Tabula December 19 – 25, 2011 Khatuna Mshvidobadze*

Dawn of the Internet Era in Russian Politics

Tabula

December 19 – 25, 2011

Khatuna Mshvidobadze*

Just two days after the polls closed, downtown Moscow’s Tverskoi Magistrate’s Court stood as a metaphor for Russia’s December 4 Duma elections—botched election fraud, street protests and a popular blogger jailed. The Internet generation had handed Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev a sound and apparently unexpected blow.

Putin’s United Russia won just under 50% of the vote, compared to 64% in the 2007 election. The strongman’s party barely clings to a simple majority in the 450 seat Duma, with 238 seats, down from 315 in the outgoing parliament. Some exit polls suggest that the actual vote for United Russia may have been considerably lower than 50%.

Remarkably, ruling party cronies perpetrated traditional balloting tricks and some relatively new Internet shenanigans. Nonetheless, Putin stood at party headquarters on election night stunned, with virtual egg on his face.

“They falsified,” said soon-to-be jailed blogger Aleksey Navalny, “but this falsification was an unfortunate rejuvenation with Botox!” Navalny is known for anti-corruption crusades and for labeling United Russia “the party of swindlers and thieves.” Indeed, the Internet may have been the wild card in this election.

As expected, Russia’s irregular army of youthful hackers and cyber criminals directed distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on many websites vaguely identified with political opposition. The popular blogsite LiveJournal, where Navalny posts his blog, was attacked, as were news portals like slon.ru and Zaks.ru, New Times and Kommersant newspapers, Bolshoi Gorod magazine and Echo Moskvy radio.

Echo Moskvy commentator Matvey Gonopolski tweeted, “So, send the guarantor of the constitution (Medvedev) in his Twitter, Facebook and E-Mail your requests to unblock this site. Let him, at least once in his life, use his I-Phone properly—to call and order the FSB to stop the madness.”

Another target of Internet madness was Golos, a Russian election observer non-governmental organization, denounced by Putin as “Judas.” Days before the election, Kremlin-proxy television NTV assailed the Golos office with on-camera demands to reveal its funding sources. On election day, DDoS attacks brought down Kartanarusheniy.ru, a Golos project to plot election violations on a map. Sites with links to the map were also attacked.

The DDoS attacks were expected because many considered similar attacks on LiveJournal and Novaya Gazeta last spring to have been trial runs for the upcoming parliamentary and presidential elections.

Navalny was a principal target of those attacks on LiveJournal, as were opposition plans to post a report entitled, “Putin. Corruption.” Novaya Gazeta apparently drew the ire of Kremlin-backed hackers for its “Online Parliament of RuNet,” a scheme to “elect” representatives who would then blog about their political grievances.

Needled by the likes of Navalny and rattled by “Arab Spring” and the London riots, the siloviki and the Moscow political establishment were alarmed. “Look at the situation that has unfolded in the Middle East and the Arab world,” Medvedev told the National Anti-terrorist Committee. “It is extremely bad…This is the kind of scenario they were preparing for us.” Meanwhile, Russian Prosecutor General Yury Chaika told his CIS counterparts, “You saw what happened in London…In my opinion, the problem is evident and we need to bring social networks under reasonable control—simply to protect citizens’ freedoms.”

And the Kremlin spun off a new group from its exuberant youth corps Nashi to be “the nation’s conscience on the Internet.”

But that conscience was insufficient to deliver The December 4 election. Despite tough words and practice runs, the Kremlin appears to have underestimated the power of the Internet. Many sites were brought down, but news of election fraud flashed around the globe, nonetheless.

Commenting on the Kremlin’s apparent lack of strategy, journalist and historian Vladimir Pribylovsky told The Moscow Times, “All the pro-Kremlin websites combined have less of an audience than Navalny’s blog.”

Echo Moskvy Director Alexei Venediktov concluded, “These will be the last elections that were controlled by television.”

According to a recent survey by the British firm ComScore, 80 million Russians are now connected to the Internet, and that number grows daily. The power of the fifth estate is on the rise, even in Putin’s—if it is still Putin’s—Russia.

It is hard to imagine that Russian election fraudsters—traditional and cyber—failed to deliver even 50% of the vote for United Russia. Were they too timid out of fear of a Russian Autumn? Did they suffer fiber- optic shock? Or was their plan just ineffective due to deficiencies that seem baked into the Kremlin walls? Likely, it was a combination of all three.

Presumably, Putin and company learned some lessons as they look toward the March presidential elections, however, this is not yet evident. Vlast Editor-in-Chief Maksim Kovalsky and Andrei Galiev, General Director of the magazine’s parent company were dismissed for publishing the image of a ballot spoiled with an obscene message to Putin. Nonetheless, that image zipped around the RuNet and beyond. And crowds of unprecedented numbers were called via social media to a December 10 protest in Bolotnaya Square. Another big demonstration is expected December 24.

"Of course,” National Security Council Director and former FSB Director Nikolai Patrushev told Argumenty I Facti, “there should be reasonable regulation in Russia, just as it is done in the United States, China and many other countries."

Whatever they do, the Internet era in Russian politics has only just dawned.

*Khatuna Mshvidobadze is Associate Academic Fellow at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, Washington, and Senior Associate at the Georgian Security Analysis Center, Tbilisi.