Faking Free Speech in Putin’s Russia
Inside the Kremlin’s accelerating war on free speech—and its brazen attempt to rebrand repression as “freedom.”
Off to the side of global headlines, the Kremlin’s internet censorship has been advancing by leaps and bounds. On February 11, Russia’s authorities began throttling the highly popular messaging app Telegram and finished their months-long throttling of Meta’s messenger WhatsApp—which is now subject to a full ban. These are just two among a wide array of recent moves to constrict Russians’ information access.
The world should be watching the closure of Russia’s internet space: In addition to exemplifying a global trend toward internet fragmentation, it clarifies the stakes for free expression as a concert of dictators aggressively seeks to displace liberal-democratic norms.
Amid geopolitical flux, autocratic optimism has reached a peak neatly symbolized in Putin’s speculation to China’s Xi Jinping about conquering death itself. From tech governance bodies to human rights forums, authoritarian models that legitimize expansive speech restrictions, prioritize state control, and downplay dissenters’ rights are gaining sway.
On the ground, autocrats are copy-pasting repressive laws to crush their critics and sharing high-tech tools for censorship. Iran’s sophisticated infrastructure for digital surveillance and control, most recently on display during the regime’s bloody crackdown on protesters, offers one testament to the long-term fruits of authoritarian mutual learning. Against this backdrop, freedom of expression has declined precipitously around the globe.
Yet the contours of global free-speech debates are growing muddier amid controversies, in part, over Russia’s external propaganda networks. The Kremlin has doubled down on propaganda spending despite budgetary challenges, and its global broadcasters RT and Sputnik—banned in EU countries following Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine—are expanding their presence from Ethiopia to Serbia to Chile. Exploiting the EU ban for their own narratives, Russia’s propaganda outlets seek to co-opt not only local grievances, but enthusiasm for basic democratic values: RT’s English-language social media features the slogan, “Freedom over censorship, Truth over narrative.”
As Putin’s loose alliance of autocrats shifts norms and clouds the waters, democratic societies should keep a close eye on the ever-evolving domestic models they represent. The record is clear: Authoritarians are the world’s most relentless, aggressive, and inventive suppressors of free speech. Their efforts pose a grave threat not only to democratic governance but to the fundamental freedoms of ordinary people around the globe.
As they confront this threat, democracy’s defenders should offer an unapologetic embrace and defense of free expression—a right whose power is amply demonstrated by the magnitude of the Kremlin’s investment in quashing it at home, and faking it abroad.
Tech in Service of Censorship
Last fall, merely searching for so-called “extremist” content online became a misdemeanor in the Russian Federation. To grasp the impact of this measure, consider the scope of entities the Kremlin considers “extremist”: for starters, the U.S. company Meta; the anticorruption organization once run by opposition leader Alexei Navalny, killed by poisoning in state custody; the entirety of the “international LGBT public movement”; the religious texts of Jehovah’s Witnesses and Falun Gong practitioners; and a 1953 report by the Polish jurist Raphael Lemkin on “Soviet genocide in Ukraine.”
Russia’s ban on searching for “extremists” is far from the only recent shift in the Kremlin’s approach to online speech. Following a spell of relative openness on the early “RuNet,” Moscow has gradually cultivated an array of digital tools to crush free expression. These include pervasive online surveillance through the “SORM” system, outright blocks (initiated after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine) on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and exploratory efforts to fully sever the Russian segment of the web from the global internet.
These trends intensified notably over the course of 2025: Authorities introduced a ban on advertising VPN services, appeared to block voice-over-internet protocols (voice calls on platforms like WhatsApp, Signal, or Telegram), restricted the Apple video calling tool Face Time, blocked the instant messenger Snapchat, and began shunting users toward a state-linked “national” messaging app called “Max.” Operators of large Telegram channels are being required to add a state-controlled bot as an administrator.
Meanwhile, local and regional Internet shutdowns have become a regular feature of life. Though described as a defense measure against Ukrainian drones, they have occurred in regions far from military action. Strikingly, digital regulators—who hitherto relied on a blacklist of prohibited sites to suppress political content—compiled a “white list” of sites to keep accessible while the internet in its entirety is blocked (an approach also witnessed recently in Iran). While this list is nominally intended for use during temporary, localized mobile shutdowns, some experts see a harbinger of wider things to come.
In addition to stifling expression on digital networks, Russian authorities are leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to crush expression online and off. AI tools are being trialed by censors to speed the hunt for forbidden content online, by publishing houses to catch subtle deviations from state-prescribed ideological parameters, and by the security services to hunt down protest participants who dared to speak out in person.
Old Wine, New Bottles
Despite the Kremlin’s deployment of futuristic censorship tools, its approach to freedom of expression remains firmly rooted in the past. Almost forty years ago, a blossoming of free speech helped bring down the social order that KGB lieutenant colonel Vladimir Putin had guarded.
