Putin launches a general cause
It can be said that Vladimir Putin has completed the repressive police and judicial apparatus that he has been building up over 25 years in the Kremlin. The deployment by the FSB, the former KGB, of a new criminal charge against the dissidents in exile – which is described as a "terrorist community"- represents the push for a kind of general cause against the entire opposition, similar to the one unleashed by General Franco at the end of the Civil War.
The Russian domestic opposition, led by the FBK – the Anti-Corruption Fund founded by Aleksei Navalny – has never come out of hiding and by law is accused of being "foreign agents." A label that also hangs on sociologist and academic Boris Kagarlitski, imprisoned since July 2023 and convicted in 2024 for apologizing for terrorism. The general cause was already taking shape. And now it takes shape with the Kagebist plan deployed two weeks ago, which brands some twenty intellectuals, artists and journalists as conspirators and terrorists. personalities such as former businessman Mikhail Khodorkosvki – pardoned by Putin in 2013 after ten years in prison – and former chess champion Garry Kasparov. Most of the dissidents have sought refuge in Europe – where they enjoy the support of the Council of Europe – perhaps because the US is beginning to seem unsafe to them.
Despite everything outside of Russia, within a so-called sweetened exile, there are some – a few – intellectuals opposed to the regime who are neither persecuted nor incorporated into the general cause. One of them, Alexander Gabuev, director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, observes, analyzes, reflects, and presents visions of Russian reality, some of which are not understood in European society. In May 2025, in an article in Foreign Affairs, Gabuev strove to make it clear that, if it wants to coexist peacefully with Russia, the West must reestablish the ties severed in the wake of the war in Ukraine as soon as possible. And Gabuev wasn't going to say that the war has made Russia an increasingly closed society that views Westerners with hostility and resentment because of the economic sanctions.
Fear, resignation, and indifference
Alexander Gabuev has detected the extent to which Putin's dictatorship generates fear, resignation, and indifference in Russians. Fear, but also patriotism. A political-emotional situation that leads Russia to shift in favor of China, and which the Chinese dictatorship welcomes. In May 2024, a year before his warning in Foreign Affairs, Alexander Gabuev warned that the West was oblivious to the profound changes in Russian society that are leading people to distance themselves from Europe like never before. Before the war, Russia's trade transactions with the EU were double those with China, and now they are less than half. Russian oligarchs and businessmen send their children to study in Hong Kong or Beijing: Gabuev reminds us that in 2023, after the pandemic, 12,000 Russian students settled in China, almost four times as many as in the US.
And it is this Russia, where democracy has historically been reduced to fleeting episodes accompanied by bloody shocks, that is moving away from the values that underlie Europe and closer to its Asian neighbor, which had always been seen as a threat. It is not surprising, then, that Putin has opted to intensify repression in the form of a general cause: he seems to be quite clear that there will be no response from Russian society. And it is not surprising, either, that Xi Jinping and Putin were not fantasizing about immortality. Or the possibility of living to 150 years old.
