza’s generation. These ’90s kids were raised in an imperfect democracy, but a democracy nonetheless. These are the young people who watched their parents stand in front of tanks until the tanks stopped.
The opposition mobilizing the population in a regime-controlled election this year lacked the transformative power of the 1991 August Revolution, but courageous Russians did reignite hope that there can be a different, post-Putin Russia. “I know that all of this [democratic Russia] is very much possible because I have seen it with my own eyes,” says Kara-Murza.
Carolyn Kennedy received a BA in international relations from Stanford University and is part of the Human Security Project research team.
Liberty Amplified features the voices of those who defy autocracy in pursuit of freedom. It is produced in partnership with the Hoover Institution’s Human Security Project and the Hoover Institution Library & Archives.