On Tuesday, a user of the website HabraHabr living in Ulyanovsk complained that he was unable to access the LiveJournal blog of noted whistleblower Aleksei Navalny. When the user asked his internet provider, Telekom.ru, for an explanation, he received a letter in response: “Access to the resource navalny.livejournal.com has been temporarily suspended by order of the FSB.”

Upon further inquiry to Telekom.ru, Gazeta.ru discovered that the company had blocked access not only to Navalny’s blog, but to LiveJournal entirely.

“The company has limited access to LiveJournal by order of the FSB,” a technology support specialist from the company told Gazeta.ru. However, he could not explain on the basis of what sanction the FSB asked the company to block access to the website.

This is not the first time Russian authorities have blocked access to social media websites. In July 2010, an ISP in Komsomolsk-on-Amur received a court order to block access to YouTube; in the same month, a court in Ingushetia ordered providers to block access to all of LiveJournal.

Prominent blogger Aleksei Navalny has been involved in an ongoing row with government authorities in connection with his status as Russia’s chief whistleblower. Most notably, Navalny used his shareholder earnings in the state-owned oil pipeline company Transneft to reveal an alleged $4 billion of embezzlement. Last week, federal investigators filed criminal charges against the blogger for having allegedly defrauded a state-owned timber company. On Wednesday, investigators announced that an “unspecified culture studies institute” had determined that his website’s logo was a desecration of Russia’s coat of arms.

According to the Moscow Times, Telekom.ru is now blaming technical difficulties for the lack of access to LiveJournal, despite previously admitting that the FSB issued an order to block it. The FSB denies issuing a complaint about Navalny’s blog, but it is unclear whether or not they deny complaining about LiveJournal itself.

At a parliamentary hearing dedicated to legislation regulating the internet, TsIK member Maya Grishina introduced an initiative to clarify electoral legislation to fight “unlawful agitation” on social media sites such as LiveJournal, Facebook, and Twitter. The commission is asking for a separate law to govern the rules for posting “political agitation” in the blogosphere and set resources in place that would allow such agitation to be dealt with.

“Our task is to get rid of unjustified constraints and create conditions to persecute violations,” Grishina explained.

She said the most dangerous platform was LiveJournal, where the majority of comments and discussions can be freely viewed by the general public. Moreover, Grishina said, it is precisely on LiveJournal that agitation is posted on the day before elections, despite being banned by law, or that exit poll data is displayed before the last polls close.

According to Gazeta.ru, Robert Shlegel, a member of the State Duma committee on network and information politics known for his work to restrict media freedoms, did not rush to support Grishina’s idea but did say it would be discussed in the next scheduled Duma round table on mass media and internet regulation in December 2011.

Other members of the political community were less forgiving.

“This idea is stupid and impossible to implement,” said Solidarity member Ilya Yashin. “It’s impossible to force American websites (for example, Facebook) to follow Russian laws, and the internet in general is a global space.”

Head of the legal branch of the Communist Party, Vadim Solovyov, said such a law could lead to abuse. “I don’t see anything good in this proposal – people could be accused of illegal agitation for any sort of rubbish on a blog,” he said.

Regional elections took place throughout Russia on March 13, 2011. Upcoming elections for State Duma and the presidency will be held in October 2011 and March 2012, respectively.

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.

Nadezhda Prusenkova of the newspaper’s press service said that the DDoS attack on Novaya Gazeta’s server has increased in strength since its initiation on Tuesday morning. The site now receives one and a half million hits a second, effectively paralyzing it.

“We have prepared and are submitting today an appeal to law enforcement agencies, in which we basically are demanding that criminal proceedings be initiated,” Prusenkova said.

Novaya Gazeta is one of the only newspapers in Russia that remains openly critical of the Kremlin. Four of its journalists have been killed since 2001, including Anna Politkovskaya, whose October 2006 murder shocked the world and drew unprecedented scorn onto the Russian government. “There are visitors in our editorial office every day who have nowhere else to bring their troubles,” Politkovskaya wrote before her death, “because the Kremlin finds their stories off-message, so that the only place they can be aired is in our newspaper, Novaya Gazeta.”

“The editors of Novaya Gazeta consider this attack to be a direct violation of media laws, an impeding the realization of the professional activities of journalists, a violation of the rights of our readers to obtain prompt information and a breakdown of the agreement with our advertisers,” reads a post on the newspaper’s LiveJournal blog, which editors are using to publish material while the website remains inaccessible.

Editors of the newspaper suspect that the attack could be motivated by its recent extensive coverage of controversial house demolitions in the Moscow village of Rechnik. “Our correspondents are on duty in the village around the clock and send the editors photographs and videos, testimony from the victims, and also property ownership documents that still have not appeared in the news,” they said in a blog post.

“According to the information that we have, the house demolitions in the village are planned to be completed by Monday. And the materials that began to appear on our website are an absolutely undesirable background for this,” the post concludes.

