RuNet: A Cyberian Adventure

MOSCOW, AUGUST 1991. A desperate coup is underway. The plotters are hard-line Communists, determined to reverse the tide of liberalization and prevent the disintegration of the USSR. Demonstrations have been forbidden and political parties suspended. Central Television is playing Swan Lake on an endless loop.

The waiting is the worst thing. People queue outside the offices of newly-banned newspapers, competing for copies of leaflets churned out on overheating photocopiers. Mass communications, both within Russia and to other countries, have been cut.

Except for one narrow channel. Relcom, the fledgling computer network linked via Helsinki to the outside world, is carrying double its usual traffic. Foreign news coverage is coming into the country to be disseminated via Relcom users, and the hamstrung internal news agencies are circulating their reports electronically, at no cost. When the coup is finally overthrown, Relcom user George Tereshko posts on the network: “When the dark night fell upon Moscow, Relcom was one source of light for us. Thanks to these brave people, we could get information and hope.”

Looking back from 2005, of course, Relcom, with its average 1991 daily traffic of 30 megabytes seems impossibly quaint. The network had been set up in 1989 by computer programmers, as a way to expedite technical collaboration. Realistically, its role in undermining the coup was marginal at best. But it was an enclave of free speech at a moment when Russians wondered if they were about to lose that liberty yet again. And it was, of course, the shape of things to come.

Today, RuNet – the term for sites written in Russian and/or hosted on Russian territory – contains an enormously diverse mixture of content, from cutting edge software development to primitive individual homepages. It enjoys a healthy reputation as Russia’s least-censored mass medium, and, according to the Public Opinion Foundation, is regularly accessed by some 15% of Russia’s population – 16.9 million people, most of whom connect via commercial Internet Service Providers (ISPs), like Novosibirsk’s NovoNet or PrimNet (in the Far East, or Primorsky krai), mainly through dial-up connections, but also through cellular and satellite connections in rural areas, and increasingly through broadband connections in major cities. As a result, the Internet is spreading into Russian homes about twice as fast as did color television. “Most of the people I know in Russia have broadband at work, and dial-up at home,” said Maria Artamonova, a 26-year-old graduate student from St. Petersburg. “But installing broadband at home is getting cheaper and cheaper, and many people use it. I have some friends who connect to the Internet through their mobile phones wherever they are.”

Still, RuNet remains mostly young and urban. St. Petersburg, home to the country’s first Internet cafe – Tetris, which opened in 1996 – has come to be regarded as Russia’s answer to Silicon Valley. The city’s Internet cafés attract a mixed clientele of students, young professionals, tourists and briefcase-carrying businessmen. In the gleaming Quo Vadis, in the center of town, 120 rubles (less than four dollars) buys you two hours of connect time (or, for 150 rubles, you can plug in for the entire midnight to 8 am shift, which makes it a popular place for students to burn the midnight oil), plus a view of Nevsky Prospekt. But there are plenty of smaller cafes as well, from a basement dive on Vasilyevsky Island with a dozen computers, to a cluster of some thirty computers inside the Hermitage itself.

Outside Moscow and St. Petersburg, however, RuNet is not as easy to find. Olga Krysina is an editor at the online news agency VolgaInform (volgainform.ru). She lives in Samara and noted that home computers are much less pervasive in Russia than in the west. And, “as for Internet cafes, even in a city like Samara, which has over a million people, there are only two or three. Recently, things have gotten a little bit better with school and university computers, but that’s only in big cities, or some village libraries.”

In fact, outside Moscow and St Petersburg, most people’s Internet access depends on their job. “You can have a poorly-paid job and have free Internet to go with it, at a library, for instance,” Artamonova said. “Or you can be an extremely well-paid dentist, for example, and never use it at all.” Age and mistrust of technology also define RuNet demographic, Krysina said. “Russians over 40 have little interest in the Internet. Many parents prefer to try and protect their children from the harm which they believe – not entirely without justification – the Internet can bring.”

