Leonid Nikitinsky

1 August 2025

The law ‘on VPNs’ has yet to go into effect, but the Justice Ministry has already added to its list of ‘extremist materials’. And this is probably a good sign

by Leonid Nikitinsky

Source: Novaya gazeta

The Ministry of Justice has deemed Aleksei Navalny: Patriot an extremist book and added its Lithuanian edition in Russian to its list of banned materials. And this is probably good news. Let me explain why.

As we know, ‘The Duma is no place for discussion’, but the law ‘on VPNs’ passed here on the 22 July and signed by the president on 29 July has provoked debates even at this level. A sensitive point for ordinary Internet users was the question of what, as of 1 September, constituted a purposeful search for banned content using block-bypass means.

Is it only about works the Justice Ministry has managed to add to the corresponding list, or is it, more broadly, any product knocking around the Internet the court deems ‘extremist’ for each separate administrative case? 

The mechanism whereby the Duma passes a law with knowingly vague formulations and police agencies and courts use their imagination and add their own repressive content is well known to us.

But in the pause that suddenly arose between the second and third reading of the bill ‘on VPNs’, the leaders of high-profile Duma committees tried to reassure the public: using block-bypassing means would not be considered illegal in and of itself, rather it is the search for materials added to the Justice Ministry’s notorious list (approximately 5,500 items, most of them works of a nationalistic bent) that is being ‘criminalized’ (within the CAO RF [RF Code on Administration Violations] framework).

The law has yet to go into effect, and the search engines that lawyers use have yet to add the new Article 13.53 to the CAO RF text, but the Justice Ministry has been proactive. And this is a serious argument for the enforcement practice that will take shape under this article. The Justice Ministry seems to be giving us to understand that nonetheless it is proceeding from a narrow interpretation of the concept of ‘extremist materials’. 

That is, for searching for the book by Navalny, especially the Lithuanian edition, the curious face a fine of up to 5,000 rubles, whereas, according to this thinking, opening the Wikipedia page about him, even using a VPN, would not be punished.

Actually, legal practice may not even listen to the deputies and Justice Ministry and may follow a broader path of recognizing as ‘extremist’ anything under the sun. How this is going to turn out we will know closer to year’s end.

Meanwhile, on ‘extremist’ Facebook*, a forged letter on Ministry of Education and Science letterhead has appeared on the ban on possessing the books of Boris Akunin** and Dmitry Bykov** in ‘dormitories’ (of higher education institutes). In and of itself, the report, if you don’t go into the details (for example, what happened to the others?), looked perfectly plausible. Given the current zeal, almost anything can be expected from almost anyone in the regime.

The ministry rushed to disavow the letter, but it must be admitted that the clown who wrote it is deep into the topic. He is probably no younger than fifty and well remembers the tacit rules in effect in the Soviet Union with respect to samizdat.

Reading Solzhenitsyn or Voinovich was not prosecuted legally; on the other hand, its ‘distribution, preparation, or possession’ immediately led to the article of the Criminal Code on ‘anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda’—a sentence of up to seven years’ imprisonment. 

In practice, criminal responsibility was applied to far from everyone who was caught; they might be recruited as a low-level informant or simply driven from their job or institute.

Article 13.53 CAO RF will probably work according to the same principle, punishing not so much for the actual ‘search’ for extremist materials (which is hard to uncover without a denunciation) as for references to them on social networks. Here one must demonstrate caution. And it is possible that those who stand behind the Duma have a broader plan in mind and that its autumn session will grant us not only administrative but also criminal liability for ‘distributing samizdat’ (for a second time, for instance).

Translated by Marian Schwartz