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Thursday, December 29th, 2022

Meet the dissident Russians living the ‘nightmare from which it is impossible to wake up’

Author:     Ivana Kottasová,
Source:     CNN
Publication Date:     Wed December 28, 2022 | 12:07 AM EST
 Link: Meet the dissident Russians living the ‘nightmare from which it is impossible to wake up’
Stephan:   From 1981 to 1993 I was very involved with the Soviet Union, and particularly Russia. I was part of a small group of Americans working in what we called Citizens' Diplomacy, a philanthropic endeavor, had three businesses, and lived there for weeks at a time. I was in Moscow when the USSR ceased to exist and hoped that a democratic future might emerge. Instead, Putin has emerged, and as I think of what Russia must now be like I am deeply saddened and wonder and worry about what has happened to all those people I knew. I have a number of Russian SR readers, and they tell me this is a pretty accurate portrait of what things are like. It is tragic.
Credit: CNN / Getty / Adobe

For Andrei Soldatov and his friends, February 24 marked the end of Russia as they knew it.

In the early hours of that day, President Vladimir Putin announced that he had ordered Russian troops into Ukraine. “And all of a sudden, everything we still believed in got completely compromised,” Soldatov, a Russian investigative journalist who lives in self-imposed exile in London, told CNN.

Life in Russia had for many years been getting more difficult for dissidents, independent journalists and anyone speaking up against Putin’s regime, but Soldatov said people like him still had some hope to hold on to. The war changed that, he said.

“It was horrible to live under Putin and it was very far from the idea of democracy, but you still had some established institutions which you would almost take for granted that they would exist no matter what, and all of a sudden, everything collapsed,” he said, pointing to the near complete eradication of any remaining independent media, civil society and […]

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