23.02.09

Today the Internet is the only uncontrolled free space that unites people from Moscow to Kamchatka, from Ingushetia to Murmansk and Irkutsk. This country lives a life that you will not see on the Central Television screens. It informs, it discusses, it creates communities -- it is that very same civil society whose weakness anyone and everyone in Russia has deplored.

In fact this role of bringing people together in the context of rigid control over the mass media has been performed by the .SU-.RU (Soviet Union-Russia domains) zone almost from its very birth in the late 1980s. Then as now, the political police, the KGB, was obsessed with the question of how to establish control over the Net. While the uniformed intellectuals were pondering and speculating, the country collapsed. And a new one appeared.

Over the years the space for freedom in the real country has shrunk like the (proverbial) wild ass's skin. But the virtual country has grown, defending in the Net space what we lost in the real space: Today in Russia there are more than 33 million Internet users and the business turnover runs to hundreds of millions of dollars. But Big Brother never sleeps, endlessly thinking up laws and ways of monitoring the Net, staging show trials of bloggers, or setting up teams of cyber hitmen.

But, as yet, without great success. As yet. The economic crisis, growing unemployment, the fear of social protest, the specter of an "Orange Revolution" Russian-style, and finally, information suffocation, are forcing people in power, including that well-known blogger President Dmitriy Medvedev, to peer increasingly attentively at their computer screens: How does this unknown -- to them -- country live?

What can be expected from it? What is to be feared?

The Presidential Staff has a problem: Controlling the Net is difficult, but leaving it unsupervised in conditions of crisis is impossible. The task has been set: Ensure the domination of pro-Kremlin views on the Internet. This happened after the motorists' demonstrations in Vladivostok when thousands of citizens took to the streets to protest against increased duties on imports of foreign cars. Hitherto the authorities' attitude to the World Wide Web had been condescending and patronizing. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, as Anton Nosik, one of the founding fathers of the Runet, explains, a plan to impose control over the Internet space existed in the Kremlin but they decided to abandon it -- because of uncertainty over how to do it. During the parliamentary and presidential election campaigns of the 2000s the Internet did not play a significant role. Both times, the now defunct Union of Right-Wing Forces attempted to enlist the support of its denizens. But without visible success. Time after time, the television proved more powerful and more effective. As was confirmed by the events of August last year -- the five-day Georgian-Ossetian war (see The New Times No. 34 of 25 August 2008). But the demonstrations in Vladivostok and, most importantly, the reaction to them in other cities have forced the president to reconsider.

Anti-Regime Web

As before, television did not report the dispersal of the demonstrations in the Far East. The news agencies, newspapers, and even the Internet media were silent; there was no information. The blogosphere played a decisive role. It was thanks to LiveJournal (primarily Russian virtual community) that the motorists' demonstrations became known in Moscow, and the information made its way from blogs into the traditional media. Photographs of demonstrators carrying placards reading "Putler (Putin/Hitler) -- Kaput" and "Vovochka -- Get Out of the Classroom" (Vovochka is a diminutive of the name Vladimir and is the equivalent of "Little Johnny" in popular jokes; nowadays it frequently refers to Putin) flew around the Internet. "The leadership (of the country) was very unhappy with the way that uncontrolled information from Vladivostok spread on a large scale across online spaces," an interlocutor in the Presidential Staff told The New Times.

It was from that moment that the Presidential Staff began to plan a meeting between Russia's chief ideologist Vladislav Surkov -- who is simultaneously first deputy chief of the Presidential Staff -- and the bloggers. According to The New Times 's information this meeting is planned for mid-March and about 20 people will be invited to it. On the short list are such well-known bloggers as Samson Sholademi (more than 3,000 people read his blog); Darya Mitina, a former State Duma deputy and now one of the leaders of the Russian Communist Youth Union (about 1,500 readers); and Maksim Abrakhimov, the Voronezh commissar of the Nashi movement and also a blogger (2,500 "friends"). The list will also most likely include Mariya Sergeyeva, one of the leaders of the Young Guard (United Russia youth wing), who became famous after the 31 January meeting of the party of power (United Russia) at which she suggested that the opposition should tell Vladimir Putin how to make a Zhiguli (down-market Russian car) better than a Lexus. It is claimed that there will also be another Nashi commissar, Mariya Drokova, notorious for her complaints against (18th-century philosopher) Immanuel Kant (naturally it was Vladislav Surkov that she complained to) for being "rather difficult to read." In May 2008 she received the medal of the Order for Services to the Fatherland, Second Class, for her energetic activities in the field of youth policy. Finally, spin doctors specializing in work with the blogosphere will also take part in this important conference.

