Kasparov.ru, the internet portal of the United Civil Front party, was forced offline Monday evening, the editorial office said. As many as 1,500 requests per second were sent to the site, which could not handle the load, and the attacks continued well into the following day. Nazbol.ru, the website of the banned National Bolshevik Party, was concurrently taken down.

On Wednesday morning, another opposition online newspaper was targeted. Grani.ru, which publishes news and opinion content, was accessible to readers only intermittently by Wednesday evening, editors said. Ikd.ru, which publishes news about demonstrations going on around Russia, also reported an attack.

DDoS attacks, which send phony user requests and jam web servers, have frequently been used against political websites in Russia.

In the past year, opposition leaders have described the attacks as a systematic problem. Kasparov.ru was last targeted in August. Other affected sites include the web portals of Human Rights in Russia, Ekho Moskvy radio, the March of Dissent protests, and even the Kommersant newspaper.

As of Thursday December 25th, each of the sites appeared to be working properly.

• In our internal review and discussion of the Voronezh March of Dissent, several of Eduard Limonov’s people said they had recognized some of the Nashi members who were there. Two of them were recognized as the Nashi leaders who organized the brutal attacks on National Bolshevik and Vanguard of Red Youth members in 2006. Their presence coincided with increased level of aggression displayed by the Nashi storm trooper hooligans against Other Russia marchers in Voronezh.

• Two days ago, 120,000 copies of the Other Russia newspaper was confiscated by authorities. So far, 25 printers have refused to print it, even if we offer to pay above market prices. The Kremlin campaign of fear and intimidation has reached broadly and deeply.

• In the best Russian tradition, some have succeeded in finding humor in our national tragedy. A current joke making the rounds says that the Central Election Committee has decided to simplify things for the 2008 presidential election. At each polling station there will be two boxes. One “Vova” and the other “Shredder”…

[T]here remains the constant threat of being jailed for “extremist speech,” the Kremlin’s Orwellian justification for suppressing criticism. Individuals have been criminally charged for Internet posts. The security forces and their allies engage in online harassment as well. Our Web sites are under constant threat of coordinated hacker attacks, forcing us to look outside Russia’s borders to establish a network that cannot be shut down by the government.

Even if we get our message out, we cannot make people read it, or care, or act. Our mission, then, is to present a message so powerful that it cannot be ignored. In this fight, the Internet is our best weapon to let the world know what’s really going on behind Putin’s 21st century Iron Curtain.

These attacks are similar in nature (and source, we don’t doubt) to those perpetrated against Estonian websites during the Russia-Estonia row over the WW II memorial.

While we have great respect for the technical skills that have made Russian hackers famous and infamous worldwide, we do wonder why such a typically anti-establishment crowd is so eager to do the bidding of the Kremlin. Is the cult of Putin’s “strong Russia at any cost” really so powerful? These hackers should realize they will eventually be locked up by the same people in the government who are protecting them now. The Kremlin “Matrix” will grow until it has no use for any Russian “Neos.”