Indeed, the Internet has a mixed reputation in Russia, much as it does in the West. Until the mid-1990s, it was seen by many, even some intimately involved with it, as a western luxury or even an infestation. Anatoly Voronov, head of the Internet Service Provider GlasNet, notoriously remarked, in a 1996 New York Times interview, that the Internet was America’s “ultimate act of intellectual colonialism.” However, the gradual spread of Windows 95 and a single encoding standard for Cyrillic increased the accessibility and appeal of the Internet. Parochially-focused sites began to appear. A site for Levashovo village in Yaroslavl region, was started up in 2001 by a locally-based computer programmer and an enthusiastic shopkeeper. A far cry from geekdom, it listed village job openings and pork prices, complete with cheery pig logo, animated icons and flashing Cyrillic text.

Although RuNet may have a lurid reputation abroad as a source of child pornography and mail order brides, sleaze is diminishing in prominence as the Internet goes mainstream, and it impinges little on normal Russian users. The most popular activities in Russia – chat rooms, email, blogging – are similar to the West, though there are inevitably cultural differences which give RuNet an individual character, for example the prominence of online libraries such as Maxim Moshkov’s lib.ru, which far outstrips the attention paid to similar resources on the Anglophone Internet (and, notably, pays little or no attention to conventions of copyright).

Information and news portals are common, but often operate with a bias informed by state control. The most prominent example is strana.ru, whose original director, Marina Litvinovich, makes no secret of the site’s aim, declaring on the RosBusiness website: “It’s not a business project. It’s a political project. The idea is to support the Russian authorities and the president.”

Bias aside, some of the only remaining independent news outlets in Russia are online, for example gazeta.ru, Russia’s first full-fledged internet newspaper, founded in 1998. The decidedly liberal and anti-government gazeta.ru has somehow retained its reputation for intelligent analysis throughout recent clampdowns, continuing to question state authority. RuNet has also produced quality online magazines, such as Russky Zhurnal (russ.ru), which offers essays and commentary on current affairs, and newsru.com, a respected, independent, online-only outlet.

Most Russians still gain access to RuNet through dial-up connections. According to an April 2004 BISNIS Bulletin, The ISP (Internet Service Provider) market is dominated by five large companies which, in 2004, accounted for 84% of the market. The remaining 16% was divided up among some 300 others. Competition is heating up at all levels. “Prices now are just above the break-even point,” said Artur Alekperov, Information Manager at the ISP MTU-Intel, in an October 2004 Kommersant interview. “Permanent Internet access costs a little more than $20 and the service is a lot better [than it used to be]. Now dial-up providers are being forced to make adjustments to their business plans, embark on radical advertising campaigns and reconsider the range of their services.” However, Alekperov does not believe that dial-up will be eclipsed by broadband anytime soon. “Even with the development of dedicated Internet, dial-up won’t disappear. Many users go online from time to time. High speed and data transmission are not what is important to them. They pay on average $5 a month. Dial-up and dedicated access will coexist for a long time yet.”

While far from on a par with the Internet in the US or Europe, RuNet is gaining in economic significance for the Russian economy. In 2003, according to IKS Consulting, the total revenue from Internet services was estimated at $820 million, an increase of $70 million from the previous year. And, according to the Russian government, 2003

e-commerce turnover – revenues from online purchasing – was estimated at nearly 25% of that figure, or $150-200 million, up some 30% versus 2002.

This increase is occurring despite the fact that credit cards are not the main form of payment for e-commerce on RuNet. Although Euromonitor projects a continued rapid growth of credit card ownership in Russia (on a trajectory from just 4,800 cardholders in 2001, to a projected 7.9 million in 2008), these cards are primarily used for payroll operations.

E-commerce has been consummated mainly by cash on delivery, and, more recently, by the arrival of western-style payment services such as Cyberplat (cyberplat.ru), KreditPilot (kreditpilot.ru) and YandexMoney (money.yandex.ru).

