The Cyber Gulag: Russia’s Century-Old Playbook for Silencing Dissent
On the morning of September 2, 2026, Russian federal investigators detained Lida Moniava in Moscow. She is not a political activist or a journalist. For over a decade, she has run a children’s hospice named “Dom s Mayakom” (House with a Lighthouse), and has built a reputation as one of Russia’s most respected humanitarian figures. Her offense was a single post on Telegram from February 2023, marking the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Moniava was charged with spreading “false information” about the Russian military—a charge punishable by up to 10 years in prison. However, Moniava was released under a set of restrictions barring her from leaving home from 8 p.m. to 8 a.m. and from using the internet.
Moniava’s case illustrates a broader pattern of political repression. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, over 20,000 people have been detained for their anti-war stances. In 2022 alone, over 18,900 arrests were made during public anti-war demonstrations. Following the introduction of laws criminalizing the discreditation of the military and the spread of “false information” in March 2022, the consequences of participating in protests became increasingly severe. Once the fear of arrest spread throughout the population, mass protests declined sharply. Arrests for public demonstrations fell to 274 in 2023, and to just 41 in 2024. In place of mass arrests, authorities turned to individualized prosecutions. During the first three years of the war, 856 detentions tied to anti-war posts, symbols, and other actions were recorded.
This kind of crackdown is not unique to dissidents of the war in Ukraine. State-executed repression has a long history in Russia, dating back to the Soviet period.
During the period known as the “Great Terror” in the late 1930s, the NKVD (Soviet secret police) arrested roughly 1.7 million people. They targeted “enemies of the people,” an arbitrary moniker used to institute a repressive campaign against counterrevolutionaries, former nobles, members of the clergy, peasants, and the intelligentsia. Many of those arrested were sent to the Gulag, a vast system of forced labor camps scattered across hundreds of sites from the Arctic north to Central Asia. An estimated 18 million people passed through Gulags, some more than once, before most of the camps closed after Stalin’s death in 1953.
Even though Stalin’s death eased the most extreme restrictions, the state still controlled what citizens could read, write, and say. In response to the constraints on freedom of expression, dissidents established a system called “samizdat” (self-publishing), an underground network that passed carbon copies of suppressed news, political protests, and literature from reader to reader to circumvent the state’s monopoly on printing presses and photocopiers. Citizens who participated in samizdat put themselves at risk of losing their jobs or being imprisoned. For example, Andrei Sakharov, a physicist and human rights activist who smuggled his essay critiquing the Soviet regime, was fired from his job and later exiled to Gorky (Nizhny Novgorod).
Repression persisted in the decades that followed, although its appearance changed. From the 1960s through the early 1980s, under Yuri Andropov, chairman of the KGB, authorities sent up to 1,000 dissidents a year to psychiatric hospitals, using diagnoses in order to sidestep due process. Even after the collapse of the Soviet Union, harsher “anti-extremism” laws in the 2010s led to hundreds of criminal cases relating to social media posts on the Russian platform Vkontakte.
While the mechanisms and laws that the Russian government uses to control its citizens have changed, the underlying pattern has not. Some journalists now call Russia’s method of digital surveillance a “cyber gulag,” drawing a parallel between the function once served by the labor camps and online monitoring. Where dissidents once risked exposure by passing along a hard copy of a banned text, expressing a similar sentiment today can be as simple and easily traced as one Telegram post, as Moniava’s case shows.
The strategy has remained the same: by publicly punishing a relatively small number of people, the state discourages a larger portion of the population from dissenting. Instilling this fear in Russian citizens prevents them from speaking out against the government, which is especially consequential as the war in Ukraine continues with no clear end in sight. Some Russian political scientists have counseled the country’s younger generation to let the war pass and to hope that Russian leadership changes, rather than risk arrest, or worse, death, by becoming a political activist. Given what is at stake for Russians, this advice is an indication of how completely the government’s strategy has worked: when staying silent is the only rational choice, fear has already done its job.