Short THREAD 1/6 The Russian parliament has passed a law that essentially bans any discussion of Russia’s military and political actions, as well as the discussion of other countries’ actions with regard to Russia.
2/6 It’s always fascinating when parliaments adopt emergency laws that deprive parliamentarians themselves of any real power (eg to discuss issues & consult the executive based on their own expertise rather than the executive’s whims) & then repress those same parliamentarians.
3/6 The mechanism at work is very simple. The thinking is: “if I vote against it, I will be repressed immediately. If I vote for it, I might be repressed in the future, but then again, I might not.
4/6 This window between “immediately” and “maybe later, but perhaps not” is the passage through which state institutions drag themselves into a regime whose laws turn people into victims and the nomenklatura among them.
5/6 Repressions against individual members of the nomenklatura don’t scare away the rest. On the contrary, they only make the others move closer to the center of power in the (irrational) hope that those on the edges will be picked off first, and that it will end there.
6/6 This is why emergencies and legislative crackdowns don’t cause the elite divide so often spoken of in regard to autocracies. Rather, they cause a shock among the elites. Far from weakening the regime, this shock only consolidates it. This is the situation right now in Russia.
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