On July 25, Russia's upper house approved a new censorship law that introduces fines for anyone caught searching for or accessing content officially labeled as "extremist." The law will take effect once signed by Russia's president Vladimir Putin. The sweeping legislation doesn't stop there — it also imposes penalties for promoting VPN services, the very tools many Russians rely on to bypass government censorship and access blocked information.

After Russia's lower house, the State Duma, endorsed the law on July 22, a small group of people protested outside Russia's parliament, for the first time in a long while. One of the signs read "For a Russia without censorship. Orwell wrote a dystopia, not a manual." Police quickly detained the man holding it.

The classic dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, published in 1949, is widely interpreted as a warning against totalitarian rule, inspired by the government oppression the author observed in Nazism and Stalinism.

Another protester was Boris Nadezhdin, who had been expected to be the only liberal candidate in the 2024 presidential election. At the time, the electoral commission refused to register his candidacy.

"The first stage was banning websites. Now they're banning people from searching the internet. This is already close to thoughtcrime," Nadezhdin told DW, alluding to Orwell's same novel, and its central theme of citizens being punished for thinking differently than the state.

The new legislation stands out even among the dozens of censorship laws the State Duma has passed before and after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. According to the bill, simply searching for so-called "extremist materials" online will now be considered an administrative offense, punishable with a fine of up to the equivalent of €55 ($64). Previously, punishment required some form of engagement with banned material, such as posting a critical comment on social media.

What counts as........

© Deutsche Welle