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

One of the few individuals who was not afraid to go public with criticism was Alexey Navalny, the blogger who had been trying to expose corruption in Russia and had gained a wide following, not the least for his courage. Navalny was blunt, posting on his blog evidence of all kinds of crooked and dubious deals. He called Putin’s party the “party of crooks and thieves.” The words went viral.

The scheduled December 4, 2011, parliamentary elections were approaching, and Putin’s United Russia Party was poised, once again, to take the lion’s share of seats. But something unexpected happened in November as the elections drew near. The progressive, urban intelligentsia, who had studiously kept out of politics for a decade, was angry about Medvedev being dumped and began to express disgust with the party of crooks and thieves. They knew there was no way the party could win the elections fairly. This impulse gave rise to a dozen or so online groups devoted to monitoring the December 4 elections to make sure they were fair and legitimate. These groups included Grazhdanin Nabludatel, or the Citizen Observer; RosVybori, or Russian Elections; Liga Nabludatelei, or League of Observers; and others. In Moscow alone eleven thousand people volunteered to be observers in parliamentary elections.

The loss of Medvedev was a spark, and more sparks followed. In earlier years the middle class had quietly accepted a broad trade-off: Putin brought prosperity, and the public remained passive and didn’t participate in politics. This began to shatter. Now the urban middle class was angry. However, they lacked experience and coordination; they needed someone to turn their anger into a national campaign for fair elections.

They found this person in thirty-year-old Grigory Melkonyants, a short, mercurial man who looked as Armenian as his name. A committed, restless workaholic who spoke a thousand words a minute, Melkonyants was deputy director of Golos, the nation’s only independent election watchdog organization.

Melkonyants had been waiting for this moment for years. He had been observing Russian parliamentary elections since 2003, patiently gathering and analyzing data about voting. He understood how the system worked and how to identify fraud. In the presidential election of 2004, which Putin won handily, he had arranged a special phone hotline to gather information about fraud from polling stations across Russia. Then, in the spring and summer of 2011, Golos upgraded the system. Most significantly, he created an interactive digital map to mark all questionable activity and violations in campaigns and during elections. All the data would be in one place and could easily be posted by volunteers. Melkonyants also decided to program a unique web platform to display and visualize the data rather than use an already-available commercial product. In the summer of 2011, when the map project was ready to go online, one of the largest websites in Russia, Gazeta.ru, offered to cooperate and put the map on their website, where millions of people could see the results. It first went up in September 2011.

The authorities noticed the map right away, and they were not happy. Realizing it was a simple tool that could make fraud at polling stations all too visible, they attempted to create their own replica of the map, but no one trusted their version. The pro-Kremlin hacktivists also tried to compromise the Golos map by feeding it false information. The attempt was rudimentary, however, taking existing reports of improper activity and just changing the name of the party and resubmitting it—so crude that Melkonyants caught it right away. Then, on the eve of the December 4 election Gazeta.ru came under pressure and took the map’s banner down from its website, but several other news organizations lent a hand to keep it visible, including TV Dozhd. The map remained up for millions of people to see. [15] Grigory Melkonyants, interview with authors, June 2013.

But the Kremlin still had a few tricks to play. The night before the parliamentary elections, at twenty minutes past midnight on December 3, Lilia Shibanova, the head of Golos, landed at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport on her way home from Warsaw. Her mood was grim. The previous day a court charged Golos with violating Article 5.5 of the Administrative Code, which forbids publishing voter polls less than five days before elections. Just a few hours earlier, as she was en route to the Warsaw airport, the NTV television channel, now a pro-Kremlin outlet, aired a program attacking Golos.

She went through passport control, and everything seemed normal. At Customs she selected the green corridor, with nothing to declare, and suddenly customs officials waved her into their room. They thoroughly searched her luggage and then announced that her laptop was to be confiscated for a search because there could be some sort of illegal software. Outraged, Shibanova started to make calls, and customs officials changed their explanation, telling her they were seizing her laptop “for collection of operative information.” Shibanova refused to give up the laptop without her lawyer present and spent the night in Sheremetyevo. The reason for this spectacle was clear to her and her people. Her deputy Grigory Melkonyants posted on his Facebook page:

I really hope that everything will be ok with Lilia Shibanova, she is at the airport (Sheremetyevo, F). Personal inspection, seizure of computer stuff. The task is clear, to divert attention from December 4.

Shibanova was able to leave the airport around midday the next day and was forced to leave her laptop with Customs.

Despite a cyber attack on December 4 intended to disrupt the project, the Golos map displayed massive fraud in the parliamentary election.

Ilya Azar saw it at firsthand. Working as a correspondent for the news website, Lenta.ru, he decided to go undercover in hopes of exposing the people engaging in election fraud by a method known as “the carousel”: the fraudsters would venture from polling station to polling station, stuffing the boxes for United Russia, Putin’s party. Forty people in Azar’s group were each given 10 ballots, already marked for United Russia, for each polling station, as well as a false identity document giving them the right to vote. They would then visit polling stations, show a simple tram ticket at each, which was enough to be given one ballot paper, fill that out, and then add the ten additional papers they had brought, stuffing about 3,080 ballots for United Russia by evening. Azar gained access to the group by a source he knew who was a courier in a small Moscow company. Azar was promised 1,000 rubles, or about $30, to take part.

When he witnessed the fraud at the first polling station, Azar blew the whistle, and police detained the fraudsters. He then posted a story to his website entitled “Carousel Is Broken,” and the whole scam fell apart. [16] Ilya Azar, “Karusel slomalas” [Carousel Is Broken], Lenta.ru, December 4, 2011.

Azar’s story immediately went viral in Russia and caused a sensation. The revelation of such blatant fraud incensed the thousands of election observers who had volunteered, galvanized by their disgust over the dumping of Medvedev. Now they were really furious. At the same time, reports of fraud in the election poured in from most of the regions. Golos published seven thousand reports of infringements at polling stations across the country. The anger reached a crescendo when Russia 24, a state television channel, aired election results from the Rostov region in southern Russia. As expected, United Russia was in first place with 58.99 percent of the vote. The Russian Communists, who were quiet allies of Putin, got 32.96 percent. Then each of the other parties picked up a small piece of the pie as well, and when all the votes were tallied up, the sum was astonishing: 146 percent!