“Card holders are still a very small percentage of the population, and only a few of them are ready to use their cards for online purchasing,” said Yandex Chief Editor Yelena Kolmanovskaya. “But the situation is improving every month. The problem is usually solved with a cash-on-delivery scheme, so the retailers use their own couriers for local delivery, acting like cashiers as well. YandexMoney is widely used for intangibles, such as payment for telecom services like cellular and Internet and cable TV.” Kolmanovskaya said YandexMoney now has some 200,000 client accounts, and is accepted by more than 600 online retailers. Users can pay money into their accounts by credit card, or make a cash deposit at their local post office or bank.

In a very short period of time, support systems for e-commerce have risen up to meet the new demand. A few years ago, Kolmanovskaya said, “there was a lack of infrastructure – things like warehouses and delivery (especially nationwide delivery), poor Internet penetration outside Moscow and large cities, and the lack of clarity of laws in the Internet arena. Now shipment systems have really improved, so there is no serious brake to e-commerce expansion.”

Not surprisingly, advertising has increased along with trade. The Association of Communication Agencies of Russia predicted that Russian companies will spend some $33 million on Internet advertising in 2005, a 100% increase on 2004.

Of course, that is but a tiny fraction of the predicted $200 billion worldwide expenditures on Internet marketing for 2005. Part of this is simply that the Russian market is not that large. But also it is that there are not that many suitable venues for advertising. For major players, advertising is quite lucrative: Anna Artamonova, vice-president of mail.ru, was quoted on inauka.ru last year, saying that banners on the company’s home page cost at least $50,000 per month. Contextual advertising, ads which appear in response to words users input into a search engine, is also enjoying huge growth, and was reportedly responsible for two thirds of Yandex’s 2004 revenues. Yet, while the big dot-ru companies may be doing well, there are simply not enough high-profile sites on RuNet to support western advertising levels. “The number of Internet resources is continually growing, but only a tiny portion of them are of interest to advertisers,” said Dmitry Mozhayev, general director of the Index-20 Internet advertising agency, in a Kommersant interview in early 2005.

RuNet has inevitably attracted foreign interest, accompanied by a few high-profile snafus.  In December 1996, AOL shut off access to its service in Russia, due to rampant credit card fraud. In 2001, Lycos launched a Russian-language portal, but it foundered within a year, because it could not win enough users away from native services like Rambler and Yandex. Even today, said Yandex’s Kolmanovskaya, “major western players have still not really arrived in Russia. They have made only one step – the Russification of different services. To us, it looks more like an acknowledgment of the Russian Internet than serious competition. Google made a step towards Russia when it began to support the Russian language in 2000, but to date it only has 15-16% of Russian searches, while Yandex has 47-48%.” Yet following Yahoo!’s launch last year of a Russian e-mail service, Rambler Deputy General Director Ivan Zasursky acknowledged the competition. “Global brands are finally noticing the Russian Internet,” he said last October. “They are coming into our home market, and we are ready for battle

Of course, the ordinary Russian web user does not think about RuNet primarily in terms of e-commerce. At the grass roots level, there are some interesting ways in which RuNet has built on some very Soviet traditions. “Don’t have a hundred rubles, have a hundred friends,” runs the Russian proverb, and, during the endemic shortages of the Soviet era, it was essential to have an extensive network of contacts in order to obtain the necessities of life. Influence based on position – blat – was the currency of the times. Dr. Alyona Ledeneva, author of Russia’s Economy of Favours, sees RuNet as being shaped and dominated by Russians’ subversive, networking impulses. “In the Soviet period, blat was absolutely essential to make the system work,” she said. “People co-operated to beat the system. And that sort of mentality continues.”

In this context, both the act of networking with other Russians, and the sharing of illicit information via the network, are cast as badges of social morality. “If I were a hacker and I knew certain code-breaking techniques,” Ledeneva said. “I’d share them with you, because we are against the system. In the Russian mentality, it’s still very important to engage in activities that circumvent formal procedures, because it’s so ingrained in our patterns of everyday behavior.” At a lower level of skill, Ledeneva said, ordinary Russian users trade tips on how to beat the system. “They all tell you how to get onto the net for free. They share those little techniques.”

