Best & Worst of CPAC's Free Speech Ratings: Russia

Freedom of speech is a fundamental human right that keeps authoritarian governments in check. The CPAC inaugural Freedom of Speech Ratings highlights regimes that most aggressively dismantle this right and applaud those countries that respect and protect it. In this inaugural assessment, Russia received a dismal score of 0%, reflecting a total absence of independent expression. This score identifies a regime that not only restricts information but actively targets and destroys those who dare to challenge official state narratives, effectively ranking Russia as one of the most dangerous places in the world for dissent.

Modern Russia is defined by a political culture deeply rooted in the Soviet Union’s legacy of total state control and censorship. Since 2000, the Kremlin has effectively revived the Soviet model of "omnicensorship," where the state dominates every major television network and treats independent thought as a criminal act of subversion. The government has transitioned from the increased media freedom of the 1990s to a rigid one-party state that utilizes the security apparatus to monitor private citizens and eliminate any genuine political competition. By weaponizing the concept of "patriotism" and erasing the distinction between dissent and treason, the regime has ensured that the only permissible public narrative is the one authored by the state.

The fate of Alexei Navalny serves as a stark example of this repression. A nationalist activist and opposition leader, Navalny was sentenced to 19 years in prison on charges including "rehabilitating Nazi ideology." A complex brand of Russian nationalism defined his career; he participated in the 2006 "Russia March" and vocally opposed immigration from the Caucasus, even comparing Muslims from that region to "cockroaches" in a controversial video. In 2024, he died in an Arctic penal colony under suspicious circumstances, a death widely viewed as a state-sponsored murder intended to silence his documentation of government graft forever.

The systematic silencing of figures like Navalny demonstrates the ruthlessness of Putin's regime in censoring expression and why Russia earned a spot as one of the worst rated in CPAC's Freedom of Speech Ratings with a score of 0%.

Read the full brief here.

Not every case of imprisonment for speech gets widespread media attention. If you are aware of a case in which a person was imprisoned for speech and received a harsher sentence than the political prisoner whom we feature in the scorecard, please send the details of the case to slaird2@conservative.org. To meet our methodological criteria, the person must be 1) imprisoned or sentenced to prison for speech that would have been protected under the US first amendment, 2) a citizen of the country in which they are imprisoned, 3) received a sentence of imprisonment for at least one month OR were imprisoned without being sentenced for at least 3 months 4) not imprisoned for any actual crime during the same period for which they were sentenced for a speech crime.

CPAC vehemently opposes the views of many of the political prisoners featured in the Freedom of Speech Ratings. Political prisoners are featured in the Freedom of Speech Ratings for the purpose of revealing the state of legal Freedom of Speech protection in their countries. Political prisoners are selected based on the objective facts of their cases; each selected prisoner is the person who received the harshest sentence in that country for speech that would have been protected by the US First Amendment. CPAC stands for the right to Freedom of Speech for everyone, even people whose views we vehemently oppose.