Indeed, Russia’s civil society has been steadily growing over the last twenty years. There are thousands of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in the country spanning from environmental issues to social work, corruption and human rights. Amongst the most active shakers and movers in the country, we count the anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny, the environmentalist Yevgenya Chirikova, human rights activists and defenders Ludmila Alexeevna, Oleg Orlov, and Tanya Lokshina.

In central Moscow, nearly opposite the headquarters of the Interior Police on 38 Petrovka, is located Russia’s historical civil-rights group, Memorial. Founded in 1987 by former dissidents and political prisoners to commemorate the horrors of the Soviet past, Memorial expanded considerably, turning into a research center. It also spread to many Russian cities and towns, including in the contested North Caucasus. Memorial’s activist Natalia Estimirova was the one of the undisputed leaders in collecting information on human-rights violations like kidnappings and extra-judicial executions in Chechnya. She was kidnapped in Grozny in July 2009; her body was found a few days later in the neighboring Ingushetia carrying signs of a violent death: she had been shot. The killers were never found.

Memorial’s chair, Oleg Orlov, declared that Natalia’s death led to what her murderers wanted to achieve: an abrupt reduction of information inflow from Chechnya. Likewise, the authorities still make it nearly impossible for the civil society to work safely in the Caucasus. However, Memorial continues its mission indefatigably: “They must know that someone else will stand up for them,” told Orlov in a recent interview. And so does Tanya Lokshina, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch. The Financial Times even listed her in the prestigious list of “25 Russians to watch” in 2012. Although most of her colleagues and friends died in tragic circumstances, including Anna Politkovskaya and Natalia Estimirova, she is a frequent visitor of the Caucasus and became undoubtedly one of the most outspoken human rights advocates in Russia.

Interestingly, a new wave of activism now flanks traditional groups, like Memorial and Moscow Helsinki Group. For instance, Yevgenya Chirikova was an engineer not interested in politics at all. But one day, as she was walking with her husband through the Khimki forest (just outside Moscow), she saw red marks on many trees. She soon discovered that the federal government was planning to build a highway to St Petersburg meant to cut through the forest. She also learned that the oligarch most closely involved in the project was Arkady Rotenberg, Putin’s loyal friend and judo coach. Given its narrow shape, the whole ecosystem of the forest was then at risk. Thus, she began organizing demonstrations and acts of disobedience. Some members of her group even set up a camp where they daily confront the police in what became similar to guerrilla warfare. “We stopped them with our bodies – we hugged our trees and didn’t let them cut them down”, said Yevgenya.

She was threatened several times to have her two daughters taken away to a state-run orphanage due to an anonymous complain, like in Stalin’s time. Since she couldn’t count on the authorities, she made a video address and uploaded it on the Internet. People were not only very sympathizing; she gained even more support and now she turned out to be a very charismatic civic leader. Mikhail Beketov, the editor of the local newspapers, Khimkinskaya Pravda, was not as fortunate. He used to write columns about corruption cases and the highway project. Then, in November 2008, he was so brutally beaten that he ended up in coma for a few weeks losing three fingers, a leg and left unable to walk and speak.

Alexei Navalny represents another pillar of Russian political and social activism. The 35-year-old lawyer began his one-man crusade against corruption in 2007, when he acquired some stocks of Russia’s big state companies (Gazprom, Rosneft, and Transneft). He quickly noticed that these companies paid very small dividends; at the same time, he read in a newspaper article that Transneft had donated three hundred million dollars to charity. After extensive investigations, he slowly uncovered dubious arrangements and corruption allegations of big state-owned firms, including Gazprom,VTB, a major Russian bank, and RosPil. Navalny has managed to galvanized people to become civil activists without joining an NGO or even a political party thanks to his blog – widely read across Russia. The newspaper Vedomosti, the Russian equivalent of the Financial Times, defined Alexei Navalny as the politik goda (“politician of the year”).

Amongst many lawyers who attempted to fight corruption, we must remember Sergei Magnitsky, the attorney who had alleged wide-scale tax fraud sanctioned by officials. He was arrested and died in suspicious circumstances only few days before the one-year limit of his detention without trial would expire, while the officials involved in the scandal were promoted to higher ranks within the Interior Ministry. However, unlike Magnitsky, Navalny found a successful weapon for his cause: the Web. With more than 50 million users, Russia has the biggest Internet audience in Europe. And recent protests show how people are now discovering what a powerful tool online activism can be, even as a protection shield.

Ludmila Alexeevna, the chairman of Moscow Helsinki Group, is an eighty-four-year old lady who became a political activist since Stalin’s death, and, until today, she is arrested during unsanctioned rallies. “If I have to pay the price, I’ll pay it. It’s more important than obeying and lying out of fear. I am not ashamed of my life”, she proudly stated. She also emphasized the role of the Internet in shaping public opinion, especially for those movements that are never mentioned on state television. Indeed, a range of opposition websites, including The New Times, Ekho Moskvy, Kommersant, Radio Liberty, and the independent elections observer Golos (“voice” in Russian) were targets of an unprecedented hacker attack on December 4th. There is a widespread fear that Putin will put more pressure on civil-society organizations and on the Internet in view of the upcoming presidential elections next March.

Though it started to kick off, civil society in Russia remains small and fragile. As The New Yorker’s Chief Editor, David Remnik, recently wrote, the efficacy of such groups and individuals is so limited, so circumscribed by the Kremlin that they do not constitute a civil society; but, rather, an archipelago of islands in a vast sea, barely connected to each other and ignored, at best, by the political élite. Their work is still dangerous. Lawyers, journalists, and human rights defenders have been murdered for their work in recent years, but Putin, echoed by the Chechen warlord Ramzan Kadyrov, defined these independent monitors with the (typically Soviet) expression: “enemies of the people.” The growing numbers of demonstrators at street rallies may yet be a sign that something has changed. In any case, the upcoming presidential elections will represent a pivotal moment for Russia’s civil society and the country as a whole.

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Marzia Cimmino is a trainee at Human Rights Watch in the Russian Federation. Before moving to HRW, she was a visiting Research Fellow at the Carnegie Moscow Center. Her analyses on Russian foreign and security policy have appeared on the journals Aspenia Online and Equilibri amongst others.