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

The day after the elections, December 5, anger boiled over into the streets. People were upset by the brazen stealing of the election and gathered at Chistie Prudi, a tree-lined boulevard in the center of the city. Thousands showed up, without any serious organizing. Lev Gershenzon, an editor of Yandex News, brought five colleagues from Yandex. They had all been election observers and spent hours and hours at the polling stations. They felt angry and cheated by the election. When they looked around at the crowds, they were surprised to see so many people in the same mood of fury and despair. “The mood was very depressed, this feeling of desperation,” Gershenzon said. “We did not expect that there would be so many people.” [17] Lev Gershenzon, interview with authors, January 2015.

The police responded with arrests. More than three hundred people were detained, including the blogger Alexey Navalny and the political activist Ilya Yashin.

Navalny at once tweeted from the police van. “I’m seated with folks in an OMON bus,” he said cheerfully, referring to the riot police, notorious for their brutality. Navalny had been on Twitter for two years and had tens of thousands of followers.

Police kept detaining protesters and took them away to stations all over the city. Grigory Okhotin, a thirty-one-year-old journalist who witnessed the arrests, was stunned by the numbers of people hauled away, many of them friends who were completely unprepared for such an experience. He then went with his brother to a club nearby where there was free WiFi. [18] Grigory Okhotin, interview with authors, June 2014. His detained friends began posting on Facebook about whom was arrested and where they were being held. Then Okhotin and his brother decided to drive around the city to see whom he could get released. He started posting what he learned on his own Facebook page, using the hashtag OVD, meaning, in Russian, the police station.

Soon, it looked like this:

#OVD-news: OVD Fili-Davydkovo: nineteen people

#OVD-news: OVD Yakimanka: eight people

#OVD-news: in OVD Dorogomilovo there are twenty-five people. Names of some of detainees: Bulgakov Anatoly, Bulgakov Dmitry, Shipachev Dmitry, Chernenko Artur… Ermilov Egor, Balabanov Victor, Lozovoi Dmitry, Polyansky Timur, Balabanov Igor, Yudin Sergei, Kapshivy Dmitry

Okhotin and his brother posted their first report on who had been detained that night on the website of the magazine Bolshoi Gorod . From that moment everyone concluded that Okhotin was in charge of detentions all over the city. “I started getting calls from complete strangers and was sent messages, ‘We are detained, we are here and there.’ And it occurred to me that all this information could be centralized,” he told us. Over the next two days the Okhotin brothers launched the website OVD-info, which became a public forum for sharing information about Russian citizens detained during protests.

The next day, December 6, the court sentenced Navalny and Yashin to fifteen days in jail. Muscovites went to the streets again, this time gathering at the Mayakovskaya Metro, on Triumfalnaya Square.

In the crowd was a slim, tall, twenty-four-year-old man with light-brown hair and gray eyes. He was already well known in Moscow creative circles: Ilya Klishin. He had come to Moscow from the provincial city of Tambov to study foreign policy at the prestigious Moscow State Institute of International Relations. However, he was soon deeply involved in social media and marketing.

In 2010 Klishin took offense at an article by a pro-Kremlin publicist attacking his generation for being idle “hipsters”—young people who were incapable of thinking about anything other than their iPhones, bicycles, and sneakers. Klishin wrote an article in reply, “Hipsters Strike Back,” claiming that his generation was indeed interested in politics. Then he and a friend launched a small website, Epic Hero, concerned with politics but cast in terms of the hipster subculture, which they both embraced. Epic Hero became very popular and gained such wide notice that even Medvedev’s staff had invited them to work on the effort to build a Russian Silicon Valley. On December 6 he went to the square to write about the new face of political protest. Among those in the crowd there was a rumor that the next big demonstration would be in four days and held at Revolution Square, very close to the Kremlin.

Very late that night Klishin got home and opened his laptop. He started searching for anything he could find about the next rally at Revolution Square. He found only a short news piece on another website that permission had been granted for a demonstration of three hundred people on December 10, but that was all.

Klishin went to Twitter and posted a question: “Is there any event on Facebook for December 10?”

A reader of Epic Hero wrote back, “No. Let’s start the event.”

Klishin launched his event—for a rally at Revolution Square—on Facebook, sending the link to his friends and journalists. Finally, exhausted, he went to sleep. [19] Ilya Klishin, interview with authors, October 2014.

The next morning, December 7, when he opened the computer, Klishin found that more than ten thousand people had RSVPed yes for the event.

At the same time, several other journalists and activists were also using Facebook to trade ideas about what should come next in the protest movement. Among them were Yuri Saprykin, a well-known columnist, and Sergei Parkhomenko, at this point a host on Echo Moskvy, the popular liberal radio station. In the 2000s Parkhomenko felt restless, as did many journalists of his generation. He had only his weekly Friday program on Echo Moskvy to run, and it was not enough for his energetic character.

He was among those who sat down on the evening of December 8 at a restaurant, Jean-Jacques, popular among the Moscow intelligentsia. Some opposition politicians were there as well as journalists and activists. All the discussion revolved around how to persuade the Moscow government to give a permit for a larger demonstration. Late in the evening they got a phone call from Nemtsov, who said the Moscow authorities were ready to talk—and someone should go to City Hall immediately.

Parkhomenko was the only one with a car, so he volunteered. [20] This account is based on authors’ interview with Parkhomenko, Klishin, and Saprykin, January 2015. He brought with him Vladimir Ryzhkov, a former member of parliament who was also in the opposition, and two activists, who were formal applicants for the meeting. Parkhomenko brought with him his iPad so he could be in contact with the other group members, who were dispersed over the town, with some, like Saprykin, sitting in the office of Lenta.ru.

Parkhomenko and Ryzhkov were met at the lobby of City Hall and were shown to the fourth floor to a large office where they saw a tall man in a suit with his face strikingly reminiscent of a young Leonid Brezhnev—it was deputy mayor Alexander Gorbenko, in charge of information policy. The talks dragged on for hours. Parkhomenko was carrying an iPad and constantly posted updates on Facebook in a closed chat with his group. “My page on Facebook was my major instrument in the talks,” Parkhomenko recalled.

He showed the city officials that thousands more people wanted to attend the rally and demanded permission for them to attend. When a young woman, a club manager, wrote on Facebook that she was scared but would nevertheless go to the protests, her posting was rapidly liked by thousands. Parkhomenko showed it to the city officials. He told them he was not a leader of the movement, just a messenger. The people in Moscow who had become so agitated didn’t need a leader or organization to tell them what to do or where to go; they got it all from social networks. When, during the meeting, he saw that the number of people RSVPed to the event had hit twenty thousand, Parkhomenko showed the iPad to city officials.