Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Michoustine during a Duma session in Moscow April 7, 2022. DMITRY ASTAKHOV / AFP
In a country where the president decides everything, or almost everything, this observation seems counterintuitive. However, a recent census has confirmed it: the Russia of 2022 has been gripped by an unprecedented legislative frenzy. During the year, the Duma, the lower house, passed 653 laws, “the largest number in the history of Parliament, a record since the end of the Soviet Union” in 1991. During the last session, its President Vyacheslav Volodin is congratulated.
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This winter session has also taken on the semblance of a frantic sprint, organizing votes down the chain to ratify legislation that is considered a priority. On December 21, for example, it was a law sanctioning incitement to sabotage with sentences ranging from imprisonment to life imprisonment — text tailored to combat the incessant fires of recruiting offices — or another that officially granted access at the FSB Russian security services to track data from taxi applications to track citizens’ movements.
That same week, three other more symbolic laws were passed in rapid succession: one banning the use of foreign words where there was a Russian equivalent; the other with up to five years in prison for the “public desecration” of the Ribbon of St. George, an emblem inherited from tsarism and especially World War II that has become a symbol of patriotism. The third, adopted for the time being at first reading, recognizes as “extremist” the geographic maps that do not accurately reflect Russia’s borders – but are shifting quite a bit given the Ukrainian army’s counter-offensives in the areas recently annexed to Moscow.
“Crazy Printer”
Each time, the procedure is accelerated: enough to give the Duma its long-forgotten nickname “the crazy printer”, won after the protest movement of 2011-2012, when deputies passed without even having time to read them, repressive texts prepared by the Kremlin.
The zeitgeist has changed in ten years, but the time is still ripe for mobilization in the face of internal and external threats. If Vyacheslav Volodin was pleased on December 26 that 33% of the texts adopted in 2022 concern social policy, the most important laws are undoubtedly of a repressive nature.
From March 4, ten days after the start of the “special military operation” in Ukraine, on February 24, the tone was set with the passage of ad hoc laws preventing the spread of “false news” about the actions of the Russians criminalized army or “discrediting” armed forces. These two texts were enough to eliminate the last independent media and silence any challenge to the conflict, with nearly 6,000 sentences handed down, sometimes accompanied by lengthy prison terms for political opponents.
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