Wednesday, August 13, 2008
Russian bloggers at war
Foreign Policy's web site has an interesting article about Russian bloggers and the war for international public opinion.
As Russian tanks lumbered southward over mountainous Ossetian terrain, Russian netizens were seeking to dominate the digital battlefield.
But sophomoric pranks and cyberattacks were only the first shots of a much wider online war in which Russian bloggers willingly enlisted as the Kremlin’s grass-roots army. For Russian netizens, “unconventional” cyberwarfare—winning the hearts and minds of the West—became more important than crashing another server in Tbilisi. Managing information seemed all the more urgent as there were virtually no images from the first and the most controversial element in the whole war—the Georgian invasion of Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia—and the destruction that, were one to believe the Kremlin’s account, followed shortly thereafter....
Those skeptical of the official statistics argued that the government could have fabricated the figures. In response, a group of Russian bloggers sent a public letter to SUP, the Russian company that owns and manages LiveJournal, one of the most popular blog services in the country (but legally still an American entity). They asked it to impose curbs on free speech and censor anyone seeking to undermine Russia’s war effort by expressing pro-Georgian sentiment. “Regular laws of peaceful times do not apply; we are at war!” read their somewhat hysterical letter. (Thankfully, SUP ignored their demands.)
Interesting. Regular readers know that I put up several posts on the Russo-Georgia war over the weekend, and I noticed a number of hits from Russian-language Livejournal sites. I also got a couple of strange pro-Russian comments from people with Russian-sounding names, and more than 100 recorded unique visits from the Russian Federation over the last few days. I remember thinking that the Russian blogosphere was more active than I would have expected.
At one level, the rising Russosphere is just another species of resurgent nationalism in that country. Indeed, Russians seem to rejoice in their national toughness. In last year's Pew Global Attitudes Survey, George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin were similarly unpopular around the world, the main difference being that Bush was (by then) also unpopular in the United States, whereas Putin was wildly popular (approval ratings in excess of 80%) within Russia. The Russians, it seemed, loved the fact that the world was afraid of Putin, while few Americans felt that way about Bush. That difference is potentially very destabilizing.
The decade of the 1990s, when Russian nationalism seemed dormant, may turn out to have been nothing but a hiatus for a force that has already shaped the world for more than a hundred years.
1 Comments:
By 
Dawnfire82, at
Wed Aug 13, 10:01:00 AM:
An old co-worker of mine with a graduate degree in Russian Studies once told me that the Russian culture doesn't care at all if a few people disappear in the night or their boys get conscripted for war from time to time so long as the streets are safe to walk, the trains work, and they are powerful.
Centralized, top heavy authority is normal there. So is imperialistic expansion.
*shrug*
By the by, I'm making a tentative effort to resurrect my old blog, Black Faced Sinner. I figured since I'm no longer active duty Army, I'll be able to keep up with it better.
