While access to the internet itself remains largely unhindered in Russia, many bloggers have come under attack – both online and in person.

In the last two years there have been several cases of technical blocking and numerous cases of content removal. The authorities have also increasingly engaged in harassment of bloggers. At least 25 cases of blogger harassment, including 11 arrests, were registered between January 2009 and May 2010, compared with seven in 2006–08. In addition, dozens of blogs have reportedly been attacked in recent years by a hacker team called the Hell Brigade.

The report did point out areas where access to the internet remains a pressing issue:

The number of internet users jumped from 1.5 million in 1999 to 46.5 million in 2010, and grew by more than 13 million in the last two years, though this still leaves Russia’s penetration rate at 33 percent, lower than the rates in Central European countries. The level of infrastructure differs significantly from place to place, and gaps are evident between urban and rural areas as well as between different types of cities. The worst access conditions can be found in the North Caucasus and the industrial towns of Siberia and the Far East.

Corruption within the federal government also plays a part in what companies control internet access across the country:

Five access providers—Comstar, Vimpelcom, ER-Telecom, AKADO, and the state-owned SvyazInvest—controlled more than 67 percent of the broadband market as of February 2010. Regional branches of SvyazInvest account for 36 percent of subscribers, up from 27.8 percent in 2008. As at the federal level, regional dominance usually depends on political connections and the tacit approval of regional authorities. Although this situation is not the direct result of legal or economic obstacles, it nonetheless reflects an element of corruption that is widespread in the telecommunications sector and other parts of the Russian economy.

Greater concern, however, was focused on blocked online content, particularly opposition-oriented websites.

Although attempts to establish a comprehensive, centralized filtering system have been abandoned, several recent cases of blocking have been reported. In December 2009, a number of ISPs blocked access to the radical Islamist website Kavkaz Center. At almost the same time, the wireless provider Yota blocked several opposition sites. The practice of exerting pressure on service providers and content producers by telephone has become increasingly common. Police and representatives of the prosecutor’s office call the owners and shareholders of websites, and anyone else in a position to remove unwanted material and ensure that the problem does not come up again. Such pressure encourages self-censorship, and most providers do not wait for court orders to remove targeted materials.

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Content is often removed on the grounds that it violates Russia’s laws against “extremism.” Providers are punished for hosting materials that are proscribed in a list on the website of the Ministry of Justice. The list is updated on a monthly basis and included 748 items as of January 2011. The procedure for identifying extremist materials is nontransparent, leaving ample room for politically motivated content removal. There have been at least three cases of site closures, two of them temporary, on the grounds that the affected sites hosted extremist materials. In February 2010, the major opposition portal Grani.ru was checked for extremism, but the authorities apparently found nothing incriminating.

Among the most disturbing accounts in the report were cases of criminal suits and physical attacks against individual bloggers.

Since January 2009, police and the prosecutor’s office have launched at least 25 criminal cases against bloggers and forum commentators. While some cases were against individuals who posted clearly extremist content, others appear to be more politically motivated. The most severe and widely known sentence was that of Irek Murtazin, a Tatarstan blogger and journalist who received almost two years in prison in November 2009 for defamation.

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While traditional journalists and activists have faced a series of murders and severe beatings in recent years, physical attacks on Russian bloggers and online activists have so far been comparatively limited. However, one recent event drew significant attention. In November 2010, Oleg Kashin, a reporter for the newspaper Kommersant who was also well known as a blogger, was severely beaten near his home in Moscow. His coverage of protests and political youth movements had prompted vocal responses from pro-Kremlin groups in the past, but it was not known exactly who was responsible for the attack.

Read the report in its entirety by clicking here.

Russia: Freedom of Speech Online in 2010
By Marianna Tishchenko
February 10, 2011
Yezhednevny Zhurnal

With the Internet rising in influence as the single most important source of information (40% of Russian citizens use the Runet), the issue of online freedom of expression has become significantly more relevant. This year, the Internet became a platform for political and social mobilization in Russia. However, judging by the reaction of the Russian authorities, who strive to suppress activities in cyberspace, the government does not see online activism in a particularly positive light.

At the same time as ordinary Russians (who are, by the way, the most active users of social websites in the world) have begun to rely more heavily on the Internet, the government has also changed its priorities in regards to the global web.

Regional Blocking

Blocking websites is a practice used widely by government authorities, mainly on a regional level, to control Internet content. It must be noted that the particular nature of this method is that residents from one concrete region are blocked from seeing the same websites that everyone else can access as normal.

