As we commemorate the 30th anniversary of the events that led to the reunification not only of Germany, but also of Europe, we would be wise to recall the cautionary message of those who sacrificed their lives on Tiananmen Square.

Smith Freeman and Olivia Capozzalo of the She’s In Russia podcast interviewed Yulia Gorbunova about the latest Human Rights Watch report.

Turkish academic Mahmut Çınar was recently blacklisted from his professorship because he signed a petition in support of rights for Kurdish populations. He defended himself against the accusations of terrorist propaganda in the Turkish High Court. This is his statement of defence.

Interview with Arif Hacılı, the leader of the Musavat opposition party in Azerbaijan. Interviewer: Malgosia Krakowska.

In the years 2013 to 2015, following the Maidan Revolution in Ukraine and the shady re-election of Azeri president Ilham Aliyev, for a third term, the Azerbaijani government, already one of the most restrictive dictatorships of the European continent, introduced a series of new laws and regulations affecting NGOs, their funding, and their activities. This allowed for an unprecedented crackdown on the NGO sector between 2014 and 2016.

The move to partially “decriminalise” domestic violence in Russia in January 2017 is the illustrative apex of a longer trajectory of the decimation of women’s rights post- Pussy Riot. I have spent more than a decade researching what rights mean in women’s everyday life in Russia. It is evident that the local neoconservative context in Russia is hardening. We are seeing legislative moves in parallel with neoconservative discourses that actively limit women’s autonomy and freedom by attacking reproductive rights and disregarding gender-based violence. Yet, it is important to consider these moves as situated within a global context of apparent state-sanctioned misogynies, which we see across autocracies and democracies. Is Russia one extreme example of the wider failure to recognise women’s rights and their violations in relation to gendered violence across the globe?

This piece originally appeared in Issue 5 of New Eastern Europe. Subscribe now.

33-year old Ildar Dadin is a former security guard who got married in a Moscow detention centre last February. Cameras were not allowed for the short ceremony but journalist Anastasiya Zotova, now his wife, came out smiling to the well-wishers and reporters waiting in the snow. At that point, Dadin had been under house arrest or behind bars for a year, having neither had any previous convictions nor a particularly high pubic profile. The judge at Moscow’s Basmanny Court had sentenced Dadin to a total of three years of prison.