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As passed in a first reading on March 31, the bill would ban demonstrations outside government buildings, international organizations, embassies, courts, jails, hospitals, schools, churches, concert halls, theaters and stadiums.
The bill, supported solely by United Russia, provoked an immediate outcry from nearly everyone else, and within two days United Russia was backing down.
Putin's revisions would allow protests outside government buildings and many other places included in the bill. His residences would remain protected from disgruntled citizens, as would courts and jails and things like railroads, pipelines and environmentally hazardous sites.
Putin also overruled the Duma's provision that events deemed to violate "moral norms" could be forbidden, although his alternative proposal would require bureaucrats to send any concerns they have to the organizers "in written form." What Putin does not object to, however, is the spirit of the proposed law. He wants it revised, not scrapped.
Indeed, with United Russia and the whole political system controlled out of the Kremlin, it is hard to believe the bill did not get Putin's nod of approval before it was ever put up for a vote in March.
And thus the whole month-long saga smacks of a stage-managed PR stunt enabling Putin to position himself as an enlightened tsar, the only person capable of checking the authoritarian, backward and "unconstitutional" forces in the country.
Reinforcing the age-old myth of the good tsar and bad boyars, the personal aspect clearly has been played up, as though Putin himself was moved to put pen to paper and rewrite the bill, such was his outrage at the "illegality" of certain aspects of it.
It is all too reminiscent of when the bill on extending the presidential term to seven years was dusted off in the Duma in February so that Putin could make a public show of rejecting it and defending the Constitution in the run-up to the presidential election.
But for whose benefit, then, has this elaborate song and dance been organized? Is it for domestic consumption, for the 30 percent of the population who, in Mikhail Khodorkovsky's estimation, are more liberal than Putin? Or for foreign consumption? Putin is clearly concerned about his image in the West as an authoritarian leader. Or is it purely tactical considerations? Spook people with a scary first draft, so that the final version seems moderate and criticism is muted.
Probably all of the above.
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