Russian Blogging: Navalny Speaks

"…there are about 50,000 people who read my blog daily. If I don’t write, three days later the blog will be read by 20,000 people. In a week, the number of readers will be 2,000 people and, two weeks later, only your mother will go and see if you wrote something.

Therefore, if you want to have a popular blog, you have to constantly write and say something. The good thing about the Internet is that the audience is very mobile and no one will wait for Navalny if Navalny won’t write anything for a month. These are the laws of the genre.

I am off to Wilton Park next week for a conference about Russia: new prosperity, aspiration, innovation, participation. My session is all about new media and social networking.

Looking at what is happening in the Russian internet world is difficult because (like everything in Russia) there is just so much. But do check out the interview with Russian super-blogger Alexey Navalny as quoted above. Here he is talking about his landslide victory in a virtual election for mayor of Moscow:

… the government has lost the moral and intellectual competition on the Internet, which is pretty big – almost 37 million users. For the government there’s no online platform where it is trusted. There are websites like Kommersant, Vedomosti, Echo Moskvy.

Even if we take non-liberal websites, conservative, entertainment, neutral, whatever – any voting would lead to the victory of what we call “the opposition.” And the government, although it invested a lot of money, has lost this work.

And as the Internet penetrates, this division will get bigger. Internet is the main threat to the stability of the government in Russia.

For a different view, here is an extract from an interview with a hard-nosed Aleksey Chadayev, founder of the ‘Kremlin blogger school’ which a friendly ex-colleague has sent me from BBC Monitoring. Imagine if D Cameron tried set up a No 10 Blogging School – the howl of derision would be stupendous. In Russia things are … different.

Chadeyev:

… There is one more factor of some importance here — the consequences of the demographic explosion. There are many young people in the Arab countries and fairly old regimes controlled by elderly "agents" from the days of the KGB-CIA confrontation. When encountering the new communicative forms, they pour out. But Russian society is older and there is much less of this youthful energy in it. With the exception of a few regions that are a special conversation.

[Chernenko] But the Western press writes that events like those in North Africa could happen in Russia too, and that the Russian authorities fear Facebook.

[Chadayev] Certainly there is nothing to fear. It is simply a new tool, a new weapon; you need to work with it. I would think about this in an entirely different key. And maybe we ourselves will try to organize a Twitter revolution at some particular geographic point that is important for us. The Russian world has vast spaces. Why not…

[Chernenko] …Arouse the Russian-speaking citizens of Estonia to protest?

[Chadayev] Why not? They are disconnected, each one of them sits in his apartment and cannot do anything with this midget leviathan that is trying to naturalize them and integrate them into their wretched East European carcass. Obviously all the old methods of organizing and mobilizing them do not work. But as for the new ones, why not?

[Chernenko] In other words, the technologies themselves are neutral and any force — pro-government or oppositionist — can use them with equal effectiveness?

[Chadayev] Of course! They are simply tools. It is simply that there are people who are able to master them and combine this knowledge with sociology, that is, with knowledge about how the particular society is organized…