ABSTRACT
This section examines the 2021 Federal Law on Education amendments that ensured legal regulation of enlightenment activities. In this way, non-official discussions about society and citizenship were classified, including lectures, seminars, masterclasses, and roundtables. Foreign agents were explicitly prohibited from conducting enlightenment activities for minors. Officially, the amendments aimed to counter fake news, pseudoscience, and adverse foreign interventions in the education process with broad legitimation campaigns behind them, including the so-called zero hearing arranged by the all-Russian Public Chamber.
These amendments introduced a complicated bureaucratic process for negotiating any workshop that might elaborate on political issues, explicitly countering the work of foreign organisations and individuals involved in enlightening. Organisations arranging such activities and providing technical or methodological assistance were also listed in a special inventory as part of the new legal regulation. The open petition by educators and academicians against the amendments failed to yield any results, as did the protests, which resulted only in fines for protesters.
