By stigmatizing human rights groups, environmentalists, journalists and virtually anyone receiving money from abroad as “foreign agents” — a label tantamount to traitor — the Russian law set a template for what the International Federation of Human Rights described as a “multifunctional tool of authoritarian regimes.”
It allowed Mr. Putin to steadily suffocate Russia’s previously vibrant civil society and start a relentless descent into one-man rule that helped lead the Kremlin, unfettered by dissent and caught in its own echo chamber of increasingly strident state propaganda, into its disastrous war in Ukraine.
The law proved so successful in silencing criticism that Mr. Putin, determined to halt so-called color revolutions across the former Soviet Union, the first of which was the 2003 Rose Revolution in Georgia, has pushed other former Soviet countries that he sees as belonging in Russia’s orbit to crack down on their own “foreign agents.”
In January 2014, Ukraine’s corrupt president, Viktor F. Yanukovych, struggling to quell mushrooming street protests, announced what became known as the “Dictatorship Law,” a raft of measures that included curbs on “foreign agents” in the news media and civil society. Unable to put in place the measures, he fled to Russia a few weeks later.
Georgia has seesawed since the collapse of the Soviet Union between periods of democratic hope and brutal repression, including under the presidency of Mikheil Saakashvili, who came to power in the 2003 “Rose Revolution” promising to root out corruption and pull his country out of Russia’s orbit. He largely delivered on these pledges during his first years in power but, after the war with Russia in 2008, ended his time in office with a wave of often politically motivated arrests.
Georgian Dream has followed a similar trajectory, though dogged throughout by suspicions that its founder and financier, Bidzina Ivanishvili, a reclusive billionaire who made much of his money in Russia, was secretly backed by the Kremlin.
