VILNIUS, LITHUANIA - When he heard that Leonid Volkov, his compatriot in the long-suffering movement to bring liberal democracy back to Russia, had been viciously attacked with a mallet outside his home in Vilnius, Vladimir Milov’s response was typically Russian.
VILNIUS, LITHUANIA – When he heard that Leonid Volkov, his compatriot in the long-suffering movement to bring liberal democracy back to Russia, had been viciously attacked with a mallet outside his home in Vilnius, Vladimir Milov’s response was typically Russian.
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that this was totally unexpected,” Milov told Foreign Policy over a beer in an empty and dimly lit hotel restaurant in the Lithuanian capital.
When you’re in the business of challenging Russian President Vladimir Putin, which Milov is, you come to accept a certain number of occupational hazards. Particularly now, as Moscow faces unprecedented risks from all sides—and particularly from within. Still, the attack on Volkov was particularly brutal.
We sat down during Russia’s three-day presidential election in March, just days after Volkov was attacked. Milov knew, as the vote approached, that Putin would try to kneecap their shared organization, the Anti-Corruption Foundation, of which Volkov is the “backbone”—he just didn’t know it would be quite so literal. Volkov’s assailant targeted the dissident’s limbs, injuring his legs and breaking his arm.
Putin, Milov said, “is really looking for some secret button which he can press to shut the movement down. He thought it will be, first, killing off Nemtsov, then killing off Navalny,” he continued, referencing his former colleagues Boris Nemtsov, gunned down in 2015 in Moscow; and Alexei Navalny, who died in a Siberian gulag in February.
But Putin is discovering that “it’s not switching off,” Milov said.
While the non-Russian world may have a pessimistic view of these anti-Putin dissidents, Milov said that they are not as weak as Moscow would have us believe. Look no further, he argued, than Putin’s own thuggish behavior.
On the eve of the final day of the presidential election, Milov was thinking about the twilight of the Soviet Union.
“I first voted in elections in the Soviet Union,” Milov said. “I’m old enough to remember: Soviet GDP [growth] was positive until the very last year of ‘91, but food had disappeared from stores.” He sees parallels between then and now. Rosy top-line numbers and a command economy can only mask deeper economic rot.
This year, at least according to Moscow, the Russian economy is expected to grow by 3.6 percent, leading many to proclaim that international efforts to marginalize and destabilize Putin have failed. But, Milov said, “the fact that the economy is GDP-positive doesn’t tell you anything about the real crisis.”
Milov has spent time on both sides of the Russian state. In the late 1990s, he joined the Russian Energy Ministry, eventually rising to the level of deputy minister in the early 2000s. He resigned in 2002, in the early years of Putin’s reign, joining a Moscow think tank before fully signing up for the burgeoning dissident movement—first under Nemtsov, then Navalny.
Milov described Putin’s war economy as one that helps a small number of people but fails everyone else. Even if Russia’s state statistics agency, Rosstat, reports that the economy is hot in nearly every sector, Milov has written that this is the country’s “Potemkin GDP.”
The military-industrial sector has grown massively since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and now, Milov estimated, about 10 million Russians work directly or indirectly in the defense sector. Those defense workers “are benefiting from the wartime economy,” he said, but the rest of Russia’s roughly 75 million workers are facing tough times. Inflation continues to rage near 8 percent, and interest rates sit at a painful 16 percent.
Amid a labor shortage, worsened by the war economy as well as sanctions that hobble imports and advanced manufacturing, Russia has become increasingly reliant on China—but that shift comes at a price.
“China now occupies about a 95 percent share in Russian car imports. The price of imported cars since December 2021, prewar, has doubled,” Milov said.
The staggering price inflation for consumer vehicles proved so obvious that it prompted a response from Putin in his annual end-of-year press conference in December 2023. He claimed that the prices had risen just 40 percent and blamed Western sanctions.
Milov argued that Russia, like many autocratic states, can generally be divided into thirds: A third oppose Putin, a third support Putin no matter what, “and in between are the apolitical folks who just want to be left alone,” Milov said. The trick for Russia’s beleaguered opposition is reaching that final slice.
The December press conference, normally a tightly-scripted affair, featured plenty of questions about the cost-of-living crisis and pointed queries about when the war in Ukraine will end—clearly prompted by the people from that middle third. Milov said the uncharacteristically dour tone of the broadcast betrayed the real question that Russians have for their president, one that Milov’s movement has been trying to put on the table for years:
“Why does your reality not correspond to our daily life?”
The greatest evidence available that the Russian opposition movement poses a real threat to Putin, Milov believes, is just how much money and effort the Kremlin spends to try to crush the liberal movement.
“They spend billions and billions of rubles,” Milov said. Even with a weak ruble, “billions” translates to tens of millions of U.S. dollars. “And there are many thousands of people involved in fighting us,” he added. “The rule is very simple: They would not invest so many resources, they would spend it somewhere else, if we were marginalized and didn’t mean anything.”
