Deputy Minister of Justice Sviridenko, who announced another possible tightening of the foreign agent legislation, stated that even aliens could end up in the corresponding registry. They, however, have a chance to become relocators in the universe, but even if they were on Sirius, due to their violation of the current legislation on our Earth, they would receive administrative penalties, and then criminal ones, or, if the Deputy Minister's ideas come to life, immediately criminal ones. It also makes sense to declare the alien community an undesirable organization or extremist association in advance. In short, it is quite possible to shoot a sequel or even better a remake of Steven Spielberg's 1982 film "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial." It shows well the technology of the influence of an alien named E.T. on the minds and behavior of the younger generation. And no traditional values. Just like the Neanderthals, whom postmortem Alexey Pushkov accused at the St. Petersburg Legal Forum of not adhering to traditional values and therefore becoming extinct.
But if we reason scientifically, where would the Neanderthals get traditional values — they did not have time to develop them, and the Russian people in bast shoes, with a community, conciliarity, Orthodoxy, matryoshka, and balalaika were not yet born. There was no one for the Neanderthals to adopt these values from. Moreover, there was a danger that the Russian people could addict Neanderthals to firewater, and they would have died out even faster. In general, everything is complicated, Mr. Pushkov delved into such a distant past in vain.
Meanwhile, a former coal industry figure, now an advisor to the president, Kobyakov, took on a subject that at our law faculty at Moscow State University was called "Soviet State Law." Since, he told the astonished audience, certain procedures were not followed during the dissolution of the USSR, the Soviet Union, it turns out, exists, and then the battle with Ukraine can be considered an internal conflict. That is, Ukrainians are natives, subjected again to internal colonization by a more developed state-forming people. Kobyakov recalled the Belovezh Accords, beloved by all parties and movements, but probably was not aware that the USSR was dissolved on December 21, 1991, by 11 heads of former Soviet republics in Alma-Ata. There is the Alma-Ata Declaration on this matter. Such is the material.
Domestic elites generally emphasize that they are trying, as best they can, to live in the USSR. But at the same time, they contribute to the destruction of precisely the Soviet infrastructure and the reduction of the number of former Soviet people. On this basis, they can be recognized as anti-Soviet. Moreover, if the official figures of the Soviet Union spoke in the spirit and style in which the officials of the Putin regime speak, they would have put their party card on the table on stage and been ousted from their positions. Can you imagine a USSR Minister of Justice who would say that "statehood" is more important than any laws and especially human rights? No. But a Russian minister — yes. Moreover, this kind of approach is the liquidation of statehood as such. Can you imagine Andrei Andreyevich Gromyko reasoning from the podium about all sorts of "Giscard d'Estaings, Willy Brandts, Margaret Thatchers"? But the Russian Foreign Minister reflects aloud and publicly about "Macrons, Starmers, and von der Leyens." Style is not only a person. Style is also a political regime.
At the legal forum, Minister Chuychenko also proposed introducing a new provision into the criminal legislation. Simply put, killing is now allowed in defense of moral values. For example, he said, if a criminal is raping someone's daughter, the father has the right to kill him. The minister correctly appealed to the concept of "necessary defense" or "limits of necessary defense." Legislation since Soviet times has taken such circumstances into account. Moreover, the minister forgot about the concept of "state of affect." So the lyrical hero of his case would either avoid punishment or it would be sufficiently merciful. Or did he mean something else? For example, that it is possible to kill gays, experiencing towards them righteous, holy, Orthodox, highly moral anger? No answer.
Head of the Investigative Committee Bastrykin at the St. Petersburg International Legal Forum, May 19, 2025. Photo: Anatoly Medved / Roscongress
With such details, in which the devil is contained (more precisely, in the lexicon of our politicians, Satan), it sometimes turned out not only wild but also somehow awkward from the point of view of objective knowledge. For example, former President Medvedev gave a speech in which he touched on the insoluble problem — with whom to sign a peace agreement with Ukraine, who is the person on the Ukrainian side who has sufficient legitimacy for this? When the act of Germany's surrender was signed, everything was more or less clear:
«...I remind you that, for example, the act of unconditional surrender in 1945 was not signed by the leaders of Nazi Germany, it was not signed by well-known absolutely odious figures who were at the head of the Nazi regime, but by military leaders, and this was sufficient, so everything will depend on the specific situation and the document that will be subject to signing, but here quite significant work will still be required...»