After seven decades in which political dissidents, religious believers, and unlucky grumblers faced arrest, exile, or worse, policies introduced under reformist leader Mikhail Gorbachev (1985–1991) finally gave Russians a chance to access forbidden literature and witness open debate. As one contemporary commentator relayed, the system’s “powerful machinery for the suppression of living and free thought” began to crumble. So, too, did the USSR itself, as long-repressed popular movements for national independence rose to the surface in many of the Union’s non-Russian republics.
Even amid the turmoil and poverty of the post-Soviet 1990s, the seeds of free expression bore fruit. Independent human rights organizations like Memorial spoke openly about the crimes of the Soviet past; independent media like Novaya Gazeta showed how to separate news reporting from political control; satirical TV programs like Kukly mocked crooked businessmen and pompous politicians. When Putin—who referred to the Soviet collapse as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [20th] century”—reached the heights of power in 2000, it soon grew clear that this was a situation he would not tolerate.
Less than a week after President Putin’s inauguration, an armed raid by law-enforcement officials marked the start of a year-long campaign to consolidate state control over the broadcaster NTV. It also initiated a decades-long dive back toward the status quo ante of a media space fully subordinated to the state. The launch, in February 2022, of the Kremlin’s full-scale war in Ukraine proved a turning point, with the last high-profile independent outlets forced to close or leave the country. For the Kremlin, controlling speech at home has been a crucial enabling factor in a war of aggression against its neighbor.
Legal controls on the media ran parallel to other, more direct methods. On October 7, 2006—Putin’s birthday—journalist and antiwar activist Anna Politkovskaya was murdered in her apartment building in the heart of Moscow. Altogether, the Committee to Protect Journalists records no fewer than forty murders of journalists in post-communist Russia, excluding combat situations. In 2024, Ukrainian journalist Victoria Roshchina died in Russian captivity. When her body was transferred to Ukraine, investigators found hemorrhages, a broken rib, and “possible signs of electric shock.”
The regime-controlled media that now fill Russia’s airwaves cheerlead relentlessly for war and levy casual threats to “turn the world to dust.” They boast higher production values than their Soviet-era predecessors and entertain viewers with bombastic “debate” shows that stay within the spectrum of state-sanctioned opinions. Yet such maneuvers should not be mistaken for independence.
One former commentator opined that state TV “runs on military discipline.” Talking points and subjects for coverage are reportedly set at weekly meetings with the Kremlin. In a 2022 interview, one editor remarked, “It’s hard to identify true information. It’s like believing in aliens, or in God.”
Citizens Under Fire
It would, however, be a mistake to imagine that Putin’s speech controls are solely a problem for journalists and their readers. Through a combination of advanced digital controls and a draconian crackdown on various speech offenses—especially so-called extremism—the Kremlin has found ever more ways to reach into the lives of ordinary people. As in the Soviet era, a shadow of fear once again hangs over citizens seeking to share their beliefs, follow their conscience, or speak their mind.
Russia’s draconian campaign against “extremists” casts a wide ideological net. The Kremlin has arrested publishing-house employees over the distribution of books with LGBT themes and briefly jailed a woman who simply wore rainbow earrings. At the same time, it has cracked down aggressively on religious believers whose practices fall outside the state-approved norm: Authorities have arrested dozens of Protestants and Hare Krishnas over their missionary work, outlawed Jehovah’s Witnesses entirely, censored speech from a breakaway faction of the Russian Orthodox church, and banned Islamic religious literature. An imam was tried for “inciting hatred” of the Chinese Communist Party, and a human rights defender was arrested for the display of an “extremist” symbol: the Facebook logo.
Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, thousands of people have been affected by a new crackdown featuring bans on “fake news” and “discrediting the Russian army.” They include a seventh-day Adventist forced into exile after using Bible verses to protest the war; a father jailed after an antiwar picture drawn by his twelve-year-old daughter drew attention to his social media posts; and a 63-year-old railway worker sentenced to seven years for social media posts about the killing of civilians by Russian military forces in Ukraine. (In a bizarre twist on international hate speech norms, the latter stood accused of spreading false information on the Russian armed forces “on the grounds of political hatred”). In 2017, the Moscow Times reported a new piece of political humor: “My grandfather served time for telling a joke, I’m going to serve time for sharing memes.”
Vice to Virtue
Having drawn its own lessons from the Soviet collapse, the Russian regime at home regularly vents its hostility toward individual freedom. Abroad, the same impulses are clear when Moscow dispatches mercenaries to shore up newly installed military juntas in Africa’s Sahel region, partners with China to shut out of UN institutions citizens who might dare to criticize authoritarian regimes, or offers governments from Central Asia to Latin America the instruments of digital censorship and surveillance.
The Kremlin also plays a critical role in advancing principles antithetical to freedom of speech at the international level: For instance, it has been pushing an expansive definition of cybercrime that would legitimize a global panoply of vague laws that jeopardize political speech online.