The Lithuanian security service confirmed, in a 2022 threat assessment, that Russian operatives were targeting dissidents in Vilnius. An increase in intimidation as the elections neared mirrored an intense repression campaign inside Russia itself.
In December, a military court initially fined dissident sociologist Boris Kagarlitsky $6,500 for “justifying terrorism”—but two months later, the same court accepted an appeal from prosecutors, upgrading his sentence to five years in prison. Renowned human rights activist Oleg Orlov was handed a similar legal about-face, and now faces more than two years in prison. They join others who have been convicted and sentenced on trumped up or fabricated charges: Ilya Yashin, Yevgeny Roizman, and Vladimir Kara-Murza, among others.
“They want to send a powerful message that ‘Resistance is useless; there is no hope; we’re gonna kill you all,’” Milov said.
Milov himself was arrested amid widespread protests in the summer of 2019, after which he was detained for 30 days. “This was really lightweight, compared to what Navalny has been through,” Milov said. He faced more jail time after the Anti-Corruption Foundation was declared by Moscow to be an “extremist” organization, so he fled for Lithuania alongside Volkov. After leaving, Milov was tried and convicted, in absentia, to eight years in prison for criticizing Putin’s war against Ukraine.
Everything about Russia’s prison system is designed for “psychological torture,” Milov said—there’s the perpetual lengthening of your sentence, the rats and co*ckroaches that infest the cells, and sleep deprivation.
Milov said that it is important to understand the not-so-subtle signals being sent from the Kremlin with all of these pressure tactics. He scoffed, for example, at a report that Moscow was considering releasing Navalny in a prisoner swap shortly before his death.
“I know Putin, right?” Milov said . “He would never let Alexei go. … It’s definitely not a coincidence that he was murdered on the day of the Munich Security Conference.”
This brutality and showmanship are exactly the point.
“He constantly tries to deliver this message: ‘I can do whatever I want, and you f*cking Western chicken will have to suck on it,’ right?” Milov said, then laughed at his own crude phrasing. “Sorry!”
Milov believes that the decision to have Volkov beaten with a hammer—dispatching with any kind of plausible deniability that may come from, for example, poison—was meant to reinforce that message.
“This is also a show of horror,” he said.
Just before noon on March 17, I followed a procession of Russian citizens in Lithuania as they walked through Boris Nemtsov Square in the leafy Zverynas neighborhood, past a makeshift memorial to Navalny, and up Ukrainian Heroes Street to queue up at the gates of the Russian Embassy to cast their ballots.
Even though participation in the elections was widely agreed by international observers to be rigged, Moscow obsessively tried to gin up the results anyway. The Kremlin went all-out in forcing ordinary Russians to the polls—going so far as threatening their employment if they abstained and tracking their cellphones to make sure they visited a polling location.
Milov called these tactics “most usual.” They show, he added, that a strong mandate is a “do-or-die question” for Putin’s regime. In order to get the results that regime wants, it will need to carry out a “tightening of the screws”—even tighter than they have already been.
This wouldn’t be necessary if Putin felt secure in his managed democracy. Milov said that Putin’s message of absolute power is less convincing when it requires such extraordinary efforts to attain.
Certainly, few ordinary Russians believe in the validity of these elections. Yet even the dissidents called on people to turn out to the polls. Navalny believed that the more people who marked an X next to the other names on the ballots, even if those candidates were Putin’s controlled opposition, the more anxiety would rise in the Kremlin. Voting for anybody but Putin became one of his last requests before his death. Navalny’s team even created an app to help randomly select one of the non-Putin candidates, a recognition of just how interchangeable they are. The team asked people to come out and vote at exactly the same time, 12 p.m., on the final day of the polls.
Putin was reelected, at least according to the official tally, with more than 88 per cent of the vote. It is likely that Navalny’s appeal for malicious compliance did prompt some particularly heavy-handed fraud: Disqualified candidate Boris Nadezhdin’s campaign has uncovered tallies from multiple voting locations showing that Putin’s results were probably substantially lower. Still, the “noon against Putin” plan proved to be a bit of a dud.
As a proof of concept, though, these protests may yet prove to be a turning point.
In recent years, Milov and the other dissidents have heavily relied on the few channels that can still reach ordinary Russians—Telegram and YouTube in particular. (Volkov, stubborn, was posting videos taunting Putin in the hours after he was beaten outside his home.) But the dissidents know that real change in Russia will have to come from the streets.
“We will try to beef up this new format, so that people can, in fact, show up and show the big numbers without major risk of everybody being jailed,” Milov said. He likens the effort to popular demonstrations that began in 1987, during glasnost—the Soviet Union’s period of comparatively increased openness and transparency. Outside Moscow’s Olympic Stadium, small groups of Soviet citizens gathered around major events to express their displeasure at the regime.
Milov and his fellow liberals see a day, perhaps soon, when Putin’s faux democracy collapses in on itself. It’s his job to help bring that day closer and to plan for what happens next.
“I have a pretty good understanding of what he would want me to do if he was still alive,” Milov said of Navalny. “So this will go on—it means that the movement will not disappear.”
