March 13, 2021 can be considered as another milestone of the current Russian regime in its struggle against Russian society. If earlier there were raids by law enforcement officers on meetings of various «Wahhabis,» Jehovah’s Witnesses, and other «extremists,» then on that day such a raid took place on… a forum of municipal deputies held in Moscow. In other words, it was an attack on representatives of the Russian government itself, at the local level.
But these were the wrong bees, i.e. municipal deputies. They did not gather under the auspices of the ruling party, or worse, under the auspices of one of the Kremlin-controlled parties, such as the CPRF and LDPR, which rarely play ball with the authorities and wanted to teach those who wanted to join their ranks how to win elections. This was enough for law enforcement officers to interrupt the meeting on the pretext that its participants were either connected to a mysterious undesirable organization or had violated the mask, glove and social distance regime, after which they began to remove them from the hall and take them away in police vans.
In addition to more than a hundred ordinary participants of the event, the following elected representatives of the Russian government were taken to a police station Mikhail Timonov, deputy of the Moscow City Duma; Maxim Reznik, deputy of the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly; Ilya Yashin, head of the Krasnoselsky municipal entity and chairman of the council of deputies of the Krasnoselsky municipal district in Moscow; and Yulia Galyamina, deputy of the Timiryazevsky municipal district in Moscow. Sergei Vlasov, a municipal deputy of the Pechatniki district in Moscow, managed to avoid arrest by pretending to be a journalist, not a deputy. Also «welcomed» were the former mayor of Ekaterinburg, Yevgeny Roizman, and the twice-poisoned politician Vladimir Kara-Murza.
It is significant that the Kremlin, having established absolute control over all-Russian politics, is afraid to allow an increase in the number of deputies not under its control, even at the level of the smallest municipal entities. In other words, it is trying to control everything that is characteristic not of an authoritarian but of a totalitarian regime.
Against this background, it is unlikely that anyone in his right mind was surprised by the revelation of the former president of the Republic of Tatarstan, Mintimer Shaimiev, that «the federal authorities, exerting pressure on education through the prosecutor’s office, introduced new state educational standards through the federal educational authorities, and as a result, the amount of native-language instruction was reduced to three hours per week». But this is not the limit. The Kremlin is trying to control not only which deputies are elected to municipal assemblies (in some cases analogous to rural councils in the communist era) and how many hours of native languages of the peoples of the Russian republics are taught in schools, but also… what its officials wear. Some time ago, the heads of the republics of Tatarstan and Bashkortostan, apparently following the example of Ramzan Kadyrov, began to appear in clothes stylized as national, thus setting an example for their subordinates. But it didn’t last long — Radik Habirov, the Moscow appointee who played the role of a Bashkir national leader, was apparently reprimanded by the Kremlin, and a new order was issued cancelling the previous one on wearing Bashkir costumes at official events. It will be interesting to see if the leaders of Tatarstan and Chechnya will follow suit.
In short, everything is logical. In the country that Putin’s Russia is becoming, everyone must vote the same, speak the same, dress the same, and ideally even think the same. The latter is to be ensured by the law on educational activities, which came into force last week and aims to suppress any education not controlled by the state. (In the photo — deputy Mikhail Timonov communicates with voters in a police car).