Prusenkova noted that editors are attempting to find an alternative domain for the website in addition to LiveJournal. “But the problem is that the attack immediately goes exactly to the domain name ‘Novaya Gazeta’,” she said.

Russian opposition websites are quite frequently subjected to DDoS attacks. They often correspond with important political events, such as elections or large-scale protests. The website for the opposition movement Solidarity underwent such an attack in September 2009, after a presentation of movement leader Boris Nemtsov’s critical brochure on Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov.

Solovyov joins a long list of individuals and organizations charged under a controversial anti-extremism law (article 282 of the Russian Criminal Code). He faces a possible two years behind bars if charged and convicted.

According to Oborona, police searched Solovyov’s home on August 12, seizing computer equipment and Oborona literature.

The criminal investigation against the activist was first launched on August 5th, and was justified by several blog posts written by Solovyov on LiveJournal, Russia’s most popular blogging service. The entires in question, published form December 2006 to June 2008 under the “dimon77” monicker (Rus), criticize the activities of the FSB (Federal Security Service) and militsiya. An Oborona spokesman said that they did not contain any calls for violence or grave insults.

Solovyov has taken part in a number of opposition demonstrations staged by The Other Russia coalition. Oborona believes the investigation against him may be an attempt to pressure and silence the group, which frequently criticizes Russia’s security services. “We are convinced that our close associate has not done anything illegal or objectionable, and will strive for his full acquittal, as well as punishment for those who initiated his persecution,” the group wrote.

Solovyov’s case resembles the case against another Russian blogger, Savva Terentyev, who was given a suspended sentence in July after a year-long court battle. Terentyev, of Syktyvkar, had written a single offensive blog comment, later retracted, saying that corrupt police should be burned in every town center.

The post in question appeared on Lebedev’s personal LiveJournal site last summer. In it, the businessman wrote that another State Duma representative, Vladimir Medinsky, “lobbies on behalf of gambling industry interests.” An open letter with similar implications was also posted by Lebedev on the website of the Kommersant newspaper. Medinsky then filed a suit in defense of his honor, dignity and business reputation, asking for 100 million rubles (€2.7 or $4.2 mln) in compensation.

According to a statement released by Medinsky’s press-service, the case is precedent-setting, marking the first time that “a ruling on the defense of honor, dignity and business reputation, concerning publications in a weblog, had led to tangible consequences for the guilty party.”

Medinsky himself said that the ruling was an important step in setting guidelines for the media as it continues to move into the blogosphere. “It is essential to know what one may and may not do,” the parliamentarian said. “Regardless of whether 500 thousand people read it, 5 thousand or merely 50.”

“Insulting other people with impunity in ones weblogs is now impermissible.”

Artem Artemov, Lebedev’s press-secretary, said the businessman was unhappy with the ruling and trial, but that he would comply fully with the law. “Lebedev does not agree with the Basmanny court decision,” he said. “But, as a law-abiding citizen, he has paid out 30 thousand rubles to Medinsky, and has published the phrase required by the court in his LiveJournal weblog.”

The Russian judicial system, while not based on precedents, does take past cases into account.

alternate spelling: Aleksandr Lebedev.

On Thursday March 27th, Belyaev was called into the office of the prosecutor and asked to give a written explanation “on the matter of online activities.” Belyaev explained that the investigating officer, Denis Yanushevich, showed him print-outs of several of his recent online journal entries, intermixed with entries that had never appeared on his blog. One of these entries has been used as grounds to launch the case.

Belyaev refused to give a written statement, falling back on a law against self-incrimination. He has agreed to return to speak with prosecutors in the near future, after he has a chance to consult with an attorney.

See also: Russian Blogger Heads to Court After Fiery Comment

According to prosecutors, the trial should begin in around two weeks.

Terentyev, 22, claims that he had no intentions of “inciting hatred and enmity.” His words, written as a response to a local journalist’s blog entry describing measures used by police against the opposition press , were a harsh emotional criticism of members of local law enforcement. His comment, later rescinded, spoke out against militsiya officers in general, calling them “garbage,” and proposed that one way to set an example was to “incinerate a bad cop” in every city center once a day.

The case has posed some difficulties for the prosecution. Linguistic experts were brought in to prove that Terentyev’s text was “aimed at inciting hatred and enmity, and also dishonoring a group of persons based on their belonging to a social group” and was “performed publicly, using the mass-media.” Terentyev’s supporters question whether an online journal can be considered “mass-media” and whether law enforcement officers are a collective group.

Representatives of LiveJournal, Russia’s most popular blogging service, have called the charges “absurd.” The web portal was recently purchase by a Russian firm, which has led to some concerns that Russia’s online commentators could be censored by the country’s security services.

If convicted, Terentyev faces a large fine and a maximum of two years behind bars. He has pledged to appeal any court decision.

