Defending Human Rights in Russia Feels Hopeless. But I Still Do It

It has been a year since I started working at OVD-Info, one of Russia’s leading independent human rights watchdogs. As the situation in Russia grows more depressing every day, my friends and relatives often ask why I still do it. While I enjoy writing, it is fundamentally unpleasant to spend every day documenting torture, death, and lives spent behind bars.

I have worked as a freelance crisis correspondent for a while, so I am used to writing about suffering and sacrifice. Yet, when covering wars and rallies, you get an adrenaline high that pushes you onwards. Every word feels like a small victory simply by the virtue of staying alive to write it. In my current job — communicating the work OVD-Info does to the English-speaking world — there is no such thrill. There is only a grueling marathon without an end in sight. 

OVD-Info was founded 12 years ago, amid what English-language media called the Snow Revolution. Sparked by reports that the presidential election results were fraudulent, these protests called for Russia to be transformed into a democracy with liberty and human rights at its core. The goals of those protests were not fulfilled. Instead, the Kremlin tightened the screws on the country, slowly suffocating its civil society. 

The Kremlin saw this kind of popular mobilization as a serious threat after seeing the color revolutions that enacted change in neighboring countries. The promise of democratic change was anathema to Russia’s leadership. So, Putin and his cronies spent the years that followed 2012 building a sophisticated system of repression. 

OVD-Info grew as an organic response to this system. Our name references the police code for police precincts. We started by using social media to provide information about the people detained at protests — their names, the precinct in which they were held, and whether they were in critical condition.

The overwhelmingly positive response from civil society led to a drastic expansion. OVD-Info built a website and a legal aid wing. We paid for lawyers to protect the victims of the Kremlin: people whose freedoms to express themselves and protest were violated.