‘Don’t repeat our mistakes’ - Russian writer Akunin warns against creeping repression

Riot police stand as smoke billows from a burning barricade on Hrusevskoho-street in central Kiev Saturday Jan. 25. 2014. (LEHTIKUVA / Antti Aimo-Koivisto )

Russian author Boris Akunin, who was recently sentenced to a lengthy prison term in absentia after supporting Ukraine, warned other countries on Monday to be vigilant against creeping repression.

“Don’t repeat our mistakes,” the 69-year-old author told diplomats gathered at an event on the sidelines of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva.

Akunin, a longstanding critic of the Kremlin and its military offensive on Ukraine, was sentenced in July to 14 years behind bars after a Moscow military court found him guilty, among other things, of “aiding terrorist activity” with pro-Ukraine comments and “justifying terrorism” over a 2024 Telegram post in which he said he was “for revolution” in Russia.

Speaking alongside Belarusian Nobel Literature Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich, whose books have been banned in Russia, and two journalists who had previously been jailed there for their work, he described the slow “strangling of culture” that had been underway in the country for years.

Now, he warned, the same was starting “to happen in the United States of America as well”.

“Don’t let it happen.”

The UN special rapporteur on the rights situation in Russia, Mariana Katzarova, told the rights council Monday that 50 media professionals are currently behind bars in the country, making it “the third-largest jailer of journalists in the world”.

She described a country on an “alarming trajectory”, with the state systematically restricting freedom of expression and other rights as it seeks “to crush civic space, silence the media, dismantle the legal profession, eliminate political opposition, suppress culture (and) distort historical truth”.

Akunin stressed that the attack on free expression had begun in Russia long before it launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine three and a half years ago.

He pointed to how President Vladimir Putin, shortly after first coming to power in 2000, had gone after “one independent television channel”.

Russians at the time had protested “too mildly, because we did not quite understand what was happening... It was just one TV channel”, he said.

“We never thought that regression was possible,” Akunin said, warning that countries that “have been democratic for many years” had been lulled into the same sense of complacency.

They “think that democracy is guaranteed. It is not”, he said.

“We are living in a new reality... We are on the verge of a new Cold War”.

Alexievich also painted a bleak picture of the situation.

“Democracy today is in retreat,” the 2015 Nobel laureate told the gathering.

“It is clear that we are living in a different world, a new world,” she said.

“I think we are doomed to live in this world for at least several generations”.