Participants

Simon Pirani²; Matthias Neumann¹; Nick Evans³; Judith Pallot⁴;  ¹ University of East Anglia, UK;  ² University of Durham, UK, UK;  ³ King's College, University of Cambridge, UK;  ⁴ University of Oxford, Christ Church, UK

Discussion

“I am using this trial as a tribune from which to denounce the war publicly”, Dmitry Ivanov told a Moscow court in March 2023, just before it sentenced him to eight-and-a-half years’ imprisonment for circulating “fakes” about the Russian army. Ivanov was a maths student at Moscow State University. His “crime” was to write 12 anti-war posts on a student Telegram channel that he helped to set up.
Political oppositions in Russia have been using the “final word”, guaranteed to defendants in the Russian constitution, to communicate with one’s fellow citizens – in the manner that Ivanov pointed to – since the nineteenth century. The roundtable will consider the renaissance of this tradition in the conditions brought about by Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine.
Although overt anti-war protests such as street demonstrations had been almost completely silenced by repression in 2022, other forms of protest have not. In the occupied territories of Ukraine, protests range from defacing banknotes to underground partisan warfare. In Russia and Belarus, they range from writing social media posts to firebombing military recruitment centres and sabotaging railroads. All these methods have been used less frequently as the war has gone on, but civil disobedience has not been completely crushed.
The speeches made in court can help us to understand the political make-up of resistance in the occupied territories, Russia and Belarus. In Voices Against Putin’s War, published in English in 2025, we have published anti-war statements by 12 people and summarised 17 more. If all protests, and not only anti-war protests are considered, more than 100 speeches have been made in the last three years, usually published on Russian-language media outside Russia. The number already begun to grow in 2018-21, due to the repression of, on one hand, civic activism by Crimean Tatar organisations, and  on the other, of pro-democracy activism in Russia. Many are collected on the “Poslednee Slovo” website.
(end)