The Russian penchant for collective subversion recently manifested itself in the Stop Barbie! Foundation, which sprang up in response to the “open vote” held to select Russia’s entrant for the Miss Universe 2004 beauty pageant. One of the subsequent founders of Stop Barbie! was scrolling through the entrants, thinking how blandly similar they all looked, when he saw one who stood out: schoolgirl Alyona Pisklova, a natural beauty who had not bothered with make-up or a pose, and had entered the competition mostly as a joke.

“He realized then that he actually had no choice,” declares the Foundation’s online history. “When one is given a choice of one hundred lighters of the same size but of different colors, we prefer to use a match. So we lit a match. We sent our requests to hundreds of our ICQ and LiveJournal friends. Within 17 hours, Alyona became a leader in the vote poll with about 3,000 votes, leaving her main rivals far behind.” The campaign was not ultimately successful. It turned out that Alyona, at 15, was too young to qualify for the Miss Universe contest, and she had to settle for a special Viewers’ Choice Award.

LiveJournal.com, which helped spark the Stop Barbie! campaign, is actually an American-based blog site. But it plays host to a huge Russian community. So popular is ZhZh (short for Zhivoy Zhurnal, a literal translation meaning “animate magazine”) in Russia that the national press has credited it with bringing diary-keeping back into fashion. Internet commentator Eugene Gorny remarked on the Russian Cyberspace Project site that “the Russians ate LiveJournal.” And he is not far off. Of the 2.4 million blogs on LiveJournal, 115,964 (as of January 19, 2005) are run by Russians. In fact, Russia, as the source of LiveJournal blogs, places fourth, behind the US, Canada and the UK.

The average Russian ZhZh user is older and more educated than his or her American counterpart, and has an extensive “friends list” (other people’s journals syndicated on a single webpage for ease of reading). Russian academics use their journals to air works in progress and hold near-real-time debates using the comments facility. “Everyone thinks they need a LiveJournal account,” site user “alexbel” wrote in response to this journalist’s query. “I’m sometimes amazed at impossible nerds who create accounts for their pets and babies.”

Internet commentator Roman Leibov, famous as the “father of Russian LiveJournal”, the first person to both create and use a Russian-language blog on the site (in February 2000), summed up the popular theories on why Russians love LiveJournal: “The unfastenedness [rasstegnutost] of Russian consciousness, its extroversion and the love of fine writing.” However, he also warned against shoving the phenomenon into a neat box. “I don’t think those superficial, simple answers are correct,” he said. “It’s just the way things have turned out, historically.”

Leibov also pointed to “Russian logocentricity – the obsession with the word that characterizes our culture,” as a driving force in RuNet. Yet this may only apply to the more consciously literate sites. As online editor Olga Krysina complained, “The biggest problem on RuNet is illiteracy. It’s got to the point that, when using a search engine, you can find more instances of a given word with orthographic errors, than of the correct word.”

If, at the outset, the tiny world of RuNet was primarily the province of intellectuals, this has changed greatly as the network has expanded. Today, as in the West, trash thrives, producing the curious sense that RuNet is simultaneously a contemporary environment and a throwback to the lurid excesses of 1990s Moscow.

For example, the site pravda.ru, a breakaway from the original Communist Party newspaper, regularly runs reports with headlines like “Olympic Erotica” or “Boriska the Man from Mars,” accompanied by a greenish photograph of a boy with digitally-enhanced red eye. And, despite RuNet’s movement away from pornography in recent years, tacky ads featuring semi-naked women with a button reading “click here” emblazoned over their buttocks are still a common sight, often on pages that do not necessarily have sexual content, such as collections of anekdoty, the pithy comic scenes so popular in Russia.