The military leader in this context turns out not to be an odious figure. Meanwhile, Field Marshal Keitel, who signed the act of surrender, was found guilty by the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg of war crimes and crimes against humanity and was executed by hanging on October 16, 1946, as one of the main war criminals.
It is time to get used to some oddities and inaccuracies in the appeals of Russian officials to history or other disciplines like the same criminal law. But every time this or that statement still continues to surprise. For example, not at the legal forum, but at another gathering called "Historical South Russian Lands," Foreign Minister Lavrov stated the following:
«...Imagine the Vatican as a place for negotiations. Well, it's a bit inelegant, I would say. When Orthodox countries will discuss issues on a Catholic platform concerning the elimination of root causes. One of the root causes is the course towards the destruction of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church...»
The question arises: is it elegant for two Orthodox countries to negotiate in Istanbul, one of the centers of Islam? Or, in the view of Smolensk Square, the Kremlin, and Lubyanka — is it still Constantinople, the Third Rome? Moreover, we thought that all our confessions are equal, and the church is separated from the state. And it's about the lives of people, about stopping the deaths of representatives of "two Orthodox countries," maybe the Vatican will do for this. Certainly a more sacred place than the Saudi Arabia, Qatar, or Burkina Faso, beloved by Russian politicians.
No serious debates flared up at the legal forum, but in the Duma, a discussion unfolded about who is to blame for the discrediting of Stalin. According to speaker Volodin, also a major amateur historian, the blame lies with the Communist Party faction. Although, when Comrade Stalin lay unconscious at the dacha in Volynskoye, Gennady Zyuganov was still walking under the table, and during the XX and XXII Congresses of the CPSU, which rightly discovered at least massive violations of legality during the Stalinist period, he was still a teenager, and then a young man. And he could hardly personally participate in the defamation of the bright name of the tyrant and murderer. The cause of the dispute was the demand of a representative of the Communist Party not to limit themselves to renaming the Volgograd airport to Stalingrad, but to rename the city entirely. This irritated Volodin not because he does not love Stalin, on the contrary, he loves him very much. But for the reason that instructions on renaming have not yet come from above. Well, they will rename in the future when the boss says, isn't it clear!
It is somehow awkward to mention the sparkling speech of a major lawyer, the head of the Investigative Committee Bystrykin, who compared the destruction in Mariupol with the blockade of Leningrad — we will leave this without quite clear and natural comments. But we will mention the initiative of the LDPR faction, which went unnoticed due to the abundance of insane statements at the Legal Forum, to establish a new Day of Military Glory — the Day of the Capture of Paris (meaning in 1814). I don't know about Paris, but separate geographical points on the southern coast of France and other pleasant places in Europe, the source of sins and "Eurofascism," our elite has already taken — if we sum up the cost of all the real estate they own in these latitudes, as well as the cost of education in Western schools and universities for their children, sometimes born in European clinics, then with this money, Russian pensioners and public sector employees could be fed for several years. So why worry now. Europe is ours.
What is good about such forums is that they resemble a political striptease or coming out: Russian elites openly say and show — here we are. Wild, uneducated, hating everything around, questioning universal values, recorded in the same Constitution of the Russian Federation, and the ten Christian commandments. As for the substitution of history, even the subject "History of the USSR" in the Brezhnev version, with completely unceremonious mythology, there's nothing to say.
Some are truly ignorant, others indeed say what they think — now these wild things are not just allowed, they are their, representatives of the Russian establishment, etiquette. Previously, it would have been a party card on the table, now — pride in themselves. And some are trying with all their might, so that God forbid they are not exposed in having human feelings and a normal education, to adapt to the new rules and new etiquette. And if a tail does not grow, like everyone else, they try to artificially attach it to themselves.
Otherwise, you can fly out of this very elite.
And aliens, even if they exist, should not poke around here with their saucers — foreign agents without traditional values are not welcome here. Moreover, the aforementioned head of the Investigative Committee reported with satisfaction on the growing number of migrants ending up not at the forefront — a similar fate may await the newly minted E.T. if he gets distracted, as in Spielberg's film.
* Andrey Kolesnikov is considered a "foreign agent" by the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation.