With bare hands – the legacy of Oswaldo Payá
I’ve often wondered, what does it take for a lone individual to stand up to a totalitarian system, and to risk it all for the right to speak and associate… Read more »
Category: dissent
Sergei Kovalev, Soviet dissident & Putin adversary, dies at 91
Sergei Kovalev, a leading Russian dissident and human rights activist who fought for the victims of oppression in Soviet times and opposed Moscow’s war against Chechen separatists in the 1990s,… Read more »
Navalny vs Putin: An epic existential battle
Alexei Navalny grows more powerful every time Putin talks about him, one observer suggests. Police took several allies of the jailed Kremlin critic into custody early on Thursday, ahead of planned… Read more »
‘China’s COVID Secrets’: How to curb Beijing’s authoritarian agenda
President Joe Biden’s nominee for United Nations ambassador will pledge to restore American leadership, warning that its absence in recent years has allowed China to fill the void, Bloomberg reports…. Read more »
Civil society crackdown: Kremlin pushing for Belarusian-style grip on power
Russian rights activists on Thursday condemned draft legislation including a significant expansion of who can be labelled a “foreign agent” as a new clampdown on dissent, Agence France Presse reports…. Read more »
‘Gigantic Empire vs Tiny Poet’ – China’s Solzhenitsyn
In the middle of the night on May 30, 2020, more than fifty armed police surrounded an ordinary residential building in Chuxiong City, Yunnan Province and arrested Wang Zang, an… Read more »
Yuri Orlov ‘lit a fire under Soviet regime’
Yuri Orlov, physicist who became a symbol of Soviet dissent, dies at 96 https://t.co/21j9gD1Mdr — Democracy Digest (@demdigest) October 1, 2020 Yuri Orlov, a Russian-born physicist who designed particle accelerators,… Read more »
Why China’s propaganda efforts backfire
A journalist who had worked for some of China’s most powerful propaganda outlets has been jailed for 15 years after being accused of attacking the ruling Communist Party, AFP reports:… Read more »
‘From Dark Horse to Nobel Laureate’: Have Liu Xiaobo’s fears been realized?
Liberal Senator @SenPaterson says China’s threat to impose “economic sanctions” on Australia if it conducts an independent inquiry into the source of the coronavirus shows the Chinese Communist Party is “extremely… Read more »
Inside Wuhan: China’s struggle to control the virus — and the narrative
Hao Jun, in his late forties, is one of a small but tight-knit group of dissidents based in Wuhan who took it upon themselves to document the earliest days of… Read more »