Андрей Солдатов - The Red Web - The Struggle Between Russia's Digital Dictators and the New Online Revolutionaries

With television under the control of Putin’s government and with the newspaper industry in pro-Kremlin hands, the oligarchs now turned to the Internet. In 1999–2000 they launched the most prominent and potent of the new media in Russia: Gusinsky started NTV.ru (Newsru.com since 2002), and Berezovsky started Grani.ru. The oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky bought Gazeta.ru from Pavlovsky and relaunched it.

Meanwhile Pavlovsky’s Foundation for Effective Politics, still in Putin’s corner, enjoyed free reign from the Kremlin and launched a number of ambitious projects, including Lenta.ru and Vesti.ru, both Internet newspapers, and Strana.ru, a Russian national news service, which was presented as a new kind of media combining text, video, and audio. Strana.ru’s editor position was given to Marina Litvinovich, Pavlovsky’s deputy, who, with Artemy Lebedev, had arrived late to the meeting with Putin in December 1999. [4] Andrei Soldatov, Kremlin.com, Index on Censorship, no. 1, 2010, http://ioc.sagepub.com/content/39/1/71.abstract .

All these new media lacked in-house correspondents, and Lenta.ru and Newsru.com were just news aggregators. Gazeta.ru was the only website with a full-scale editorial office. It was also the only site staffed by print journalists; Gazeta.ru was created by reporters who had previously worked at Kommersant . But Gazeta.ru was also the most expensive website to run, while the news aggregators limited themselves to few editors whose task was to rewrite the stories published by wire agencies and newspapers as quickly as possible. Presentation and packaging took over from fact-checking.

But it was clear that a new age was dawning.

On October 23, 2002, a group of armed Chechen terrorists seized a packed theater on Dubrovka Street in Moscow. The Nord-Ost crisis lasted for three days. On Saturday, October 26, FSB special troops stormed the theater, and 130 people were killed, many of them innocent civilians poisoned by a gas containing fentanyl, a narcotic pain reliever, that special forces pumped into the theater in order to subdue the terrorists. During and after the siege the Kremlin found itself for the first time overwhelmed by hundreds of news items and electronic messages critical of the official version of events, circulated on the Internet and promoted by news aggregators.

We worked then for the weekly Versiya , and on Sunday, October 27, the day after the storming of the theater, we realized we could not wait a week for our reportage to run in the printed paper. We had a story about what a disaster the storming of the theater had been, and we needed to get it out quickly. We decided to publish it on our website, Agentura.ru, launched two years before to cover the activities of the Russian secret services. [5] Agentura.ru was inspired by the Federation of American Scientists Secrecy Project led by Steven Aftergood and was supported by the Relcom ISP from September 2000 to the spring of 2006.

The following Friday, November 1, when Versiya was finally going to press with our print story, a group of FSB officers arrived at the editorial offices of the paper and began a search. They hoped to stop the paper from printing but were too late—the pages had already been sent off. A few computers, including the editorial server and Andrei’s computer, were seized. [6] A group of FSB officers arrived at the editorial offices of Versiya claiming they were looking for information published in an article by Soldatov in May 2002 about the construction of residential apartment complexes on the premises of former FSB special facilities in Moscow. The FSB’s raid lasted for hours, and our editor, fearing our arrest, told us to stay out of the office. We found a tiny café on Stary Arbat Street near the Versiya office. As we sat waiting, a gaggle of reporters we had worked with in the late 1990s at the crime department of Segodnya arrived. Hugs and smiles and jokes followed. Immediately they floated dozens of wild ideas on how to organize public support for us, but they were all pure fantasy. We all knew that this time was different. It was clear that the traditional print media our friends worked for were hardly in the mood to support journalists.

The stakes were high. The FSB kept up pressure on Versiya . Journalists were summoned for interrogation, including us, and we understood from the questioning that the security service was building a criminal case around a supposed disclosure of state secrets.

What was different this time, however, was the rise of the new media. A few days after the FSB had raided Versiya we went to the offices of Newsru.com, a few tiny rooms in the building occupied by Media-Most on Palashevsky Lane. We met with Lena Bereznitskaya-Bruni, an editor of Newsru.com, who had been a friend since the days when we worked at the newspaper Segodnya . Lena was outraged by the storming of the theater and promised to help. Newsru.com organized a constant stream of public pressure, reporting every interrogation, and finally succeeded in forcing the FSB to back off bringing any charges.

Meanwhile other traditional media who questioned the special forces’ performance at Nord-Ost were put under pressure. The press ministry officially warned the radio station Echo Moskvy that it could be closed down for airing interviews with the Chechen terrorists. The television channel Moskovia’s broadcasts were temporarily halted. Putin personally criticized the NTV coverage of the crisis. [7] Andrei Soldatov, Irina Borogan, Marina Latysheva, and Anna Stavitskaya, Journalisti i terrorism [ Journalists and Terrorism ] (Moscow: Center for Journalism in Extreme Situations, 2008).

But the Kremlin could not catch the new media. The independent digital outlets were better designed, faster, and smarter than anyone else. This time the flow of information turned squarely against the Kremlin. Pavlovsky’s pro-Kremlin websites lost the battle for the online audience. In 2002 Pavlovsky had sold two online projects, Vesti.ru and Strana.ru, to the All-Russia State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company, a state-owned corporation that included a major television channel. If this was intended to bolster the Kremlin’s defenses with more resources, it faltered. The problem was that these outlets just appeared hapless and vapid at a time of crisis. As an attempt to spin public opinion, it failed. A few years later Strana.ru was quietly relaunched as a guidebook about Russia’s regions.

In the mid-2000s more print journalists lost their jobs. For many the Internet was the only place where it was possible to express their opinions. At the same time, online media had no resources to pay for investigative journalism and genuine revelatory reportage. So instead reporters turned into bloggers and opinion columnists, which would be less expensive. The overwhelming number of them were highly critical of Russian domestic policy, despite lacking access to information. Some enjoyed thousands of followers. Many of them also had very popular blogs on LiveJournal.com, a blogging platform. Among them, Nossik had been one of the first Russian-speaking users of LiveJournal.com; soon he was the most prominent Russian blogger. In 2006 he was appointed the chief blogging officer at SUP Media, the owner of LiveJournal.com. Within a year he had a new position in the company: “social media evangelist.”

The Kremlin was not happy with the explosion of bloggers and turned to means already proven to be effective in dealing with newspapers: having loyal oligarchs buy off the Internet platforms. The first to go was Gazeta.ru—then the only news website with a fully staffed team of reporters—purchased in 2006 by Alisher Usmanov, founder of Metalloinvest and close to the Kremlin. Early the same year Usmanov had acquired Kommersant Publishing House, including its respected business newspaper Kommersant , and Gazeta.ru went under its control. In 2008 Usmanov further expanded his media empire: Kommersant agreed to merge Gazeta.ru into SUP Media, the biggest blog service in Russia. The result was that it all ended up in the hands of an oligarch.