Despite their “anti-censorship” posturing, Russia’s outward-facing media instruments are no exception to this pattern. Former U.S. employees of RT have openly discussed how they were forced to twist their coverage to match the network’s preferred narrative. One describes being told by editors that “we work for the Kremlin.” True, RT editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan claimed to take issue with the new law on internet searches, which she claimed could complicate her efforts to research and “shame” extremists. But it would come as a surprise to few observers of Russian politics that her “appeals” fell on deaf ears.
Russia’s efforts to cloak its external propaganda arm in the same values it assaults around the globe are nothing new. In the late 1970s, faced with the unexpected force of a global movement for human rights, Soviet leaders directed their propagandists to mount a campaign on “socialist human rights” that would turn scrutiny back on the capitalist states and dim Western enthusiasm for harping on these issues. It was, overwhelmingly, an outward-facing project. For domestic audiences, Soviet outlets rarely used the term “human rights”—until Gorbachev’s reforms, when international human rights engagement unexpectedly became a lever for freeing prisoners of conscience and reforming Soviet law.
Then and now, the gulf between domestic and foreign propaganda shows a limit to authoritarian self-confidence. As Joseph Siegle has noted in a report for NED’s International Forum, rather than directly peddling an unattractive political model, today’s authoritarian information operations often camouflage themselves by focusing on genuine local grievances. In this vein, RT’s sloganeering—along with the Kremlin’s voluminous investments in repression at home—might be seen as a tacit tribute to the political power of free speech.
Recognizing that their true programs may win few popularity contests, dictators instead identify themselves with the right they aim to dismantle. This cognitive dissonance may point to an opportunity for democratic societies—if they can reclaim the mantle of fundamental values, above all free expression, that dictators fear.
Speaking Back
No societies, including democratic ones, are immune from threats to free speech. Robust discussion on and attention to defending this fundamental freedom is pivotal everywhere—not least within democracies as they grapple with responding to Russia’s foreign influence efforts. It is by no means to dismiss these critical conversations that I here point out: The global contest between autocratic and democratic systems, governance models, and cyber norms is also a struggle for the future of free expression.
Although today’s autocrats delight in mimicking democracies’ justifications for digital speech policing, they occupy a league of their own when it comes to the breadth of expression they suppress and the draconian punishments they impose—not to mention the absence of any mechanisms that might let citizens demand a change of course. The closed digital environment now taking shape in Russia has long been a reality in settings like Iran, North Korea, and, most prominently, China.
As autocrats know all too well, democracy is impossible without the freedom of expression, and free speech is among the first casualties when autocratic cyber and political models spread. We can see this from the temporarily occupied territories in Ukraine, where a controlled internet and the brutal suppression of dissent have followed rapidly in the Russian army’s wake, to Southeast Asia, where PRC companies have shared the tools and know-how for censorship online.
To respond to this global antidemocratic onslaught in a way that fortifies, rather than undermines, free expression, civil society has an essential role to play. As censored, state-dominated internet environments become a reality across more and more of the globe, civil society actors develop technical workarounds that give independent minds a chance to seek out information, and independent voices a chance to be heard. They show us how to counter lies and propaganda with more speech, rather than the heavy hand of the state. Instead of adding to the ledger of censorship, civil society–led responses to Russia’s machinery of repression give voice: They document the plight of prisoners of conscience, uncover information the Kremlin would prefer to keep under the rug, and offer solidarity and support to the victims of Putin’s relentless campaign to silence dissent.
These courageous dissenters are investigative journalists who have faced down state harassment, exile, and cyberattacks to keep independent Russian-language reporting accessible. They are leaders like former political prisoner Vladimir Kara-Murza, a survivor of multiple poisonings who was finally sent to a Siberian prison on charges that included “disseminating false information about the army of the Russian Federation.” Released in a 2024 prisoner exchange, he keeps calling for a free Russia and an end to Putin’s war in Ukraine. They are, too, lesser-known names like Natalia Arno, targeted with a nerve agent in Prague, whose foundation provides a space for Russians who will not be silenced to regroup and recharge. They are politicians and programmers, analysts and activists, struggling tirelessly for their fellow citizens’ rights to think, speak, and live freely.
Where authoritarian propaganda seeks to muddy the waters, the voices of frontline human rights defenders bring clarity. As Putin and his allies position themselves as shapers of a new global order, the rest of us would do well to heed their lessons—and have their backs.
Beth Kerley is senior program officer at the National Endowment for Democracy’s International Forum for Democratic Studies, and editor and contributor to the Forum’s series of publications on emerging technologies and democracy. She holds a PhD in History from Harvard University, where she wrote a dissertation examining the treatment of human rights issues in late Soviet formal and public diplomacy. The views expressed in this article are her own.
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