The Rosa Parks of Putin’s Russia?

The under-reported sentencing of an unknown Russian woman illustrates how terrified the Putin regime is of any kind of dissent, how far it’s willing to go crush it and how Russians can still exhibit moral fiber and resist.

On May 10, a St. Petersburg court sentenced a 61-year-old pensioner named Irina Tsybaneva to two years’ probation. Her crime? On Oct. 6, 2022, just before Russian President Vladimir Putin’s 70th birthday, she placed a note on the grave of his parents that read: “To the maniac’s parents: Please take him. He brings so much pain and sorrow, and the whole world is praying for his death. Death to Putin. You raised a monster and a murderer.”

Strong words — and absolutely on target. The more important point, however, is that Tsybaneva acted on an emotional impulse and had no intention of making a public act of protest. Her action, in other words, was not political.

As she told the court: “I am 61 years old, I am a widow. I am not interested in politics and never have been, I am not a member of any political parties, and I have never been. I’ve never been to a rally and I never intended to.” But “after watching the news, I was overcome with fear.” She said she doesn’t “remember how I wrote it at all. I don’t remember the text at all. I realize that, succumbing to an emotional impulse, I made a rash act. I’m sorry that my actions could hurt or offend anyone, I’m sorry. It was a spontaneous action, not a planned action to get someone’s attention.”

Indeed, the note was nothing more than a cri de coeur by a senior citizen overwhelmed by the emotions produced by Putin and his war against Ukraine. Tsybaneva could have declared her disgust on Red Square. She could have distributed leaflets. Instead, she wrote a brief note, folded it and placed it in an inconspicuous spot on the grave.

“Nobody knew about the note,” she said. “I did not expect such a resonance. I was sure no one would ever see the note. The note was folded with the text on the inside, not attracting anyone’s attention at all.”

And yet the note did attract someone’s attention. An investigation was launched, and, after the police presumably spent hours tracking her down, Tsybaneva was placed under house arrest last fall. At her trial in May, she was found guilty of “desecrating burial sites for reasons of political hatred.”

The note clearly indicates that her feelings for Putin were hateful. But the hatred was not political; it was personal. Nor can one seriously believe that placing a note on a grave is a form of desecration.

And yet, despite the manifest harmlessness of Tsybaneva’s gesture, the Putin regime decided that a trial and punishment were imperative — regardless of the time and resources that might have been more fruitfully spent on fighting real crime. Only a leader who is profoundly fearful of and sensitive to any criticism, however slight, could take umbrage at a pensioner’s private opinion. A strong, self-confident regime would not act this way. A brittle and self-doubting regime would.

And it is precisely because of its weakness that such a regime responded the only way it knows how: by means of repression that, in intruding into the private lives of its subjects, resembles the totalitarianism of Stalin’s Soviet Union.

Unfortunately for Putin, the problem with his totalitarian aspirations is obvious. A system of total control works only if the regime is strong and has ample resources on hand. And that is precisely what Putin’s Russia — embroiled in a hopeless war, torn by political divisions within the elite and hamstrung by sanctions — is not.

Could Irina Tsybaneva become the Rosa Parks of Putin’s Russia? Parks’s act of defiance was supported by the growing civil rights movement and the network of African American churches that helped form a vibrant civil society within the oppressive Jim Crow South. Unfortunately, Russian civil society was among Putin’s first victims, and its leaders are either in exile or in jail.

But there is hope. Tsybaneva’s light sentence could inspire other Russians to leave notes on graves and monuments throughout the country. That may not seem like much, but revolutions often start with minor acts of protest that snowball into mass revolts.

Regardless of her immediate impact, Tsybaneva will very likely go down in history as an example of a “good Russian” who was willing to resist the evil that Putin and his regime represent. She will be lionized when that regime ends.

Alexander J. Motyl is a professor of political science at Rutgers University-Newark. A specialist on Ukraine, Russia and the USSR, and on nationalism, revolutions, empires and theory, he is the author of 10 books of nonfiction, as well as “Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires” and “Why Empires Reemerge: Imperial Collapse and Imperial Revival in Comparative Perspective.”