As a general rule, copyright is neither sought nor respected on RuNet. “I think freedom of speech is adhered to in RuNet, but most users don’t understand it in a proper way,” said Silvara V., a 23-year old interpreter from St. Petersburg. “In most Russian forums, it just means the liberty to use bad language. Copyright isn’t [understood as] a right in any way.”

In the summer of 2004, the Russian Duma passed an amendment to the existing Law on Copyrights and Related Rights. It was intended to toughen up the rules surrounding works in digital form, but it has yet to significantly affect RuNet’s cultural environment – based on a cocktail blend of Soviet anti-capitalism and anarchist communality and anti-authoritarianism. Add in the influence of 1990s robber capitalism and the result can be a heady, lawless mix, typified by the strange case of the hacker DoZ.

In June 2004, DoZ circulated an email promising to paralyze any website for a fee, ranging from $60 for a four-hour crippling of a normal web server to $80,000 for a week-long crash of microsoft.com. DoZ referred potential clients to existing satisfied customers for references, though reputable experts who read the email were understandably skeptical about its claims.

The permissive atmosphere on RuNet also extends to political dissent. Not only do major opposition parties operate their own websites, but the Internet is also used as a mobilization tool by human rights pressure groups such as Memorial [memo.ru] and, at the other end of the scale, by far-right xenophobic groups. For example, the right-wing Russian National Unity, has a smartly-presented website [rne.org] that belies the group’s radical politics. Good web design, it turns out, is accessible to fringe groups in a way that high quality printing or mass media column inches are not. Only the choice of imagery (a Russian eagle and a swastika-like logo) differentiates the appearance of the RNU site from that of a mainstream party.

This is free speech, warts and all, and, given the increasingly aggressive attempts of the Kremlin to tame other mass media, it perhaps seems incongruous. In fact, a number of practical factors make censorship of the Internet a difficult, if not impossible task. Some sites, such as the Chechen information portals that act as a mouthpiece for rebels battling Russian troops, are physically located outside Russia. If the Russians pressure local authorities to shut down Chechen sites, the sites simply pick up and move to another country, as happened when the Kavkaz Center kavkazcenter.net, which published Shamil Basayev’s letter claiming responsibility for the Beslan siege, moved from Finland to Lithuania in autumn 2004.

The anarchic profusion of sites actually hosted within Russian state boundaries is enabled by a combination of RuNet’s size, and its lack of centralization. There is no owner or senior executive to intimidate, fire or arrest, thus affecting the whole organization. Instead, RuNet’s content is created by users, and, at this stage of the network’s growth, there is so much disconnected activity that it is impossible to inspect it all. “There is a lot more freedom of speech than in other mass media, which have to follow their owners or the government,” said 22-year-old Moscow software developer Mikhail Sobolev. “I don’t think the government would achieve any success at all if it tried to control RuNet. It is hard to control distributed systems, and people have known how to avoid it since Soviet times. And, in my opinion, the government doesn’t even try to. It has newspapers and TV to deal with.”

Official policy is in fact pro-Internet. The Putin regime has recognized the advantages of IT along with its dangers. In 2002, it launched the high-profile, $2.6 billion e-Russia campaign, aimed at bringing the entire Russian Federation online. The plan seeks to accelerate the computerization of Russian society, from a computers for schools program up through high-profile international events like the yearly Broadband Russia Conference. The BRC brings together telecom ministers from the former Soviet states with business leaders, and provides a showcase to potential investors such as the EBRD. Authorities rightly perceive the IT industry as a key contributor to the economy of 21st century Russia, and a way of discouraging post-Soviet brain drain.

In spite of its growing interest in new technology, the government’s track record of legislation, such as the 1995 and 1999 SORM (System of Operative Investigative Activity) laws, suggests it is very interested in controlling, or at least monitoring, private and business use of the Internet. SORM-1 obliged Internet service providers to install hardware that allowed the FSB to monitor the e-mail and Internet usage of their customers. SORM-2 went even further, requiring all ISPs to route incoming and outgoing data through FSB computers. Yet the legislation has been widely criticized, and the government has made notable alterations, such as a revision to SORM-2 which obliges the FSB to obtain a warrant prior to looking at a user’s electronic traffic. To date, SORM has not generated mass arrests, but the fear remains.

