Russia is having a moment, partially because its highly visible leader, President Vladimir Putin, has become an increasingly formidable character in international politics. Putin has had a hand in many of the foreign policy negotiations that the United States has also been involved in, and not always a helping one (Case in point: Edward Snowden). President Obama has described his relationship with Putin as “blunt” and “candid.”

The deal Putin recently brokered with Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad, which would protect Syria from U.S. airstrikes as long as Assad agreed to relinquish any chemical weapons, does not help the situation. This deal kept the United States from getting involved in another lose-lose situation in the Middle East, but also allowed Russia to keep Syria as an ally and made the United States look pretty dumb in the process.

Putin outlined his position (and kind of thumbed his nose at the United States) in a Sept. 11 Op-Ed for the New York Times. He has also recently been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize for the compromise. If you had to read that twice in order to believe it, don’t worry: basically anyone can be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Adolf Hitler was in 1939.

Most alarmingly, Putin has partnered the Russian Orthodox Church in order to return to the outdated, oppressive ideal of the traditional Russian heartland, untainted by Western ideology. What, exactly, this “heartland” entails is unclear, but it would appear that members of the LGBTI community, as well as women and dissenters of any stripe, aren’t allowed in.

The recent anti-gay law, which bans the spread of “homosexual propaganda,” has received quite a bit of attention in the media, and for good reason. Not only is it in flagrant violation of human rights, but it also has ramifications for the 2014 Winter Olympic Games which will be held in the Russian city of Sochi.

Though the anti-gay law is sickening, there are yet further examples of more covert repression happening in all corners of Russia’s vast terrain. There’s more to Putin’s patriotic heartland reclamation than ignorant legislation. It begins with the fact that GULAG-style prisons (the Russian acronym for Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps and Colonies, a relic of the terrible Stalin regime) still exist, and house inmates are imprisoned for, at the heart of it, speaking out against Putin.

Three members of the punk-rock feminist protest group Pussy Riot, known to pop up flash-mob-style, clad in balaclavas to sing/scream protest songs, were imprisoned following a Feb. 2012 performance of “Virgin Mary, Put Putin Away,” on the altar of Moscow’s Christ the Savior Cathedral. For their “punk prayer,” Yekaterina Samutsevich, Maria Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova were charged with “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred,” which is technically a hate crime.

Never mind the irony of it all, given the general and baseless hatred the Putin regime has shown itself to harbor. The band’s statement was not an affront to religion itself, but against the corrupt collaboration between the government and the church in pursuit of a conservative social agenda. Supporters of Pussy Riot as well as various humanitarian groups like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International believe that the charges and ensuing punishment – two years in prison – doesn’t fit the crime.

At the heart of the debate is the question of whether an offensive political statement is the same as a hate crime. It isn’t, according to Human Rights Watch, “To correctly balance the rights of free speech and political opinion with protection of the rights of others, only conduct likely to incite imminent violence, discrimination, or hostility against an individual or clearly defined group of people should be classified as a hate crime.” The disproportionate charge, then, is more an attempt to police free expression than to quash so-called “hate.”

Samutsevich has already been released, but Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova still have a few months remaining in their two-year sentences. Tolokonnikova, who is set to be released in March, has made waves recently for embarking on a nine-day hunger strike, which began on Sept. 23, to protest the conditions at Penal Colony 14, a women’s prison located in the bleak region of Mordovia in southwest Russia.

She detailed the reasoning behind her hunger strike, as well as the various abuses, in an open letter. Some of the alleged abuses include forcing inmates to work 16 to 17 hours each day sewing uniforms that are then sold to an outside company for profit and imposing impossible quotas on that labor. Tolokonnikova allegedly received a thinly-veiled death threat after bringing up these concerns with the head warden. In addition to these specific complaints, Tolokonnikova has condemned the inadequate rations, filthy sanitary facilities, lack of hot water and staff abuse towards inmates, including randomly stripping and beating inmates who do not meet their quotas and using favored inmates to police the rest.

Tolokonnikova was moved into solitary confinement during her hunger strike and is currently in the hospital due to an infection. Despite her condition, Tolokonnikova has threatened to resume her hunger strike unless the rights violations in Penal Colony 14 are investigated and she is transferred to another facility. Both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have urged authorities to seriously investigate the accusations, and have advocated for the release of Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina.

The brutal Russian prison system and its history of slave-labor conditions has faced scrutiny in the past, but not enough to affect change. Tolokonnikova’s high-profile, controversial stature, magnified by her open letter and bolstered by the support of humanitarian organizations, may help engender real change in the prison system and how political dissidents are still treated in Russia.

So what have we learned? There’s a lot more to Putin’s patriotic agenda than riding around shirtless on horseback and calling for a return to a “simpler” time. As the anti-gay law and the mistreatment of political dissidents in Stalin-style prisons shows, the sinister nature of Putin’s regime spreads far and wide, and we’d do well to pay attention to how it plays out.

Hannah Sparks is a Collegian columnist and can be reached at [email protected].