Internet: Web becomes valued forum for free speech

Financial Times

When state television showed a dynamic Vladimir Putin at the wheel of a yellow Lada touring the provinces after devastating forest fires, a fuller picture was to be found on the internet.

Video shot by laughing onlookers and uploaded to the net showed that the prime minister was in fact followed by a motorcade of at least two dozen vehicles, including three spare yellow Ladas in case of a mechanical breakdown.

There are few sectors that better reflect Russia’s lopsided development than the internet. The web has grown strongly as a business, drawing on the nation’s strengths in maths and science to produce a domestic search engine, Yandex, that describes itself as “better than Google”.

Yet the government’s efforts to foster a Russian Silicon Valley outside Moscow show how a poor investment climate is letting down that human potential.

Politically, the return to an authoritarian system, in which the government controls television but not newspapers or radio, has turned the internet into a valuable – though incomplete – forum for free speech and discussion.

Like jokes in the Soviet era, the internet takes the sting out of Russian life in the 21st century. Unfettered news and comment about everything that television will not touch includes descriptions of high-level shenanigans and mockery of the ruling tandem of Mr Putin and Dmitry Medvedev, the president.

Mr Medvedev’s online nickname of “Captain Obvious” refers to his tendency to say the right thing with little to show for it. A few days after he declared that the release from prison of Mikhail Khodorkovsky would pose “absolutely no danger” to society, the former tycoon was sentenced to a second term in prison in what was widely seen as a politically motivated trial.

“You can go on the internet to vent your frustration and that makes you feel like you’ve done something, although of course you haven’t really changed anything,” says Sergey Alexashenko, a 21-year-old student at Georgetown University in the US. He is struck by the idealism of his US peers, compared with the cynicism back home.

Exceptions to such apathy include the Duma intern who was fired after he published details of expense-fiddling and time-wasting by parliamentarians on his blog.

Although internet penetration in Russia is expected to increase from 40 to 70 per cent over the next four years, according to Public Opinion Foundation, a Moscow-based polling agency, online debate is confined to a relatively small proportion of the population.

At one end of the range is the slick website of Snob magazine. Blogs by subscribers including oligarchs sit alongside interviews with the likes of Bill Browder, a foreign investor banned from Russia, whose lawyer died in custody while trying to protect his client’s assets from a scam involving officials.

At the other extreme, rightwing groups used the internet to organise demonstrations against immigration and corruption in December, and more chillingly, to target specific individuals. Oleg Kashin, a reporter, was savagely beaten in November (and filmed for all to see) after his picture appeared on a far-right website labelled “to be punished”.

Given widespread apathy, Maria Lipman, a political analyst at the Carnegie Endowment in Moscow, argues that an Arab-style revolt driven by social media is not on the cards. “I see the mood but not the movement,” she says. “People are increasingly angry, but this does not change the overall assumption – that ‘there is nothing we can change’. ”

The authorities, for their part, are taking no chances.

In an embarrassing episode before its IPO in New York last month, Yandex was forced by the FSB security agency to hand over details of contributors to an anti-corruption website run by Alexei Navalny, a popular blogger and whistleblower. The details found their way to Nashi, a nationalist youth group prone to violent harassing of government critics.

And was the Kremlin involved in a cyber-attack on LiveJournal, a blogging site used by Mr Medvedev, Mr Navalny and the Duma intern?

“Yes and no,” says Ilya Ponomarev, head of the Duma’s subcommittee for high-tech development, who advises the president on the internet.

He believes the attack was the “initiative of people sponsored by the administration to generate pro-government content in the blogosphere … but I don’t think they were directly ordered to [attack].

“As this community becomes larger, they invent activities for themselves to prove they are important. The same applies to our nationalist groups. It’s a Catch-22. The authorities give them money to gain leverage; they ask for more and go out of control.”

But in the absence of “open” politics, says Mr Ponomarev – speaking in a still largely empty mansion housing the president’s Institute for Contemporary Development – high-tech remains Russia’s most likely engine of progress. займы на карту hairy women https://zp-pdl.com/best-payday-loans.php https://zp-pdl.com/online-payday-loans-cash-advances.php срочный займ на карту онлайн