Traditional Methods

In an article for The Dissident Blog, Tanya Lokshina writes about the ongoing crackdown on civil society that is taking place in Russia, affecting vulnerable minorites including migrants and the gay community. While Lokshina describes the current anti-liberal campaign by the authorities as "unprecedented", there are signs that it may simply be a reversion to type. In the name of a bogus appeal to political and social conservatism the Kremlin is exercising an old and atavistic mode of repression that it understands only too well:

those who dare speak out—be it about their sexual identity or their discontent with governmental policies—are threatened with punishment and blackened in the eyes of society. This is what lies behind the superficially respectable veil of ‘traditional values’ that the Kremlin is throwing over Russia today.