Kremlin Comes Up with Another Way to Hide Its Shortcomings: It will Cut Off Funds to Those Making Films Showing Corrupt Siloviki

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Sept. 30 – Russian filmmakers will lose state financing if they produce films showing Russian police or security forces accepting bribes or engaged other corrupt enterprises, Kommersant reports, pointing to yet another way the Kremlin is expanding censorship and seeking to hide problems with the Russian regime.

            Two sources in major film studios said messages to that effect have already been sent to the leaders of their studios as others and that the rule was being introduced in this way and that no one expects it to be enshrined in any formal documentation that would attract unwanted attention (kommersant.ru/doc/8990074).

            The imposition of the rule in this way is possible because “all producers know about this” already, one of the Moscow newspaper’s sources says; and they recognize that they could lose more than money because any negative treatment of the police, the FSB, the Investigations Committee or the Procuracy could be presented as undermining those institutions.

            Introducing new rules in this way often happened in Soviet times, but it is making a comeback in Putin’s, giving the regime an opportunity to deny what it is in fact doing while continuing to do it and thus making it harder but as Kommersant shows not impossible to keep track of increasing repression introduced in this way.