Paul Goble
Staunton, Feb. 19 – In order to fight crime and prevent the emergence of ethnic enclaves, St. Peterburg plans to upgrade its CCTV cameras on its streets so that the authorities can identify passersby by ethnicity, Oleg Kapitanov, head of the nationalities committee in the city’s government, has announced.
This kind of ethnic profiling is notoriously inaccurate, but other Russian cities are likely to follow St. Petersburg’s lead, yet another example of Russia’s moves toward totalitarian control of its people (https://nazaccent.ru/content/43560-v-sankt-peterburge-budut-opredelyat-etnicheskuyu-prinadlezhnost-prohozhih-s-pomoshyu-videokamer/).
Moves toward such totalitarian methods of control are taking place at enormous speed in Putin’s Russia now. At the same time that the use of CCTV cameras to determine ethnicity was announced, the Russian government announced new requirements for doctors to share information about their patients.
As of March 1, all Russian doctors will be required to share information with the police on patients with mental disorders who are deemed “a threat to others” (publication.pravo.gov.ru/document/0001202407220010?index=1). Activists say this order may soon be expanded to include data on other parts of patients’ lives (theins.ru/history/278606).
In the last decades of Soviet power, for example, the state required doctors to share information about drug use, homosexuality, and other characteristics that the regime deemed improper. What Moscow is now demanding opens the door to the restoration of such requirements and a further restriction of doctor-patient confidentiality.
That is likely to mean both that doctors will turn in the information the state wants and the state will take action against those so identified and that those in high risk groups will now avoid going to doctors and getting the treatment they need lest the doctors providing the treatment send information about them to state institutions.
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