A new article on international terrorism is added to the Criminal Code. Committing or threatening to commit acts of terrorism outside of Russia, in which Russian citizens were killed or injured is now liable to prosecution. This article imposes life imprisonment as a maximum punishment.
Now the Russian Post and private postal companies should check the parcels for anything illegal, for example, weapons, drugs or money. Responsibility for this is entrusted to the postal operators. In Russia, the correspondence privacy is eliminated.
Two unconstitutional amendments failed to pass. Before the second reading, the deputies rejected the idea of stripping the citizenship of people who committed terrorist acts or extremist crimes, as well as those who cooperate with international organizations. In the first version of the draft law, it was proposed to ban the exit from Russia to people who received a warning from the FSB or the prosecutor’s office about the inadmissibility of committing illegal actions, which is a motion out of court. As a result, the parliamentarians decided to abandon this rule altogether25.
This last detail is very revealing. If deprivation of citizenship can hardly be considered a serious punishment, the ban on going abroad would affect the way of life of a significant number of government critics. It is not by chance that this proposal was given much attention in social networks, where it was regarded as a blow to the “most advanced part of society”. It was also a distraction from the fact that these amendments were going to strike the whole IT industry, leading to a significant increase in prices for cellular and other types of communications26. We are dealing here not only with expanding the repressive powers of the authorities, but also with the damaging impact on social cohesion, on further atomization of society’s everyday life. This development creates obstacles to joint social activities and encumbers ordinary communications between individuals. Clearly obvious that the authorities, which have mastered modern IT technologies, obstruct their further advancement. However, it is more accurate to speak not of slowing down the development of information technologies, but of hindering their social spread and utilization. The law has its own beneficiaries – the producers of equipment for eavesdropping and storing information. In this respect, experts directly point to the head of Rostekh Sergei Chemezov, one of Putin’s inner circle figures27.
While part of the society, which calls itself advanced, discussed the prospects of ban on going abroad, a law was quietly adopted, which not only subjected the entire society under police surveillance, but also amalgamated the power and society under unifying police control, essentially introducing the principle of citizen’s loyalty as a condition of safety at the discretion of not only the state, but also the members of society. This is the law “On the Basics of the Prevention of Law Offenses in Russia”28. It introduces the concept of “antisocial behavior”, which is defined as” the actions of a physical person, not liable to the administrative or criminal responsibility, but violating the generally accepted norms of conduct and morality, the rights and lawful interests of others.” Therefore, there is a category of actions identified as “violating the generally accepted norms of behavior and morality.” The new law gives the right to employees of the Ministry of Internal Affairs to collect data on citizens who were not previously held liable for any offence. And it opens wide opportunities for the public to cooperate with the police in this matter. Morality and law merge into a single system of control of power and society over individuals. And we should add to this the law that allows banks, that is, private institutions, to collect debts using the Federal Bailiff Service as their enforcement, without a court decision29. The situation is unthinkable in a civilized state: imagine US federal marshals acting without a court decision upon request of some bank. But such a breakdown of institutional relations is normal for a totalitarian structure. As well as the fact that the Russian federal marshals are being assigned to the collection business. Similarly, the same thing happened with the newly created Russian Guard directly subordinated to the president, formed on the basis of Internal Troops of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Taking over the security business of the ministry the Russian Guard was vested with a wide mandate30.
The Ministry of the Interior is all but destroyed. Long before its economic (including shadow) and power components were taken away. Currently it is reduced to FSIN (Federal Service for Execution of Punishment). The creation of the Russian Guard took away from the Ministry of Internal Affairs its security business – both legal and protection of private security firms, and not only PSFs, the ministry lost all its more power resources; the SOBR (Rapid Deployment Force) is no more, gone are the OMON (Special Designation Police Detachment) and Internal Military force. All these developments show not only an intraspecific competition, but also a new place for the police in the emerging socio-political structure: an executive department, designed to protect the population, is deliberately weakened and humiliated; public security of the citizenry becomes a matter of low priority.
Summing up the results of lawmaking during Putin’s reign, one must admit that it has a totalitarian character, destroys the state-society dichotomy, replacing it with the unity of power and society. First, there was isolation of society from power, denying it the participation in decision-making, and then, on the contrary, the society began to get recruited in a controllable governance process – from participation in extra-institutional violence to the collaboration with punitive institutions.
It is ridiculoIus to condemn Absurdistan for absurdity. Criminal cases against physicists, bloggers, ordinary people, suddenly caught up in politics, are built on the principle that the more absurd the better. Wood carvers were fined for an element resembling the swastika, a motive normally found in ancient folk ornaments31. Roskomnadzor (Federal Supervision Agency for Information Technologies and Communications) blocked the retelling of the 1837 satirical publication “How to take bribes correctly” on the educational site32. The purpose of all this is to let people know that they are not subject of prosecution for something they have done, but because of the authorities’ innate necessity to prosecute, and they will do that for sure – who cares about justifications! This is not an absurdist play, but a criminal and mean method of management. Therefore, it is incorrect to characterize what is happening as absurdity, stupidity and idiocy. This is just plain evil, crime and meanness. And you must call things by their proper name: evil is evil, a crime is a crime and meanness is nothing but mean.
Might and Wealth
Totalitarian regimes do not need support coming from a conscious choice of a person and a citizen, because they need neither a citizen nor a person. The very existence of choice, the thought of its possibility is deemed to be an offence. The social support of totalitarian power is the absence of any strength on which one could rely. Nowadays the absolute majority of Russian population is happy that their government not only does not encourage it for anything, but, on the contrary, asks not to make any effort. The population does not ask questions, and loves Putin very much. But loyalty to the regime is not limited to this.
In the course of the election campaigns, the word “puting” was coined, which meaning is a mass event in support of power, organized according to the Soviet model voluntary-compulsory gathering of participants with pre-fabricated slogans and rehearsed ovations.
Many observers were sure that the putings’ participants, after experiencing coercion and humiliation would vote against Putin. The result was exact opposite.
Putin affirmed a totalitarian solidarity in Russia,