Vladimir Putin’s police state has become so repressive that a popular joke from Soviet times has resurfaced and been repurposed for those Russians today who dare to acknowledge the truth about the autocratic regime they are living under. It tells the story of two FSB (successor of the KGB) agents who are having a beer after work. The first one, Ivan, says to his colleague, ‘Tell me, Dmitry. What do you really think about Putin?’ and Dmitry replies, ‘The same as you do.’ Ivan thinks for a moment and says: ‘In that case, it is my duty to arrest you.’

It makes us laugh because it reveals the malevolent absurdity of a system that demands ceaseless self-censorship and mental contortions.

The reality, though, is far from funny, as schoolgirl Varya Galkina can testify after skipping a mandatory ‘patriotism’ class, then using a Ukrainian flag on her WhatsApp profile. Whether these were conscious acts of resistance and defiance is unclear, but the next thing she knew the police were on her doorstep to arrest her.

She was just ten years old, but still considered such a threat that she had to be brought into line. Her mother Elena remembers the police arriving: ‘Varya tried to run to me, but they wouldn’t let her. One of them grabbed her and began to drag her to the car. The other twisted my arm. It was as if they were arresting criminals.’

Varya was interrogated for several hours about what her mother had said to her about the ‘Special Military Operation’ – the only officially sanctioned wording for the war Putin had launched against Ukraine. Elena was charged with the ‘improper performance of parental duties’ and ‘politically influencing her children’. The whole family was ordered to undergo ‘re-education’.

While Soviet-era jokes have resurfaced for those Russians able to acknowledge the nature of their country’s current regime, the reality is far from funny

While anti-war protests followed the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, opportunities for frank discussions about the conflict have been eliminated by Vladimir Putin

Vladimir Putin, who has led Russia since 1999, has now it towards a militaristic isolationism reminiscent of North Korea

Theirs was far from an isolated case. Opportunities for frank discussions about the conflict have been eliminated as Putin moves the country towards a militaristic isolationism reminiscent of North Korea. Parents have had their children taken into care and people travelling on trains or eating in restaurants have been arrested following tip-offs by strangers listening in on their conversations.

Instances of neighbours informing on neighbours and acquaintances have soared.

In the space of a year, more than 284,000 communications were registered with the authorities from citizens reporting infringements of new laws criminalising disrespect towards the army.

Putin went on the offensive, going on television to accuse Russians who spoke against the war of betraying their homeland. ‘The West will be counting on traitors in our midst in their attempt to destroy Russia. But the Russian people will always be able to distinguish true patriots from scum and will simply spit them out in a necessary self-detoxification of society.’

The violence of his imagery was a disquieting echo of the Bolshevik past, when accusations of collusion with foreign powers led to the firing squad.

From the start of the military invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the official line from Moscow was that support for the war was solid. It was claimed that most Russians bought into the Kremlin’s propaganda about Ukraine – that it was run by Nazis, with the backing of a Russia-hating West, and that there was a need to eradicate Russia’s enemies at home and abroad.

Polling results supposedly testified to all of these things – though polling in Putin’s Russia comes with caveats. There is an obvious lack of alternatives, rival politicians are restricted (if not jailed) and the state’s dominance of the media ensures that only one message is getting through.

People also tend to respond to pollsters with what they assume the authorities want to hear. Where the security services enjoy great power, it may be unwise to mark oneself out by criticising the president. Much easier to praise Putin in order to be left in peace.

Before the war, Russia was already a police state, whose million police officers had all but squeezed the breath out of civil society. War brought a further clampdown, when protesters trying to take to the streets were met with devastating force, bundled into vans at nearly every demonstration by heavily armoured men. By June 2023, a human rights organisation had registered nearly 20,000 detentions of Russians expressing anti-war views. Widespread phone-tracking and facial recognition technology rolled out during the Covid pandemic helped the security services identify protesters and track them down in their homes.

Their treatment was calculatedly brutal. Three young women arrested in Moscow secretly recorded their interrogation on their mobile phones. A policeman can be heard beating them and threatening to kill them. ‘You think we’re going to get in trouble for this?’ he shouts. ‘Putin has told us to kill all of your type. So, that’s it! We’ve got Putin on our side! They’ll give me a bonus for doing it!’

Vladimir Putin has gone on the offensive, going on television to accuse Russians who spoke against the war of betraying their homeland

Before the war, Russia was already a police state, whose million police officers had all but squeezed the breath out of civil society. War has brought a further clampdown

Despite being responsible for thousands of deaths in Ukraine, Vladimir Putin toasted the New Year with Russian soldiers that had returned from the frontlines

Police officers who broke into the flat of a young poet named Artem Kamardin beat him and sodomised him with a dumbbell, while his girlfriend was forced to listen from the next room. His offence had been to read an anti-war poem on Moscow’s Mayakovsky Square.

