The competition to find sources of citizens' discontent with the actions of the authorities gives rise to increasingly bizarre and less material constructions in the minds of legislators. The latest initiative - the idea of punishing protest organizers for undergoing "training" in special camps for troublemakers - would be easiest to call simply delusional, if it did not fit into the general logic of searching for external enemies and denying citizens the right to be dissatisfied with the authorities at their own discretion.

As Kommersant reported , the State Duma's specialized commission on foreign interference in Russia's internal affairs (created after a series of protests over the opposition's refusal to participate in the Moscow City Duma elections) discovered special "camps" in several regions of Russia for training protest organizers that were financed by foreign money, and proposes punishing (including imprisonment) those who were trained there and then organized protests. The group members plan to submit amendments to the Criminal Code to the lower house for consideration in 2020 - these plans were confirmed to the newspaper by United Russia members Adalbi Shkhagoshev and Andrei Isaev.

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Earlier, the head of the commission, United Russia member Vasily Piskarev, announced the discovery of attempts by the media and NGOs to influence domestic policy in 19 regions of Russia, but the parliamentarians are not disclosing the exact list of organizations and their locations, Kommersant notes: according to the newspaper's source, this concerns both capitals, Yekaterinburg, Crimea and the North Caucasus. Shkhagoshev explained that the "camps" can also include "virtual" ones, which are understood to mean "a concentration of protest thoughts in social networks that have no geographical designation."

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This definition of the space of "turmoil" is a new word even by the standards of modern Russian legislation. Deliberately vague formulations and initially unclear definitions of laws leave room for the boldest protective interpretations of any actions and words not approved by the authorities, and each new protest only stimulates the imagination of legislators. They are united only by the axiom of necessarily external and necessarily selfish interference with the aim of inciting peaceful citizens to unnatural, in the logic of the authorities, protests against the current order. It is not surprising that the search for the enemy is rapidly going beyond the boundaries of physical geography and moving into virtual space: the larger the described image of the enemy, the more resources and forces are needed to fight it, the more impressive the halo of the fighters. Well, if the fantasy accidentally goes beyond the boundaries of reality, senior comrades can always correct colleagues.

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