“Alternative sources of information are implicitly identified as a threat in the Information and Security Doctrine of 2000,” explained Dr. Pete Duncan, Senior Lecturer in Russian Politics at the School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies in London. “But the emphasis in Russia is on listening to what people are doing rather than stopping them from doing it. That’s quite a big difference from, say, China, which sought to block off access to sites they don’t like right from the start of the Internet.”

This emphasis on observation rather than interference is apparent in the case of the Fif, or “Fisherman Friend” LiveJournal, which in 2002 syndicated a feed of every Russian-language journal on the site. The identity of Fisherman Friend was never discovered, and while some users were enthused about the journal as a “mega-documental novel,” many suspected it of being a front for FSB surveillance, and feared it accordingly. The Fif journal was discontinued when the number of Russian users became unmanageable, and no targeted prosecution or other persecution of LiveJournal users per se is known to have taken place.

According to Duncan, controversial websites both large and small are allowed to operate unhindered because they provide a useful window on the wider activities of the groups concerned. “I don’t think the leadership wants people to be looking at subversive sites for entrapment, but rather to watch how the process develops. That’s why the basic scheme of Internet regulation is for every ISP to pay for a link between themselves and the regional level of the FSB so that, without any bother, the FSB can listen into any Internet communication, to see who is saying what. Just to monitor the situation and see what’s going on, or at least to start off with. That’s more efficient than the Chinese system of just saying that people can’t get access to certain websites.”

Still, the Powers That Be are often quite vocal in their criticism of RuNet’s anarchy. In May of last year, Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov wrote an article for Izvestia, in which he called the Internet a “territory of pirates” and recommended rigorous legislation to control online media. In November, Russian Minister for Education and Science Andrei Fursenko worried many with his statement at the First International Science and Technology in Society Forum. “Easy access to the Internet creates certain problems connected with relations between individuals and society,” he said. “The government bears responsibility for control over the use of scientific technologies, including the Internet.”

Whether governmental discomfort leads to repressive legislation remains to be seen. In any case, the established dot-ru companies are determined to exploit any future developments to their advantage. “We don’t anticipate any problem concerning future tightening of the laws,” said Yandex’s Kolmanovskaya. “On the contrary, more detailed regulation may help us to develop the Internet and our business.”

From a user’s perspective, RuNet in 2005 has achieved stability and borders on maturity. It has become a topic for serious cultural study, centered in the Institute of European Culture’s Russian Cyberspace Project (ruhr-uni-bochum.de/russ-cyb), which aims to analyze “the formulation of cultural identity on the Russian-speaking Internet.” It is also maturing commercially, becoming a promising market for advertisers and a venue for e-commerce. Yet, compared to the reach and development of the Western networks, RuNet remains a fledgling structure. Russian society is still divided into a self-selected but ever-expanding cognoscenti, and a suspicious or indifferent majority who have yet to experience the new technology first hand.

Roman Leibov believes RuNet is on the brink of a new era of development. “At the moment, there is nothing completely new. There was a period of literary experimentation. Then an epoch of political use of the Internet and new media. Now it’s the time of the blogs. But that seems to be coming to an end. We will see what happens next.”

Yet, more so than any Western country, the future of the Internet in Russia depends on the government: on its continued promotion and financial support of IT expansion, and its restraint vis-a-vis censorship. Dr. Ledeneva summed up the ambivalence felt by many Russians about the exhilarating but sometimes alarmingly lawless RuNet environment: “It is essential for society that we continue to have sites like kompromat.ru, which give a lot of information that does not appear in the printed press, and even less so on the television. But I’m torn. Personally, I want to believe that the laws will be tightening up, but won’t undermine the sense of freedom of speech and information that is still available on RuNet.”  RL