They shouted no slogans nor held any placards. In their hands were petitions on seemingly innocuous subjects like air quality, city parks and paid parking.
But the orderly line of people snaking around a Putin administration building in central Moscow one chilly September morning were there to deliver a larger message. In the face of the Kremlin’s snowballing restrictions on dissent, they wanted to show that Russians unhappy with their government are not alone.
“The room for politics in Russia has shrunk a lot, but some opportunities are still there,” said Boris Nadezhdin, a longtime politician who helped organize the gathering of petitioners. “My job is to show that we are here and our voices should be heard.”
Russia has dramatically escalated its crackdown on criticism of the government after its invasion of Ukraine in 2022, forcing opposition-minded Russians to try to navigate the shifting red lines on what is allowed.
Just a few years earlier, critics of President Vladimir Putin could get elected to regional legislatures or mayor’s offices. Citizens who staged an “unsanctioned rally” would be punished with a fine, not a jail term.
But once the war started, people who spoke out about civilian deaths in Ukraine were thrown into prison. As the wartime repressions have continued, street musicians have been jailed for performing “banned” songs. Election observers have been sent to prison for routine vote monitoring.
For many Kremlin critics, the choice has been stark. They could leave the country and oppose the Russian government from exile, as many have. Or they could stay and cease political activities.
Some have chosen to stay and remain as politically active as they can.
Activists have held what they call “letter-writing evenings,” gathering at cafes or clubs to write letters to political prisoners. Yabloko, a marginalized liberal party, has organized charity auctions to support the prisoners, asking celebrities, some of them exiled, to donate items. And opposition politicians who remain in Russia have held workshops and talks touching on political subjects, inviting people to private gatherings via Telegram chat groups.
Some Russians have abandoned national politics for less politically charged issues, such as animal rights or the environment, that do not directly challenge the Kremlin’s power. One of them is Nikolai Lyaskin, a longtime ally of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who died last year at 47 in a Siberian prison.
Before the Kremlin outlawed Navalny’s group as “extremist” in 2021, Lyaskin stood next to him at protest rallies calling for Putin’s resignation. Lyaskin was sentenced to one year of probation for organizing a protest in 2021.
He did not flee after Navalny’s group was banned, but instead changed his focus. These days, he posts online about recycling in Moscow.
Lyaskin said he had been criticized by Russian exiles for speaking out about relatively minor issues and not about the elephant in the room: Putin and his war in Ukraine.
“I would love to be able to say what I want, but right now, I can only talk about recycling and landfills — and I will be doing that,” he said.
Every other weekend, Lyaskin and his allies set up makeshift stations in Moscow to collect and separate garbage for recycling. He said he was thankful that he could still live in his country and gather with like-minded people.
“We have to do what is not banned,” he said. “This is the best thing we can do to stay collectively sane.”
A few Kremlin opponents who have stayed in Russia have not entirely given up on the idea of participating in politics.
Nadezhdin is a 62-year-old veteran of Russia’s opposition politics and a former member of parliament.
Last year, he mounted an energetic grassroots presidential campaign as the only anti-war candidate. The long lines of people who waited to leave a signature in support of his candidacy spooked the Kremlin, and Nadezhdin was barred from running.
He still intends to run for parliament next year, even though he expects election authorities to again claim that the signatures he collects were forged.
When he and his allies came up with the idea of gathering hundreds of petitioners in Moscow to lobby on seemingly unobjectionable issues, he said, he had been looking for safe ways to show that “tens of million people do not support Putin.”
Yulia Galyamina, another opposition politician who remained in Russia despite being arrested after an anti-war protest shortly after the invasion, helped to spread the word about the petitioner gathering.
She once headlined major protests in Moscow and sat on a local council. But she was labeled a “foreign agent,” which barred her from running for office or organizing public gatherings.
Galyamina, a university lecturer, has since gotten involved in activism in her Moscow neighborhood, coaching grassroots campaigners. “We just have to squeeze into any cracks that we can find,” she said.
Low-level activism helps many Russians channel their grievances and feel at least some “political agency,” researchers from the Berlin-based Hannah Arendt Research Center said in a 2024 study of Russia’s civil society.
That has become all the more important, the researchers said, as the Kremlin has targeted anyone it deems a political threat.
Last month, Maxim Kruglov, a deputy chair of the liberal Yabloko party, was arrested. Yabloko has not held rallies or campaigns against the war. Members like Kruglov have found discreet ways of showing solidarity with the anti-war movement such as organizing fundraisers.
Before he was arrested, investigators dug up a social media post that Kruglov had written in the spring of 2022 that called out alleged Russian war crimes in the Kyiv, Ukraine, suburb of Bucha.
“The criminal case was an absolute shock to everyone,” said Kirill Goncharov, a Yabloko colleague. “Maxim was always so careful.”
Even though Yabloko has been reserved in its criticism of the war, the Kremlin fears that it might become a rallying point in next year’s parliamentary elections, just as Nadezhdin found support last year among anti-war Russians, said Alexander Kynev, a Moscow-based political scientist.
“Imagine they go on a TV debate and start talking about issues of the war, then everyone will have to engage with it,” Kynev said. “That could make Yabloko a medium for a very uncomfortable agenda. That’s not what the Kremlin needs.”