To understand Russia today, it is necessary to recall the great terror of the times of the dictatorship of Joseph Stalin, when the secret service of the USSR was called the NKVD.

In 1937, writer Evgenia Ginzburg was shocked when she learned that a professor and her colleague were under suspicion.. She knew he didn't break anything. But at a meeting of the Communist Party, she was criticized for not condemning him..

\? Can you imagine someone getting arrested without hard evidence? "

Everyone was scared. Even the ideologues of the Communist Party were " In her memoir The Steep Route, she wrote that " Sadly, this is exactly what is happening in Russia today, writes the Washington Post in an editorial.. More than ever in recent times, Russian intelligence agencies are grabbing people for no reason and throwing them in jail on suspicion of being critical of Vladimir Putin or the barbaric war against Ukraine.. The publication recalls that this was the fate that befell the Russian figure Vladimir Kara-Murza, who often wrote for the Washington Post. In April, he was arrested in Moscow on false charges of disobedience to police officers.. He was later accused of " The law punishing this was approved after the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.. Its goal is to suppress any criticism of the Kremlin's failures..

Now Kara-Murza's lawyer says another false charge is being prepared against him.. This time we are talking about participation in a non-governmental organization that is considered undesirable in Russia. The relevant law was approved in 2015 to close all organizations receiving funding from abroad.. Kara-Murza is still in prison. He has not yet been charged under this article.. And his lawyers say that's all they know.

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But they are familiar with the method - an endless carousel of biased persecution. The same approach was taken to justify the imprisonment of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny. And recently, another leader of the Russian opposition, Ilya Yashin, was put behind bars, who was accused of spreading “false information” about the Russian army.. In fact, he discussed on his YouTube channel the murders of civilians in the Ukrainian Bucha, which were committed by Russian soldiers. On July 8, a court in Moscow sentenced local politician Aleksey Gorinov to 7 years in prison for a similar violation..

“I am convinced that this war is the fastest way to dehumanization, when the line between good and evil is blurred. War is always violence and blood, torn bodies and severed limbs.

It's always death. I do not accept and reject it,” Gorinov said in court.

Russian researchers Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan told Foreign Affairs that the FSB no longer resembles its Soviet predecessor, the KGB.. Now it looks more like something terrible - the Stalinist NKVD, which carried out mass purges in the 1930s.. Since the beginning of the war in Russia, 16,403 people have been jailed for speaking out against. So the dark days are back in the country again.