The most outrageous example of limits imposed on freedom of expression on the Internet was the decision of the Komsomolsk-on-Amur Central Regional Court about blocking the website YouTube by Internet provider Rosnet. The ban (which was never put into effect) was a reaction to a neo-Nazi video clip that was put on a “list of extremist materials.” Regardless of the fact that the court’s decision was later forgotten, the case itself is an example of the burgeoning interference by regional authorities over Internet content.

YouTube has not been the only online resource to suffer. At the end of July, a court in the Republic of Ingushetia required a local Internet provider to block access to LiveJournal. In August, a provider in Tula temporarily blocked access to the independent portal Tulskie Pryaniki.

There was an analogous case with the environmental website Ecmo.ru. A provider in the city of Khimki blocked user access to Ecmo.ru because it was hosting a petition calling for Khimki Mayor Vladimir Strelchenko to resign.

Physical and Virtual Violence

In addition to website blocking, the freedom of self-expression on the Internet has been influenced by threats of actual violence against bloggers. Well-known Russian journalist and blogger Oleg Kashin was attacked after he published a series of articles about youth movements and protests against the construction of a highway through the Khimki Forest.

In August, a criminal suit was filed in the Kemerovo region against Aleksandr Sorokin for a post in which he compared regional governors to Latin American dictators.

In November, Ulyanovsk activist and blogger Sasha Bragin became a target of the Russian justice system when he was accused of running over a pedestrian. Bragin said the accident was staged and that a criminal suit had already been filed after he was repeatedly threatened for his investigative work.

A series of criminal suits have been filed against neo-Nazi websites. According to the Sova Center, Komi resident Vladimir Lyurov was sentenced to six months probation for inciting hatred with anti-Semitic comments posted on a local forum. Lyurov has not admitted his guilt.

LiveJournal, which is controlled by Kremlin-allied oligarch Alisher Usmanov, wound up in the center of public attention after suspending their users’ accounts. Rakhat Aliev, a Kazakh opposition politician and ex-son-in-law of President Nazarbayev, had his blog frozen. Incidentally, at one point before then, all of LiveJournal was blocked in Kazakhstan. Blogger pilgrim_67 also had his account blocked, forcing him to “transfer” to BlogSpot and lj.rossia.org.

These cases have proven the instability of LiveJournal as a platform for the Russian political blogosphere.

Blogger accounts were not only closed, but hacked. In the past five years, more than 40 Runet blogs have been attacked.

This week, a group of hackers called “the Brigade of Hell” attacked the blog of Valery Novodvorskaya. Hacker victims include political and commercial bloggers alike and the deletion and falsification of content on online journals still goes unpunished.

According to historian Vladimir Pribylovsky, who has closely investigated hacker attacks on bloggers, this group’s financing is controlled by Timofey Shevyakov, leading analyst of the Kremlin website Politonline.ru and former employee of the pro-Kremlin research institute Foundation for Effective Politics.

Control and Deletion of Content

The unrest on Manezhnaya Square on December 11, 2010 provoked a rise in attention paid to the Runet, particularly regarding any information of a nationalistic persuasion. Representatives of the website Vkontakte announced that their moderators were working in cooperation with the police and FSB to delete “dangerous” content. Until then, the site had admitted but not specified the level of cooperation with law enforcement agencies, and now the security services speak openly of monitoring social websites and tracing the IP addresses of people who, in their opinion, are inciting hostility.

Vkontakte was noted for deleting content from its pages more broadly. After the explosion in the Raspadskaya Mine, the website’s management deleted a group created in sympathy for the victims that numbered more than 6000 members when it was deleted. Last July, the group Antireligia (about 8000 members) was also deleted.

Among other measures used against online activists was the incident of Dmitri Gudkov’s car, which was smashed up after Gudkov posted a video titled “Our Gulf of Mexico” about an oil well explosion that the authorities did not react to in any way at all.

Regardless of the fact that the Russian government has staged a series of serious attacks to limit the activities of Internet users, the Runet continues to grow, unite and discuss the most varied topics all the same. It’s possible that the government will realize that controlling freedom of expression is extremely difficult – not only because of the public’s stubbornness, but also because limiting online freedom could not only hinder regional and national debates but also harm the reputation of Russia in the global arena.

Update 12/24/10: The prosecutor general of Komi has annulled the criminal charges against Safronov, on the basis that they had been filed prematurely and were based on incomplete information. The agency did not, however, rule out that they could be refiled.

Meanwhile, Safronov says he is more concerned about getting back his confiscated computers, which he can’t work normally without.

Criminal charges have been filed against a Russian blogger from the city of Komi for insulting Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on his LiveJournal page, Kasparov.ru reports.

On December 21, Pavel Safronov reported that police had raided the editorial offices of Krasnoye Znamya, a regional newspaper where he works as marketing manager for the publication’s website. Writing on his blog, Safronov said police confiscated two work computers and took him to a police station for interrogation in regards to the charges.

