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

In May 2009 a Kremlin “school of bloggers” was launched, headed by an associate of Pavlovsky. [15] Nathan Hodge, “Kremlin Launches ‘School of Bloggers,’” Wired.com, May 27, 2009. The school reportedly consisted of eighty people from all over Russia, each working with two or three activists, and their graduates were supposed to organize information campaigns online. The Kremlin also tried co-opting some prominent bloggers and promised them access to high-ranking officials.

Then, on August 17, 2009, the Sayano-Shushenskaya Station on the Yenisei River in Siberia, the largest hydroelectric plant in Russia, suffered an accident that caused flooding of the engine and turbine rooms and a transformer explosion, killing seventy-four people. The accident was caused by human error, and the media coverage of the catastrophe worried the Kremlin. In response, they tested new media approach: A journalist from Interfax, a straightforward news agency, was expelled from the area of the Sayano-Shushenskaya Station for his critical reporting. Instead, the popular blogger, Rustem Adagamov, also known as drugoi , or “another,” who headed the multimedia department of SUP, the company that owned LiveJournal, was invited to report on the relief operation. So he did, reporting favorably for the authorities. In October Adagamov was invited to join the Kremlin press pool, an elite group given special access to the president who are also sympathetic journalists, and he accepted. The new approach showed that the Kremlin could substitute hard-hitting news coverage with friendly bloggers.

Two developments changed the landscape on the Russian Internet in 2010. In April a new cable television channel called TV Dozhd, or Rain, was launched. The channel’s owner and main driving force was Natalia Sindeeva. An energetic woman who always greeted people with a big smile, Sindeeva had no television experience. But she had launched a very successful radio entertainment station, Serebryany Dozhd (Silver Rain), in the 1990s. It had taken Sindeeva three years to launch TV Dozhd, and the idea slowly expanded so that by the spring of 2010 she was leading a small media empire, consisting of the news website Slon.ru, launched in May 2009, and a just-acquired city magazine, Bolshoi Gorod , or Big City. All of Moscow’s journalists were guessing who underwrote Sindeeva’s projects, though the official version was that they were funded by her husband, a banker, Alexander Vinokurov.

Sindeeva, very ambitious, first wanted to rent a space for her channel in one of the soaring towers of Moscow city, a skyscraper financial district still developing. The idea was dropped because of the economic crisis of 2008. She desperately needed to find space for a headquarters and one day took a call from friends. “They told me, look, there are premises which could be rented for 100 dollars for a square meter,” she recalled. It was the former Red October chocolate factory, a large red-brick complex built in the late nineteenth century on an island in the Moscow River, with a view of the Kremlin. Sindeeva went to look at it; the large space, still smelling of chocolate, was almost empty. Sindeeva found the owner, but the talks took months, and then more months were spent on renovation. When finally TV Dozhd opened on the fifth floor of the building, Red October had already become a very fashionable place in Moscow, the epicenter of the hipster movement, with dozens of cafés and art studios occupying other floors and premises.

At first TV Dozhd was not meant to have much presence on the Internet or be a political challenge to the authorities. “In the beginning we didn’t think of a news channel,” said Sindeeva. “We thought of television with hosts as authors, we thought of the channel that should get the audience back to intelligent content. After all, I knew that a news channel was the most expensive thing to launch. And personally I was not interested in news.”

The full logo of the channel was displayed in English: “TV Rain: The Optimistic Channel.” And indeed, optimistic it was—the main color was pink, the channel’s logo was pink, and the office of Sindeeva in the corner of the large, open space on the fifth floor of Red October was full of devices in pink—even her chair and the refrigerator were pink. What’s more, even though Moscow was full of disenchanted TV journalists who had lost their jobs in the 2000s, Sindeeva didn’t want them; her presenters had no prior experience on television. She wanted a fresh, positive perspective.

The channel was officially launched in April 2010, but it was not admitted to the cable television world right away, as she had planned. “When we went on air on April 27,” Sindeeva recalled, “we were immediately turned off by cable operators, not because we did something, but as a preventive measure. Surkov simply didn’t want an independent channel and, at a meeting with the owners of the two biggest cable operators, he voiced his opinion.” [16] These two cable operators were Akado and Stream, owned by Victor Vekselberg and Vladimir Evtushenkov, respectively.

She turned to the website of Slon.ru, a part of her nascent media empire, and on the home page of the site appeared a window, displaying the broadcasts of TV Dozhd. Quickly TV Dozhd became very popular. Intelligent speech and faces were missed so badly on television that all of a sudden Moscow’s middle classes tuned in to the new channel. In the summer Sindeeva realized that her audience wanted not only intelligent faces but political news as well.

Now she needed an editor-in-chief for the channel. As a temporary measure, she asked an editor from Slon.ru to sit in and create a news team. In September Dozhd was included in the package of the NTV Plus satellite pay-TV platform. It was a way to let TV Dozhd in Moscow homes and not just on the Internet.

To lead the news team Sindeeva selected a journalist from Russian Newsweek , which had just ceased operating. Mikhail Zygar, twenty-nine years old, had spent nearly a decade at the foreign desk of Kommersant . “I saw my task very clearly from the beginning,” Zygar remembered. “I was there since June, and, well, I found here twenty-three-year-old journalists, and a twenty-five-year-old journalist was considered very experienced.” [17] Mikhail Zygar, interview with authors, August 2014. Sindeeva never defined the task for Zygar; they just decided they could work together.

With that, Russia again had a private, independent television channel.

And the digital wave was unfolding ever faster. In 2010 Alexey Navalny, a thirty-four-year-old lawyer, became the most popular Russian blogger with a clear political agenda. Over the previous decade Navalny tried different roads to prominence. He joined the democratic and socialist party Yabloko, from which he was expelled for his xenophobic views. [18] Julia Ioffe, “Net Impact,” New Yorker , April 4, 2011, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/04/04/net-impact . In 2007 he founded a nationalistic movement, Narod, or People. He even took part in the Russian March, an anti-immigrants rally in Moscow, calling for Russia to separate from the North Caucasus. He didn’t gain popularity.

He found his magic tool in the spring of 2008 when he bought stocks of the biggest oil and gas companies like Rosneft, Gazprom, and the oil transport monopoly Transneft, all of which were partially owned by the state. He spent over 300,000 rubles, or about $10,000, for all the shares. He gained the right to receive information about the companies’ activity and then sue their leadership for corruption. “My goal is to include the question of this investigation into the political agenda of the country,” Navalny declared in a blog post about Transneft on November 17, 2010. [19] Navalny blog, “Kak pilyat v Transnefti” [How They Are Sawing at Transneft], November 16, 2010, http://navalny.livejournal.com/526563.html .