Opinion: Hoping for Russia's digital frontier

How today's middle class and intelligentsia are the runaway serfs of a virtual borderland

Perpetually in the headlines because of new laws and regulations limiting its use and reach, but simultaneously a surviving bastion of freedom, the Russian Internet is one of Russia's most curious spaces. The RuNet also appears to be of renewed interest to the Kremlin, judging by one of Vladimir Putin's recent appointments and an approaching battle for data localization in Russia. In an opinion piece for the news site Slon, the chief editor of TvRain.ru, Ilya Klishin, argues that a “paradigmatic clash” is coming, and Russia's history with frontiers could be key to understanding what happens next. Meduza translates that text here.

The Russian Internet could have been destroyed on August 1, 2014. It was this date, anyway, that blogger Anton Nossik said would bring Russia's digital apocalypse, calling it“the last day of the Russian Internet” in an article for the New Republic. In an irony of fate, the RuNet still lives, while the New Republic, after a massive staff exodus in late 2014, was just put up for sale by its new owner.

When Nossik was writing, the concerns about Russia's Internet focused on a law equating popular bloggers with the mass media, which (we now know) didn't work out (though it's always there for future use, like a gun to the head). But the repressions didn't end there, and there are always ways things can get worse. The following year, in 2015, Freedom House removed Russia from its list of countries with free Internet access. Human rights activists pointed to new laws on personal data and the right to be forgotten, the efforts of the state censor, Roskomnadzor, the more frequent blocking of websites, and various criminal cases against people who merely “reposted” online content. Then, apparently, there were exercises to test a scenario where the Russian Internet is cut off from the World Wide Web.

Most recently, Vladimir Putin—who's previously showed little interest in Internet affairs—appointed himself as an advisor German Klimenko, the entrepreneur who created LiveInternet. In just the past few weeks, Klimenko has managed to terrify the liberal-minded public, savoring every chance to tell them how bad everything could get.

Klimenko's appointment has set off a new wave of gloomy predictions. For instance, Leonid Volkov, an ally of anti-corruption activist Alexey Navalny, wrote that 2016 awaits “a large-scale, unprecedented attack on the Internet in Russia.” Navalny himself expects the authorities to intensify their “fight against free speech online.”

Even if we assume that the opposition is deliberately exaggerating things, it's impossible not to notice how the Russian state has grown more hostile toward the Internet, following the 2011-2012 demonstrations for free elections and the results of reunification with Crimea. In the UK, researcher Gregory Asmolov rightly notes that, in recent years, “the Internet, like the US, has begun to play the role of Russia's external enemy.” (Recall Putin saying that the Internet “emerged as a special project of the CIA, and continues to develop this way.”)

At the same time, the Russian state has muscled its way into the online space, actively working to restructure it. According to Ethan Zuckerman, the director of the Center for Civic Media at MIT, troll factories and fake accounts create the illusion that there is no truth, thereby paralyzing civic activism.

Movements like the 2011-2012 protests or some hypothetical Russian Maidan revolution (which the state TV channels love using to scare the public) are just a pretext for the crackdown on the Internet. The real reason for the Kremlin's attack on Internet freedom lies much deeper—in the very nature of the Russian state.

The theory of freedom's relativity

In Russian authoritarianism, whether it's tsarist, Soviet, or Putinist, the relativism of freedom is fundamental. There's not a single sphere of life that's completely protected from the state's tyranny, which is blind and often pointedly so. Even if you're one of the elite, endowed with certain freedoms, you can still be sentenced to death for the wrong gossip, just like young Dostoyevsky and his friends in the Petrashevsky Circle for reading works by Vissarion Belinsky. Or maybe you're a single mother and you're thrown in jail for reposting two pictures on Vkontakte. The point here isn't the process or even the cruelty, but—paradoxically—the absence of any sense at all.

Selective repressions like these remind everyone that nobody is safe. This is the entire logic of a continuing criminal investigation into a protest at Bolotnaya Square that took place almost four years ago, landing dozens of people in court and then prison. This perverted Themis won't punish everyone, but she can come down on anyone, so it's wise to keep your head down whenever possible. This applies to the new aristocrats, too: the Putinist elite and their children. Their freedom is exceedingly relative, and it all depends on the whims and will of one man.

For “traditional” Russia, the Internet is a fundamentally different environment—something that grew like the anarchy and self-regulation of the 1990s. Though the Russian Internet has endured several huge influxes of new people (the country's userbase has grown ten times, from 7 million in 2000 to 70 million today), and despite even the state's crackdown, the Web is still a functioning institution of personal freedom—perhaps the only one left in Russia today. Other institutions like it were crushed long ago by the authorities. And so now, following the very logic of Russia's still budding authoritarianism, the Kremlin turns to face this last holdout.

How will this new attack end?

To answer this question, we'll need another history lesson. In some ways, the RuNet is like the Cossack freemen: spirited people who bolted off, who didn't want to be serfs (let alone sent to the North Sea or Siberia). Have you ever wondered why the Americans love so much to glorify the frontier, the open road, and the Wild West, while Russians can only muster Pushkin's dubiously sympathetic sentiments in The Captain's Daughter and Sholokhov's ideas in Quietly Flows the Don? Maybe it's because the Russian state has so consistently crushed all fugitives, whether its military governors using riflemen or Bolsheviks using machine guns. The death squads found their way to no man's land and established their version of order. The Sobornoye Ulozheniye in 1649 (tying serfs to their landlords for eternity), the tax reforms of 1718, and the expansion of serfdom to eastern Ukraine in 1783—each event was preceded by successive waves of colonization: first in the Black Earth Belt (from Belgorod to Tambov, before and after the Time of Troubles), and then in Kuban, the Don, and out east of the Dnieper.

But there comes a point when there's nowhere left to run. Before, they ran out of physical space (except in the deep taiga, where a few families of Old Believers managed to stay hidden). Today, we're running out of virtual space. Today, it's entirely possible that the authorities could disconnect the Russian Internet from the World Wide Web. Given the mayhem of the past few years, dismissing such a scenario is no longer prudent.

And here we should put the question another way: after maturing in the RuNet greenhouse for 20 years, how resilient is Russia's psychology of personal freedom? The old Russian frontier's mindset was too weak when it came to social matters. Maybe that's why it fizzled out at the edges. But the digital “steppe borderlands” of our time are the hiding grounds of the middle class, the intelligentsia, and a large part of the elite. (It's as if nobles and merchants were the ones who escaped to the Don and the White Sea, instead of runaway serfs.)

And it's precisely this difference of social strata that gives hope—albeit a small one—that things could be different, this time. There are no guarantees, but one wants to believe that the victor in the final clash between two paradigms will be the idea of personal freedom, born again in our living memory, glowing on our computer screens.