For the average consumer of news, there is a rational way to process a media scare: take the statistical probability of the cause of the anxiety actually taking place, and compare it to a slew of equally bad things that are far likelier to happen. For instance, there were 10 cases of Ebola in the United States in 2014, including two deaths, but 32,719 fatalities from car accidents in the previous year.
On the surface, a similar rationalisation could be applied to the atmosphere of fear and paranoia currently brewing in Russia. Despite this growing climate of fear amid a spate of increasingly restrictive laws, the average citizen should—theoretically at least—worry more about seat belts than what his own government could do to him. That is, unless he or she is a political activist. There is growing concern about spymania: new, harsher amendments to treason legislation in wake of the Ukraine crisis and Russia’s worsening relations with the west have resulted in an increase in treason cases, from four in 2013 to 15 in 2014.
More worrying still is the growing list of people who, by many accounts, could be regarded as political prisoners. According to a registry compiled by the SOVA Center for Information and Analysis, there are currently 54 people ‘incarcerated for actions that are not violent and not ordinarily criminal in nature, but who have made various statements or participated in the actions of certain groups.᾿ Aleksandr Verkhovsky, director of SOVA, conceded that most of these could not be considered political prisoners: many of these cases their criminalised statements did include calls to violence.
