On June 24, 2016, the State Duma (the lower house of the Russian parliament), in its final session before the September elections, endorsed a highly controversial bill drastically expanding the capacity of the secret services to intervene in citizens’ private lives and introducing extrajudicial persecution of “extremist” acts. Even Edward Snowden, the famous U.S. leaker hiding in Russia, publicly urged President Putin not to sign it into the law, saying the “bill will take money and liberty from every Russian without improving safety.”
The bill was then approved by the Federation Council (parliament’s upper house) on June 30 and signed by President Putin on July 7. There was no doubt about the outcome of the process; the legislature would not have even debated such a law if an order to do so had not come from the Kremlin administration. Russia’s parliament lacks any power of the purse; it is therefore not remotely comparable in power or function to legislative branches in democracies. It is, please excuse the overused but in this case still perfect metaphor, a Potemkin Village parliament.