The blogger is being charged under article 319 of the Russian criminal code, which prohibits “the public insult of a government official in the performance of one’s duties or in connection with their performance.” The offense is punishable by a minimum of a 40 thousand ruble fine (about $1330) or as much as one year of corrective labor.

Safronov is appealing the charges on the basis that they constitute illegal criminal persecution. Everything that has happened, he said, is part of a publicity stunt against him by unknown political forces. Indeed, the remark in question – he called the prime minister a derogatory term for homosexuals – was posted back on September 28, but no charges were filed until December 20.

For his part, Safronov insists that the remark was not actually insulting.

“I don’t consider the word ‘p*****s’ to be an insult, and I didn’t mean to insult Putin,” he explained to the news website VNKomi.ru. “Moreover, nobody told me that someone had filed this criminal suit.”

According to VNKomi.ru, an activist from the ultranationalist Liberal Democratic Party of Russia named Veronika Gorbacheva filed a complaint with the prime minister’s regional outpost in Komi on November 11. She had previously sued Safronov on the basis that he had insulted her but lost the case in court.

The free speech rights of bloggers in Russia have come under repeated threat in recent years. Among numerous notable cases, young blogger Savva Terentiev was sentenced to a year in prison for comments left on a LiveJournal blog in 2008. Another blogger was arrested for posting lewd descriptions of Vladimir Putin.

Dmitri Soloviev, a blogger and activist of the Oborona opposition movement, was notified on Monday of the December 31 decision. According to the document sent to the blogger, two groups of investigators found no evidence that any crime had actually been committed.

Soloviev had been charged in August 2008 with inciting hatred against police and federal security agents with a series of posts on LiveJournal.

Investigators had initially claimed that the five posts “instigated social strife” due to their content regarding the police.

The posts, under Soloviev’s username dimon77, included phrases accusing federal security agents of killing Russian children and assertions that the police would not succeed in breaking up the Oborona movement.

Advocates for the blogger maintained that the majority of the posts included material previously published elsewhere on the internet, and, furthermore, represented legitimate criticisms of specific actions of law enforcement officers.

As part of the investigation, Soloviev’s computer and notebook had both been confiscated, preventing him from completing his graduate dissertation.

Oborona leader Oleg Kozlovsky said that the decision to drop the case was “unprecedented in recent Russian history.” He added, however, that the case was very much an exception, as Soloviev’s case was only one of many similar, high-profile lawsuits against Russian bloggers.

In November, blogger Oleg Kozyrev launched a trade union for bloggers, citing the need for an organization to protect the rights and freedoms of the authors of online content.

Numerous Russian bloggers have been arrested and jailed under charges of extremism, inciting hatred, or instigating social discord. Most recently, 22-year old Ivan Peregorodiev was arrested in the southern city of Saratov in December and charged with disseminating false information related to an act of terrorism after he discussed rumors on his blog that victims of swine flu actually had pneumonic plague.

Kozyrev intends for the union to bring together Russian-language bloggers in an assertion of their rights and freedoms. That aside, he says, it will remain politically independent.

The manifesto enumerates seven “freedoms of bloggers” – of speech, entrepreneurial activity, dissemination of information, authorship, creative self-expression, preservation of content, and assembly. The union would work to defend all bloggers, including creators of podcasts, online videos, and photo galleries, from violations of these freedoms.

The first action of the trade union was to demand the release of jailed journalist and blogger Irek Murtazin.

Kozyrev said that the union will keep track of lawsuits against bloggers and have a database of the development of events. He additionally intends to track legislative initiatives that would have an effect on bloggers, to maintain an archive of correspondence with social and political organizations, and to set up contacts with the media.

The creation of the trade union follows the sentencing of Tartar oppositionist Irek Murtazin, former press secretary of Tartar President Mintimer Shaimiev, to twenty-one months in jail on charges of slander and “violation of the sanctity of private life.” Shaymiev says that Murtazin had disseminated information that he knew to be false, undermining Shaimiev’s reputation and disclosing personal secrets. In particular, Murtazin posted on his blog on September 12 that Shaimiev had unexpectedly died in Turkey.

In a statement to RFE/RL, Murtazin said that the trial was a “theater of the absurd” and that he plans to appeal the verdict. He also said that the decision sets a dangerous precedent for anyone with “any word of criticism” against a Russian leader.

A number of recent arrests of bloggers and have brought internet freedom in Russia into serious doubt. LiveJournal users in one southern Russian region found themselves without access to the website in June after courts ordered an opposition blog to stop publishing. Another blogger was arrested for lewd descriptions of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.