The extreme violence deployed by the state forced many opposition activists to flee abroad. But those who stayed moved their activities underground. Rather than get arrested, activists adopted anonymous forms of resistance, including leaflets, stickers, graffiti and posters.

Some risked displaying anti- war messages in public – green ribbons were a tacit anti-war symbol and the numbers three and five were used to signify the number of letters in the Russian words for ‘No to war’, a sentence regarded as spreading ‘false information’ and punishable by five years of penal labour.

Messages were left in library books or in randomly distributed letters containing information about the civilian casualties of the war. Social media platforms were commandeered, with official hashtags hijacked on Instagram and fake Tinder profiles created with accounts of war crimes.

An inventive means of quiet protest involved mass pigeon feeding, which attracted curious passers-by. When asked what they were doing, the pigeon feeders would use the encounter to explain what was happening in Ukraine.

According to Almut Rochowanski, a writer on civil rights, far from being cowed or passive, the Russian opposition’s ‘nationwide mobilisation and co-ordination effort is one of the most comprehensive, competent, courageous and resilient anywhere’.

But they are up against a repressive state. The newspaper Novaya Gazeta’s founder Dmitry Muratov had received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021. In February 2022, his paper ran the headline, ‘Russia is bombing Ukraine’. Six weeks later, he was attacked and doused in red paint by assailants subsequently identified as members of the security forces.

The state censor Roskomnadzor acted to restrict access to alternative sources. Nearly 7,000 websites were blocked in the first six months of the war, including all independent media and human rights groups.

Russians searching Yandex, the Russian version of Google, for information on what had happened in the Ukrainian town of Bucha (where hundreds of civilians were massacred by the invading Russian army) would be left with the impression that no one had been killed there at all during the whole of the occupation.

False claims were made that victims of bombings, such as the women in the Kremenchuk maternity hospital, struck by Russian missiles, were hired actors, or that Ukraine had staged photographs of massacres (including Bucha), and that corpses seen lying on the ground were later spotted standing up.

Russians who dared to tell the truth were punished to the full extent of laws hastily passed to curtail freedom of speech. Ilya Yashin, a Moscow city councillor, was prosecuted for spreading ‘disinformation’ by speaking about Russian soldiers killing civilians.

He used his final speech in court to address Putin. ‘You are at war not only with the Ukrainians but also with your own people. You send hundreds of thousands of Russians into a combat inferno and many will never come home. To you, this is just statistics, but for countless families it means the unbearable pain of losing husbands, fathers and sons.

The erstwhile leader of the Russian opposition, activist Alexei Navalny, is now imprisoned in a penal colony high above the Arctic Circle

The Russian opposition has tried to stage a nationwide mobilisation against the war. But they are up against a repressive state

Many Russians have fled abroad to avoid being drafted and sent to fight in Ukraine

‘Hundreds of thousands of Russians are leaving their home country because they don’t want to kill or be killed. Those people are running from you, Mr President. I urge you to stop this madness.’

To those Russians who oppose the war, he said: ‘It is better to spend ten years behind bars as an honest man than to burn silently in shame for the blood being shed by your government.

‘Don’t give in to despair. This is our country. It is worth fighting for. Be courageous, don’t give in to this evil, and resist. Defend your neighbourhood. Defend your city. And above all, defend one another! There are many more of us than it seems, and together we are a great force. Believe me: Russia will be happy and free.’

He was sentenced to eight-and-a-half years in a penal colony.

Despite Yashin’s plea, the vast majority of Russians have not ‘resisted’, turning a blind eye as they try to hang on to a sense of normality.

Denial and avoidance are their mechanisms for coping with the fact that their country is responsible for mass death and destruction, war crimes and worse.

When asked by a journalist whether or not Russia had attacked Ukraine, a man on the streets of Moscow replied: ‘No. I mean yes’, before resorting to a desperate, ‘but we didn’t do it first’.

A history teacher packing his car to flee to Armenia pinpointed the dilemma. ‘A lot of people realise there’s something wrong with what’s going on.

‘They try to find some justification, so they repeat what they’ve heard on TV about the supposed threat from Nato. But you can tell that on an emotional level they’re all having a really hard time. They won’t look you in the eye.’

Andrei Goryanov, a commentator with the BBC’s Russian Service, wrote of the moral compromise that inaction implies. ‘To keep the war from their door, Russians have to pretend this isn’t an expansionist invasion, and must close their eyes to the Ukrainians who are killed in their thousands and driven from their homes in their millions.

