I have been following the Pussy Riot detention and trial for months now, as I have been closely following the rise of the Russian opposition ever since Khimki forest protest and the early development of Navalni's RosPil. My interest in Russian Internet is not accidental, after all, for the prior three years I have been doing NSF-funded research in Russia and Kazakhstan on the use of communcation technologies for maintaining personal relationships. One could argue that the two are different things, but when you do research about technology use in countries with what scholars call 'hybrid' or 'authoritarian' regimes, politics is never far off.
Quite frankly, the events of last December - the big protests in Moscow and across Russia after the Duma elections - caught me by surprise. I was convinced that while the Internet was indeed an important space for political discussions in Russia, it was also a kind of pressure release valve for the vocal opposition resulting in little actual action. I presented something of that argument in a radio interview in Denmark just a few weeks prior. The size of the protests, the spread of the protests across the country and the support of the Russian Diaspora across the world, I suspect caught a number of theorists and pundits by surprise, myself included. Many wondered if this was something similar to the 'Arab Spring' so lauded as 'revolution 2.0' in the West at the time. Russian oppositional news sources marvelled at 'regular people' inspired to take political action and called it "the revolt of the 'likes'". Many mused that once the information is "in the net" you can not stop it. Other moments supporting these assertions continued to crop up - there was the booing and whistling at Putin's appearance after a wrestling match that the state-controlled big media attempted to sweep under the rug, but that immediately became a youtube sensation; the youtube video of the interview with a Nashi member Sveta from Ivanovo caused the movement a lot of embarrassment as major media picked it up for a short while as well (and yet this was quickly co-opted and turned into a pro-regime kind of moment). The Internet was lauded as the major force in organizing protests and exchanging information that lead to more people at protests, etc. Putin even called the opposition activists "Internet hamsters" and this successfully stuck as a description of online writers, discussants and much of the middle-class opposition.
Western media marveled at how relatively "free" the Internet remained when traditional news sources were tightly controlled by the increasingly authoritarian rule of the United Russia party called the party of "crooks and thieves" (a term originally coined by Navalni on RosPil and then appropriated by the opposition more generally). It appeared that the Russian government had simply missed this important information and communication technology and now it was a little too late to control even though they had started making noises about trying to impose greater control. Putin and his government, many argued then and some continue to this day, were creatures of an earlier age, savvy in their control of traditional media but ignorant of the powers of the Internet to their own peril. Although my research produced evidence to the contrary and several scholars, such as for example Diebert and Rohozinski, disagreed - all of us seemed to have been proven wrong by the unexpected upheavals of last December.
Since then, Putin was elected with little fanfare, his government immediately shifted to a strongly authoritarian position and passed a series of laws essentially making protests if not a criminal activity outright then at least economically infeasable to most regular Russians given the threat of ridiculous fines for the smallest infractions, Russian law enforcement flexed it's muscles and started not simply arresting peopel at protests but also charging them with dangerously out-of-proportion charges that carry with them enormous sentences and fines, the heads of Russian opposition have been sued, with their belongings searched and siezed and many have been silenced by this. The Russian courts have grown increasingly beligerent (frightening given the prior level of beligerence) and many people started to get very scared. In March members of Pussy Riot - an anarchist-feminist punk rock group - were arrested for an infraction so minor that the police didn't even bother to detain them when it actually occurred, arresting them belatedly. Several months later the courts went after Navalny in a way that was, for the first time, really serious. Now the aboslute farce of the Pussy Riot trial is going on, in full view of the world and the outcome is largely uncertain. Has the worldwide condemnation of the trial fostered through much Internet-based information exchange made a difference? What's going on? What happened? What now?
I have been watching this happen for months, I have a lot of data, but I am no media scholar (I am a regular empiricist of the more boring kind) and there is little scholarly work that I can do here. Yet I am far too fascinated to keep quiet so over the next few weeks I will try to write a series of blog posts thinking through what is happening in Russia and what I think this might mean for how we think of the Internet, potlical opposition and change.
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