Oleg Orlov, Russian dissident and Nobel laureate: “There are mistakes on the left about Putin: He is a ferocious imperialist. Peace with him? It would be like Munich with Hitler.”

From our correspondent
Berlin – Oleg Orlov, biologist and 70-year-old defector who speaks only RussianOnce the interview is confirmed, we look for a translator. “It’s August, and with two hours’ notice, do you think I’ll say yes?” one of them replies. Then, a few minutes later: “But if you interview a political prisoner, I’ll come right away.” She has been living in Berlin for five years, is a Russian from the Urals, and doesn’t even want her name mentioned for fear of reprisals. “My mother is in Russia, and our government is tough. Orlov is a hero to me.”

Clean record until 2022Orlov was sentenced to two years and two months in prison for “discrediting the armed forces” for an article on Russian neo-fascism. On August 1 he was released from prison. (He declined his request for amnesty) in the largest prisoner exchange since the Cold War, and he is now in Berlin like other dissidents who will not be repatriated for the time being. He receives us in a co-working space behind the embassy street, where Memorial, the human rights network he helped found in 1989 and which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022, is a guest. The first thing he does as a free man: “I visited the Modigliani exhibition on Sunday with friends. For the rest, I receive journalists all day, and in the evening I collapse. I still don’t know how I will manage to live here, far from my country.”

He began criticizing the Russian government in 1979, copying leaflets at home against the invasion of Afghanistan. What has changed since then?
“I have lived many lives over the years. Russia has many eras. After the 1991 revolution, there was a glimmer of hope, but in 1993, tanks surrounded the parliament in Moscow. Then the Chechen wars. Then the Putin era.”

What did the split give you and what did it take from you?
“First of all, I wasn’t always a dissident. The trial that put me in prison for the first time was also the first that ended in a conviction. I became a dissident with the invasion of Ukraine, like many of my dear people. I even collaborated with the government with perestroika, nothing more than dissent. We helped build the new Russia and were active citizens, and sometimes we criticized the government. Criticizing the government became a crime.”

You have protested against many Russian wars across the border. Afghanistan, Chechnya, Ossetia, Ingushetia where he was kidnapped. Now Ukraine. What role do these wars play at home?
“They express eternal Russian imperialism. And then, of course, they also serve to seize power. Yeltsin launched the first Chechen war for this reason, and Putin has been a man of war from the beginning. Today, especially in Africa and Latin America, but also here in Germany, many leftists admire and support Putin, the supposed antidote to American imperialism. They are wrong: there is no imperialism as fierce and long-lasting as Russian imperialism.”

Today Putin says he is “furious” about the Ukrainian military attack on Kursk. Was this attack a good idea strategically?
“I am Russian. It is difficult for me to say whether attacking my country’s territory, which contains thousands of evacuees, is a good idea. But on the other hand, there is a war in Russia, and war is war. That is, it is a situation where unarmed civilians are being bombed. And Ukraine did not start it.”

Is it right to take the Kremlin’s threats of escalation seriously? “Attacking Russian territory is certainly an act of escalation,” he added. “But I think Putin talks about escalation too often to no avail. It’s not true that there are specific ‘red lines’ after which everything is worthwhile. He can’t track them in the air forever. These are empty words.”

How will the war end?
“Like everyone, with peace.”

A disputed concept.
“This is what ‘peace’ is not. It is not a truce. It is not accepting all of the aggressor’s terms until he feels the urge to attack again. A peace that the aggressor can claim to have won is not peace. Finally, the Munich peace is not peace: on the eve of World War II, Chamberlain and Daladier signed agreements with Hitler that would have appeased him in an ideal situation. We know how that went, with Hitler occupying Czechoslovakia, and there is reason to believe that Putin’s peace will be exactly that.

As an observer of the conflicts in the Caucasus, you have mediated the release of some hostages. How do you deal with terrorists?
“The basic rule is that the safety of the hostages is more important than anything else.”

Can you even negotiate with a dictator?
“You can deal with anyone, but you have to know what you want and who you are dealing with. The danger is that we want to keep the other side happy, paying more attention to not upsetting them than to what we want, and that leads to the opposite result. Instead, we need one thing clear: Russia must stop its gross violation of all human rights, inside and outside its borders. This is not a matter of domestic politics: a state that does not respect human rights is a threat to everyone. A threat that has been there for years, and no one was prepared to see it. We are ready to talk to the Kremlin, but we must know very well that Putin is not someone to whom you explain things and he will listen.”

