Kremlin Launches ‘School of Bloggers’
- By Nathan Hodge
- May 27, 2009 |
- 10:34 am
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev recently made a foray into Web 2.0 with the launch of his own blog. Now it looks as if the Kremlin’s embrace of social media is tightening.
Evgeny Morozov, who writes Foreign Policy’s fascinating Net.effect blog,stumbled upon the announcement for a series of public lectures on the “Kremlin’s School of Bloggers.” The announcement is on Liberty.ru, a sort of DailyKos for the pro-Kremlin set.
Unfortunately, we missed the inaugural lecture, delivered on May 14 by Alexey Chadayev, the director of the Kremlin’s school of bloggers. Chadayev (pictured, with pipe) already has an impressive resume: He lists his credentials as “famous political scientist, blogger, activist, doctoral candidate in cultural studies, docent at Russian State University of the Humanities, member of the Public Chamber, editor in chief of the online portal Liberty.ru, and author of the book, Putin: His Ideology.” Give this man a Twitter account, and you’ll have the Karl Rove of the Russian establishment.
The Russian government was slow to pick up on new media — meaning it was always a step behind domestic political opposition as well as more serious opponents. Take the case of Kavkaz Center: a pro-Chechen website launched at the beginning of the Second Chechen War in 1999. In the early days of the conflict, Kavkaz Center was an effective propaganda site; it also pioneered a lot of the information warfare tactics seen on jihadist websites, posting “trophy videos” of roadside bomb attacks and ambushes against Russian soldiers. Russian authorities countered with lame sites like Chechnyafree.ru, but they never quite caught on.
But in recent years, the Kremlin and its online supporters have become much more adept at using the Web as a tool of information war. Kavkaz Center was an early target of denial-of-service attacks; Russian “cyber militias” have been blamed for waging cyberwar on Georgia, Kyrgyzstan and Estonia.
With backing from Medvedev, however, the Kremlin seems to view the Web as more of an instrument of soft power instead of as an offensive weapon. Take, for instance, the case of the man who posted a comment on Medvedev’s blog about shabby conditions at a local children’s hospital. The Kremlin responded swiftly, shaming the local authorities into action. It’s an effective way to reinforce the president’s prestige — and it fits in with a historical pattern (”good czar vs. bad boyars“).
Liberty.ru, for instance, seems to be a more sophisticated way to build a community than the pro-Putin youth groups, which bore a disturbing resemblance to totalitarian youth movements of the 1930s. But it still offers up a Bizzaro World version of reality. The homepage, for instance, currently features a web video entitled “Battle for History: Georgia 1989″), which takes a conspiratorial view of the Soviet crackdown in Georgia 20 years ago, suggesting that the CIA was behind nationalist demonstrations that led to Georgia’s independence. If only.
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