This week’s vote in the Russian parliament to crack down on foreign-funded non-governmental organisations marks another depressing milestone in that country’s headlong retreat from democracy. The bill is bad enough in itself: it would force all foreign and domestic NGOs regardless of their funding sources to re-register with the authorities, inviting closer scrutiny of any group deemed threatening to the Kremlin’s interests. But the manner of its passing – in its first reading the bill was approved by 370 votes to 18 – also underlines that the Russian parliament is now little more than a Kremlin ­controlled puppet show. Democracy is not under threat in Russia. It has practically ceased to exist.

In trying to understand why this has happened, there is a tendency to resort to the old clichés: it is President Vladimir Putin’s KGB past; it is the old Russian penchant for a strongman leader; it is the revenge of a bureaucracy made jealous by the rise of the oligarchs. This is the counter­Reformation, Russian style, in which the free-thinking heretics of the 1990s are put to the sword, as anyone who knew their Russian history always said they would be.