President Vladimir V. Putin and his security services kept a lid on public dissent even as he invaded a neighboring country, sent hundreds of thousands of soldiers to their deaths and drastically raised taxes to pay for it all.
Then, they moved to throttle popular apps and intermittently cut off the internet. Suddenly, many Russians found their voice.
Ordinary citizens, politicians and even reality television stars have criticized the restrictions. By speaking out, they have breathed a whiff of life into the Russian political system, which no longer allows for genuine opposition but leaves a little room around the edges for dissenting views.
Instagram influencers who usually are apolitical are banging the drum for digital rights. Politicians from the “systemic opposition” — the Potemkin factions that the Kremlin allows in Parliament to oppose the ruling United Russia party but still almost always vote with it — have reproached the government for restricting Telegram, the country’s most widely used chatting app.
The discontent is bubbling up months before Russia’s first parliamentary elections since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. And, along with dissatisfaction over the struggling economy and tax hikes, it has helped send Mr. Putin’s approval rating down. The figure has fallen for seven consecutive weeks and now stands at 65.6 percent, according to VTsIOM, a state-run pollster, around where it was just before the war.
“The internet restrictions have turned a large number of people against the ruling class, if not against Vladimir Putin personally,” said Mikhail Komin, a political scientist at the Center for European Policy Analysis. “That’s why we’re seeing approval ratings drop and people who never spoke out on political issues suddenly getting political.”
Few aspects of the deepening repression in Russia over the course of the war have been felt as broadly as the Kremlin’s efforts, under wartime pretexts, to bring the nation’s internet fully under its control.
Citing security reasons, the authorities have for months blocked access to the mobile internet for days on end in the vast majority of Russian regions. They have also blocked or throttled an increasing number of foreign apps — including Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp and Telegram — pressuring Russians to use homegrown alternatives that are easier to monitor. Many have turned to technological workarounds known as Virtual Private Networks, or VPNs.
As the blackouts and blockages have interfered with everyday life, Russians have tried to hold protests in some cities. The authorities have blocked them, in some cases citing fears that the demonstrations could get too big.
Russians have instead taken their complaints to social media. Furious messages have flooded the comment section of the social media page for the Digital Development Ministry. When the internet outages peaked, so did searches on Google for “how to leave Russia.”
Criticism has come from some unexpected voices. Victoria Bonya, a beauty influencer and former reality television star who lives in Monaco, said in an Instagram reel that the internet restrictions “make Russia impossible to live in.”
She was careful in her direct criticism of Mr. Putin, using a Russian trope to suggest that perhaps he had just not been properly briefed by his aides. And she spoke from the relative safety of life abroad. But she also said, “I don’t think people should be scared of their own president.”
The clip has received more than 30 million views. The Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, was pressed by reporters two days in a row to comment on it, and finally said Ms. Bonya could feel reassured the Kremlin was working on the issues she had raised.
Gennady Zyuganov, the leader of the Russian Communist Party, praised Ms. Bonya during a speech in Parliament. He said that as Russia’s economy stagnated and the internet restrictions grew, the snowballing discontent could threaten the current government in the same way that an unpopular war, economic hardships and stifling of freedoms toppled the Russian monarchy in 1917.
Ms. Bonya channeled the long-repressed frustrations of many Russians, said Abbas Gallyamov, a former Kremlin speechwriter who left Russia after the invasion of Ukraine.
“The attack on the internet is viewed as an attack on private life,” he said by telephone. “People are losing the most basic services. This creates a very strong resentment.”
Even loyal members of Mr. Putin’s own party, United Russia, have spoken out.
Vyacheslav Gladkov, governor of the Belgorod region in western Russia, the site of almost daily attacks by the Ukrainian military, said on social media that he was “worried” that the Telegram restrictions could endanger the lives of residents who relied on the app for air raid warnings.
More than 100 million Russians were using Telegram every month for communication, news and business transactions. The Kremlin is pushing them to switch to MAX, an unencrypted government-built “super” app.
Russians are asking opposition parties to try to do something. The Communist Party has been “flooded with complaints from all over the country,” Alexander Yushchenko, a longtime party lawmaker, said by telephone. Voters’ reaction to the restrictions, he said, have ranged from “dismay to outright radicalism.”
What has particularly incensed people, he said, is the secrecy around the measures. The government has spoken only vaguely about security threats in justifying its curbs on the internet.
This month, the Communists put forward a motion to oblige the Digital Development Ministry to provide an official explanation about the outages and blockages. The motion failed because members of United Russia voted against it.
In one twist, consistent criticism of the internet blockages has rewarded a puppet party created before the 2021 parliamentary elections to channel the youth vote after the Kremlin’s crackdown on the genuine opposition movement led by Aleksei A. Navalny.
Previously, the party, New People, sought to speak out about less-sensitive issues like removing red tape for small businesses. Now, it is focusing on internet freedoms, while being careful not to cast blame directly on Mr. Putin.
New People, which got 5 percent of the vote in 2021, has now overtaken the other three Kremlin-friendly opposition parties, receiving the support of 13 percent of voters in a recent opinion poll.
Though mostly muzzled since 2022, opposition parties retain a degree of independence and have been testing the limits of dissent before the parliamentary election scheduled to be held by September. (Representatives of New People declined multiple requests for interviews with The New York Times.)
The newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta, which at times is mildly critical of the Russian government, wrote in an editorial that “The internet is essentially the only issue where every party could boost their approval rating right now.”
Still, the flickers of political activity will not reverse Russians’ disillusionment with what is widely viewed as a rigged system.
“I don’t take part in those theatrics,” said Svetlana, a retired engineer in her late 50s, recounting her past experience on a local commission organizing elections.
Svetlana, who was fearful of giving her last name, was in Red Square to pay her respects to Vladimir Lenin at his mausoleum during an event organized by the Communist Party.
“With the current government, we are essentially confined to an open jail, and things keep getting worse and worse,” she said.
Denis Parfyonov, a Communist Party lawmaker who attended the event, said public discontent had grown so much that “maybe not that much time is left” until Russians would be ready for “far more decisive steps.”
So far, however, the system of power that Mr. Putin built appears to be insulated from the sort of revolutionary change that the Russian Communists technically celebrate.
“We can see a new political process underway, that’s for sure, but it poses no threat to the stability of the political regime,” Mr. Komin, the political scientist, said.
Valerie Hopkins covers the war in Ukraine and how the conflict is changing Russia, Ukraine, Europe and the United States. She is based in Moscow.
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