The aim of the conference is to work out a strategy for information campaigns on the Internet. It is formulated like this: "To every challenge there should be a response, or better still, two responses simultaneously," a source who is familiar with the process of preparations for the meeting explained. "If the opposition launches an Internet publication, the Kremlin should respond by launching two projects. If a user turns up on LiveJournal talking about protests in Vladivostok, 10 Kremlin spin doctors should access his blog and try to persuade the audience that everything that was written is lies."

New Front

Vladislav Surkov is not indifferent to the blogosphere, and has not been for a long time. According to The New Times 's information he periodically holds conferences with spin doctors close to the Kremlin about how they should cover various important events on the Internet. For instance, one of these closed meetings was held in September 2008 immediately after the end of the fighting in South Ossetia. On that occasion Surkov gave instructions on how to fight the Georgians not only on the battlefield but also in the media field. The book Information Warfare Chronicles (Khroniki Informatsionnoy Voyny ) by spin doctors Maksim Zharov and Timofey Shevyakov was published by the Yevropa publishing house (created by Gleb Pavlovskiy's Effective Policy Foundation) on the basis of the results of these consultations and the subsequent actions. The notes on this work include the following introductory paragraph: "Net wars have always been an internal peculiarity of the Internet -- and were of no interest to anyone in real life. The five-day war showed that the Net is a front just like the traditional media, and a front that is much faster to respond and much larger in scale. August 2008 was the starting point of the virtual reality of conflicts and the moment of recognition of the need to wage war in the information field too."

Greetings from the 1990s

Gleb Pavlovskiy's Effective Policy Foundation was the first, back in the early 1990s, to begin to guess at what role the Internet might play in the future. That was when they founded the senior Internet publication Russkiy Zhurnal, which is now in a constant state of crisis. It was also at that time, with the participation of the Effective Policy Foundation, that such successful Internet projects as Gazeta.ru, Lenta.ru, and Inosmi.ru first saw the light of day. But in time the Kremlin began to acquire new favorites. By the beginning of the 2007 election campaign the Presidential Staff's main favorites included Konstantin Rykov's Newmedia Stars publishing house (in December 2007 Rykov was elected to the State Duma on the United Russia list from Nizhniy Novgorod). It was also through the efforts of this Internet entrepreneur and deputy that the Runet gained such publications as Dni.ru, Vzglyad.ru, and the video portal Rossiya.ru, which was launched just ahead of the Duma elections. The favorites now include Vadim Gorshenin's publishing house, which includes the Internet publications Pravda.ru, Yoki.ru, Elektorat.info, and Politonlayn.ru, which was created a few months ago. The prosperity of Gorshenin's publications is ensured by former United Russia PR chief Konstantin Kostin, who in June 2008 replaced Aleksey Chesnakov in the post of deputy chief of the Presidential Staff's Domestic Policy Administration.

Presidential Cut

It is well known that the annihilation of competition leads to a decline in the quality of a product produced by monopolists. The authorities came up against this problem in November 2008, when on the day of the pompous United Russia congress in Gostiniy Dvor they announced the creation of "a new social network for those who care about Russia's future." United Russia's social network Berloga.ru ("berloga" means "bear's lair," alluding to United Russia's nickname the Bear) was indeed launched, but this project was so badly made and provoked so many smirks among ordinary Internet users that they had to close it immediately and hurriedly rework it.

However, they did not stop allocating money after this failure. "Both in the Kremlin and in organizations close to the Kremlin there are a great many people who know of Dmitriy Medvedev's love for the Internet and want to play on it and extract more money for themselves," a staffer of the Newmedia Stars publishing house said in an interview for The New Times. "That is why the Kremlin's spin doctors will be the first to protest against any restrictive measures or the building of a Russian version of the 'great firewall of China.' As long as Russia has a president who enjoys the Internet, the budgets for Internet projects will be generous."

The End Of Free Stuff?

However, the crisis will force the Presidential Staff to review its financial policy. Now the Kremlin spin doctors will have to pursue the struggle for the minds of the Internet public in conditions of a shortage of money. As The New Times was told by a source in the Kremlin staff, at the March meeting Vladislav Surkov will announce a cut in budgets for Internet projects. For instance, it is claimed that budgets for the development of Rossiya.ru Internet television will be reduced. This information has partially been confirmed by Surkov himself. Speaking at the Strategy-2020 forum on 9 February, the first deputy chief of the Presidential Staff stated: "It is very important to get used to the idea that there will be less and less money." "All the politicians in the country are accustomed to the idea that politics is when you secure an increase in a particular line in the budget," Vladislav Surkov complained. "But now the idea of politics must be changed dramatically: The method should not be 'problem -- money,' but 'problem -- solution to problem'; serious work should be done to resolve issues." So will they start to resolve them?

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Source: “The New Times”