Last year, two members of the State Duma — accused by a British court of the murder of Russian citizen Andrei Lugovoi and billionaire Andrei Klishas, who buys watches for 168 million rubles — proposed to disconnect Russians from the global Internet. It may seem like a private initiative of two deputies, which does not need to be given much importance — anyone can propose something to attract the attention of the media. But no, the current grotesque reality in Russia is such that the more absurd a new legislative initiative looks, the more chances it has of being passed into law. And now the Russian government has approved the bill proposed by Klishas and Lugovoi, with the only condition that the authors must propose a source of funding for the corresponding measures.
Of course, it will not be Mr. Klishas’s personal budget, which, as is now clear, is more than sufficient to finance large-scale state programs. The recently arrested Senator Arashukov, whose family apparently has only a few tens of billions of rubles from the «national wealth» of Gazprom, was presented as some kind of unique corrupt official, but with the example of Klishas it is clear that this is a fairly average level of prosperity for representatives of the Putin «elite». In other words, any one of them can very well afford to finance a national program out of his own pocket. But Mr. Klishas is unlikely to make such a generous gesture to the state he cares so much about in this bill, because such individuals confuse personal and state funds exclusively in the opposite direction. Therefore, it will not be surprising if Klishas and Lugovoi propose to finance their initiative at the expense of the funds of new «enemies of the people», whether they are their unfortunate colleagues, whom the system is currently shedding as ballast (and therefore one must be very agitated not to find oneself among them), or confiscated property of various «extremists and terrorists», which they include thousands of people for reposting and publishing in blogs.
It should be noted that the speed with which this system is falling into madness is beginning to exceed even the boldest predictions. A few years ago, the threat to cut the country off from the Internet would have been laughed off by Kremlin propagandists themselves, who would have portrayed it as a paranoid delusion of the opposition. But every year the «Overton window» of Russian reality expands and expands, and now looks like a gaping hole. And if during Putin’s first, second, and even the beginning of his third presidential term he occasionally portrayed himself as a «good tsar» who rebuked the «bad boyars» and discredited their most odious initiatives, starting with the Yarovaya Laws, now it is they who have the greatest chance of winning his support. The same thing happened with the pension reform, which many were confident that the president, as the «defender of the people,» would stop after allowing it to pass at all levels. No, he did not.
Probably the same will happen with the Internet shutdown. After all, it is practically the last but the most terrible threat to the current system. Either it will end it, or the end of this system will come from the Internet.