Recently, a number of Russian official bodies have been actively ranting on the subject of all things foreign. Thus, as recently as the beginning of this month, a number of Russian activists abroad had their domestic passports cancelled. This is effectively cutted them off from being able to make many transactions remotely in Russia.
Yesterday and today, however, a whole host of new repressive measures against foreigners and all those who are in any way connected with them. For example, yesterday it was announced about a new draft strategy for ‘countering extremism’, where it was proposed to create a data bank of persons who ‘left the Russian Federation to participate in extremist organisations, as well as for training in foreign centres of unfriendly states’.
What are these foreign centres of unfriendly states? The wording is so vague that potentially any Russian who has received, e.g., an offer of temporary professional training abroad could become an enemy for the Ministry of Internal Affairs.
Today, however, the mad printer of Russian parliamentarism passed several bills at once:
- providing for the possibility of recognising any foreign organisations as undesirable in Russia, including those whose founders are foreign government agencies;
- the right of the police to decide on the expulsion of foreigners;
- criminal punishment for participation in the activities of any undesirable foreign organisations.
All these measures, taken together, paint a such a disappointing picture. Far from any specifics, anyone and anything can be declared ‘undesirable’. The Russian state is trying to regulate everything foreign not because it is threatened by it (and it is unclear how some abstract foreign centres can do this). Russian bureaucracy faces a completely different environment, with which it does not know how to interact in principle, and in order to prevent anything from happening, it screws the screws in advance, because it is difficult to understand social, labour and political immigrants and emigrants, fenced off by metal detector frames, cameras and cars with blinkers even from its own people.
Besides, the witch-hunt inside Russia itself is getting more and more complicated, because there are no witches left. They have to look for new ones.