“We are ready.” Who? Have Russian dissidents found a single voice?
“It’s not true. When Navalny was alive, if he had been replaced, as he should have been, instead of one of us, we could have had a unique voice in it. In fact, they killed him.”

And now?
“I have not been a politician so far, I have been an active citizen in civil rights, but no matter what one does, we are all in a totalitarian system. They label us as foreign agents, they treat us as enemies of the homeland. So we have to come together and understand that we are all politicians already. We have to think about a single opposition structure that brings us all together.”

Is it easier to do this in exile?
“In some ways it is, in some ways it is more difficult. Every migration, every diaspora, brings with it divisions. After all, it was difficult for us to unite in Russia, because the regime put enormous pressure on us. But now, with the Ukrainian attack on Kursk, I see that these divisions among us have become more apparent. There are those who believe that it was a criminal attack, and there are those who accept the consequences.”

Navalny has worked hard against the corruption of the regime. Is that your main issue?
“Navalny fought against many other things, Not only against corruption: This struggle alone is not enough to bring down the regime. It is necessary to talk about human rights. But above all, we must all think together about what we will do when the regime ends. How are we going to manage the amnesty for political prisoners, and any other prisoners? How are we going to reform justice, a very important question. How are we going to rewrite the penal code, and remove the laws that classify anyone as a foreign agent, even if they do not receive money from abroad: no more “foreign influence”, no more talk about the environment or school. What laws should expire, and how do we rethink the electoral system? How do we bring the opposition back to life: until recently it existed, it was crushed, it did not play on equal footing, but it existed, and you can find it at the ballot box, at least in local elections… Today if someone is elected by mistake, they immediately declare him a foreign agent and he disappears from politics. All of this must be rethought from scratch, as something new.”

From whom?
“We are very advanced in this discussion: until recently I was in prison, but my friends here in exile, a group of lawyers, politicians, oppositionists, excellent citizens, members of Memorial. We call ourselves “A Hundred Days Later,” because we are talking about what Russia will look like a hundred days after Putin’s end. A roadmap. And after it is written well, we will announce it.”

He did not mention the names of the other prisoners who were exchanged on August 1. Weren’t they part of the “100 days”?
“They just got out of jail, let’s see. I’m not active for a hundred days yet either. We’ll see.”

How was he treated in prison?
“My arrest itself, and certainly my detention, was a violation of human rights and the Russian Constitution as well. Unlike others, like Vladimir Kara-Murza, for example, I was not subjected to any torture. No violence. Of course they didn’t treat us well, it was terrible, the food wasn’t enough, but that’s the case for all prisoners in Russia.”

Who was he in the cell with?
“They changed me a lot, sometimes I was with twenty people in ten beds, sometimes we were in a big cell, and many of them were deserters. They also asked me to join the army in exchange for finishing my sentence: like everyone else.”

At 70? To do what?
“Cannon fodder.”

You have told the press that you have reports of prisoner exchanges already underway. How do exchanges like the one you freed work?
“I’ll make sure there are some, and there’s definitely a protocol. But the less you know, the better, and I don’t want to talk about that.”

What happened in Russia to Memorial, your network of associations that won the Nobel Peace Prize?
“At first she was liquidated as a ‘foreign agent’. After the Nobel Prize (which he won in 2022, ed.), many of the network’s offices were looted and destroyed. Now there is no longer a landline, a lot of things are being done secretly, something has been lost. Three of my colleagues from Memorial are in prison.”

The memorial has long been the largest historical archive of the Gulag and Soviet dictatorship. Are the documents safe?
“For the Kremlin, all archives are potentially sabotage. For us, of course. Our principle is not to take even small documents from Russian history out of Russia, because they are the country’s heritage, not Putin’s. I think everything is safe, but I don’t want to give more details.”

The Nobel Peace Prize has often been awarded in recent years to opposition figures. It has often been withdrawn by others because the laureates were in prison. What does this focus tell us about opposition to regimes? But also: regimes still seem to thrive, despite dissent. What does this tell us about dissent?
“Regimes last, that’s true. But for how long? Of course, they don’t collapse the moment after we dissidents win the Nobel Prize. But it is a means of exercising power that the rest of the world isolates and stigmatizes, even through the Nobel Prize, and it is no coincidence that the regimes are all friends of each other. Populism and nationalism are having a great moment, but peace is not. But the race toward peace, toward progress, toward rights for all, has never been a sprint. It has always been a marathon.”