Moscow returns to Soviet times

The Russian parliament adopts strict rules on freedom of expression: they want to strike at 'foreign agents'. It would be a return to the times of Stalin and Brezhnev. In Gorbačëv's Soviet Union there was more freedom than in today's Russia.

Moscow (AsiaNews) - The National Duma has approved a new bill that would return freedom of expression to the concept of "freedom of demonstration" of Soviet times. A group of deputies and senators, Andrej Klimov, Vasilij Piskarev, Andrei Lugovoj, Maria Butina, Rosa Čemeris and Andrej Alševskikh, considered "the cream of parliament", have proposed to "perfect the regulation on the status of foreign agent".

The draft envisages banning 'inoagenty' from carrying out any kind of educational or training activity, from publishing children's content, from working in state and regional institutions of public education, and a number of other prohibitions. And above all, to avoid any form of contamination, an absolute ban on any form of public display.

It will be forbidden for people on the 'black list', on which all those who criticise the government, the army and state policy now end up, to organise public meetings, street demonstrations, processions and gatherings at station and bus stop buildings, airports, buildings and territories related to educational, health and social welfare institutions, places of worship and any religious organisation. And as icing on the cake, it will be forbidden to gather at the buildings of public administration bodies and in the territories adjoining them: basically everywhere.

Citizens will thus be prevented from demonstrating any form of dissent in front of the palaces of power, parliament and government, where decisions are made that often cause the population's discontent, and where they would like to express their dissent, while they will only be able to do so deep in the woods. And to think that the Russian Constitutional Court had ruled in 2019 that 'insurmountable barriers cannot be raised to the satisfaction of citizens' right to freedom of peaceful assembly at public administration bodies', in a ruling concerning the republic of Komi in northern European Russia.

The same Court also ruled in 2020, recalling that inconveniencing citizens who do not wish to participate in them 'cannot constitute an objection to deny the right to peaceful actions of expressing one's will'. According to the Consulta, the organs of power 'are required to take all measures entrusted to them to ensure the possibility of organising demonstrations in agreed venues, without trying to find on every occasion causes that justify the impossibility of realising the right to organise public meetings in the formats provided for by law'.

All this brings back memories of the Soviet procedure for organising public demonstrations, when the Stalinist Constitution of 1936, and the Brezhnevist Constitution of 1977, proclaimed the 'freedom to organise street processions and other demonstrations'. The Stalinist charter explained that this freedom must 'correspond to the interests of the workers and the aims of strengthening the socialist system', and to this end workers' associations were guaranteed 'buildings and social spaces'. Similar conditions appeared in the 1970s, limited to the 'interests of the people'.

Soviet dissidents used to gather without permission next to statues of poets, of Pushkin and Majakovsky, to read new freethinking poems, eventually ending up in the lagers and psychiatric asylums of Brezhnevian memory.

The regime allowed freedom of public assembly for the first time during Gorbačëv's perestroika. In 1987, the Soviet leader promoted the transparency of glasnost, which was affirmed by a ruling of the local government in Leningrad, later also adopted in Riga and Moscow. A year later, the Presidium of the CCP Central Committee then approved a norm 'on freedom of assembly, demonstration, street parades and demonstrations' throughout the USSR, to which it would be nice to return 34 years later.