‘Russians must accept that it doesn’t matter that they can no longer travel or be part of a broader world. That it’s normal for soldiers to go into schools and tell their children war is a good thing. That a sledgehammer is now a positive symbol of Russian power in executions captured on camera. And that it’s normal to go to jail for years for saying what you think about the war.’

According to Kirill Martynov, the editor of the renamed Novaya Gazeta Europe, ‘people seem to think that at some point Putin probably will win or the war will somehow be ended, and that, like a miracle, people will find themselves back in the Russia of before February 24. That is the most dangerous illusion.’

Before he went to war, Putin had been losing popularity. The suffering during the Covid-19 pandemic, which revealed the crumbling state of the health system and the glaring shortcomings of his administration, turned many against him.

His absence from public view, spending much of the lockdown at his Valdai residence, seeing visitors only after they had undergone periods of quarantine, punctuated by bizarre appearances at long tables to keep his distance from everyone else, was widely mocked and his image as a man of the people undermined.

This left the nation torn between disenchantment with its leadership and unwillingness to be unpatriotic at a time of war. The discontent, though, is growing as his war in Ukraine increasingly has an economic and social impact at home. Conscription to the military has disproportionately targeted deprived regions, fuelling instances of resistance. In Siberia, recruitment centres were shot at or set on fire.

In Dagestan, which contributed the highest number of troops per capita of population, tensions flared into violence.

Veteran human rights campaigner Oleg Orlov and Dmitry Muratov, editor of the now banned Novaya Gazeta, have faced legal and physical attacks for their opposition stances

The spectre of more young Russians being sent to the ‘meat-grinder’ of front-line combat has brought home the reality of a war that had previously seemed distant

Conscription to the military has disproportionately targeted deprived regions, fuelling instances of resistance

A demonstration against the Kremlin’s expansion of military conscription in September 2022 resulted in angry scenes and more than 100 arrests.

An official at a local recruitment office was secretly filmed berating reluctant combatants, ‘You have to fight. For your fatherland. For the future!’ to which one man is heard to reply, ‘We don’t even have a present, let alone a future. My grandfather fought for his country [in the Second World War]. That was a real war. This one is just politics.’

Moscow refuses to provide casualty figures, but estimates for Russian fatalities in the first year of the war range as high as 70,000. Reports from the front of appalling conditions, shortages of equipment and disregard for the wellbeing of rank and file troops added to the sense of alarm.

The spectre of more young Russians being sent to the ‘meat-grinder’ of front-line combat has brought home the reality of a war that had previously seemed distant, triggered a shift in attitudes and made the mothers of those mobilised a powerful voice for protest.

The Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers of Russia – formed in 1989 to lobby for soldiers’ rights after the disastrous Soviet war in Afghanistan – said the army’s treatment of its troops in Ukraine was worse than anything in the past. Never before had the military situation developed so quickly, so brutally and on such a large scale.

The moral authority of mothers standing up for their children made their criticism hard to dismiss. Much of it was aimed personally at Putin. One group addressed an open letter to him, accusing mobilisation committees of issuing illegal military summonses and sending untrained youngsters to the front. When they complained to the local authorities, the mothers said they were met with threats and abuse.

Putin’s response was clever. He invited 17 of them to the presidential residence on Mother’s Day to be comforted personally by the commander in chief. ‘I and the entire leadership of the country share your pain,’ he told a bereaved mother. ‘We understand that nothing can replace the loss of a son but we all die and the real test is how we lived. His life was significant – it had a purpose.’

The reaction to his platitudes was remarkably positive. The women nodded in agreement; no one expressed unhappiness or anger about the war. The independent news organisation, Meduza, established the reason. Those attending had been vetted in advance for their loyalty to the Kremlin. Fourteen of the 17 were mothers of career soldiers who had signed up to fight. Only three were the mothers of conscripts.

Tellingly, no representatives of critical NGOs were present. Olga Tsukanova, the founder of the Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers, commented scathingly: ‘Vladimir Vladimirovich [Putin], are you a man or what? Do you have enough courage to look into our eyes – openly, in a meeting with women who weren’t hand-picked for you? Women who aren’t in your pocket? Are you going to keep hiding from us?’

She was subsequently detained on her way to deliver hundreds of complaints from mothers of serving soldiers and was later fined for ‘abuse of the freedom of the media’. The Council of Mothers and Wives had its social media pages blocked.

But Tsukanova was not deterred. ‘Putin is afraid of women,’ she said. ‘The women’s movement is the strongest driving force in Russia, because when a mother fights for her son, it’s very, very hard to stop her.’

Can the mothers of Russia be the ones to turn the tide? Only time will tell.

• Adapted from Putin And The Return Of History by Martin Sixsmith (Bloomsbury, £25). To order a copy for £22.50 (offer valid to 20/01/24; UK P&P free on orders over £25) go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.