True, the right for development and operation of the Russian segment of LiveJournal was bought out by the Russian businessmen in October of the past year. Even then, this summoned a negative reaction from some users. Fortunately, the more alarming predictions regarding censorship on LiveJournal haven’t proven true. The project was led Anton Nosik, a liberal-minded journalist and famed personality of the Russian internet. The SUP Fabrik company was formed by financier Aleksanr Mamut and Andrew Paulson.

Meanwhile, both before and after SUP’s arrival, the Russian-language segment of LiveJournal continued to expand by leaps and bounds. Today, more than one million bloggers and their communities have websites hosted by the service. It would seem a huge achievement for Russia, not so advanced in terms of the proliferation of high technologies! However, if you look closer at the popularity of Russian LiveJournal, you begin to discover that many of the authors set up blogs out of something other than leisurely idleness.

If in the West the majority of blogs are something like electronic diaries along the lines of “I woke up at seven in the morning, walked the dog, fed my parrot,” then in Russia, LiveJournal became in its own way the sole uncensored and practically free platform for the expression of political views and debates between opponents. Since the “Duma isn’t a place for discussion,” [As Duma speaker Boris Gryzlov recently announced] the once legible newspapers turned into “Putin and boobs,” and the television into “bleak dreck,” then only the internet remains. That’s why blogs were set up by not only the jeering “authors” and “low-lifes,” but by the best Russian journalists, opposition politicians, and leaders of youth-movements that don’t fit into the procrustean “us or them” stock. Incidentally, since such a racket was started, soon the Kremlin youth and their brains – the Kremlin propagandists, just had to start their own electronic journals. For some years now, they have tried to gather a high relative weight in cyberspace, but so far to no avail!

In the beginning, those with nationalistic views – from common skinheads to hard ideologues – seemed to dominate among LiveJournal’s political authors. Which, incidentally, hardly worried the powers that be, even as the blogs published just about anything: from fascist propaganda to video-clips of guest-workers and international student being beaten. The situation fundamentally changed only when the liberal, discontented opposition, pushed out of the political sphere, appeared on LiveJournal. They soon started to garner the majority of votes in various internet-polls, [and the authorities began to worry], since this audience wasn’t so “socially close!” Then, the clear heads started to materialize the first ideas: to take control of the virtual space, and submerge the opposition into a total information vacuum!

Naturally, we can’t confirm that this latest acquisition by SUP…is part of an artful chekist plan. In any case, for now LiveJournal Inc. will retain American jurisdiction, and will continue operations from San Francisco. Commenting on the outcomes of the work of SUP in Russia, Chris Alden, the chairman of Six Apart’s board, said that in the past year, SUP and SixApart worked in close collaboration on developing assets, and that the number of Russian-speaking users doubled over this period. “We have been impressed by the expertise and enthusiasm that SUP has brought to LiveJournal in Russia. They’ve introduced new features, nearly doubled the number of users, invested in key product enhancements, and have done justice to one of the most innovative online social networks in the world.”

Russian representatives of SUP assured the community that changes in operations will be minimal. They will be aimed at the establishment of transparent and clear principles regarding communication and consulting on important questions. One of the central innovations will be the creation of an independent supervisory board, which will consist of industry experts and two members of the LiveJournal community, chosen by users. LiveJournal founder Brad Fitzpatrick has already agreed to work with the board. Still, many Russian bloggers rushed to express their concerns about the buyout. They pointed to the significant timing – on the day of Parliamentary elections, and on the eve of the Russian presidential campaign. “We have been sold. We have been handed over. With all the garbage. And even you. Here we had at least some kind of freedom. All this is just too obvious. What, you were being too strong an eyesore on LiveJournal, yeah?” – writes one of the popular authors.

“Those Russians who value freedom of expression and thought have nothing more to wait for here,” echoes a second writer. “Here they’ve already instituted a snitching service on the mind-criminals, and soon Putin’s Red Guard and commissars will be sitting under every button, ensuring guidelines, and checking the content for conformity. They haven’t splurged on LiveJournal to allow Russian citizens the freedom to discuss whichever topics they want in whatever manner they choose.”

“I am far removed from politics,” writes a third. “My feelings about this news are roughly like this. There were some people sitting in a cozy café, say, in Nice, socializing about their own something, showing photographs. And here all of a sudden it turns out, that their talks and photographs are very interesting to extremely unsympathetic people. And to take control of this café and all of these discussions and photographs is so important to these people, that they pay millions of dollars. As a businessman I understand this, but as a user of LJ, this attention makes me tense.”

“First of all, LiveJournal can now be registered as a Russian mass-media, with all the resulting consequences. Even if this isn’t done, one way or another, the owner of the Russian company will from now on be obliged, at the request of the law-enforcement agencies, to open friends-only entries or freeze journals. I am certain, that this tactic will already be in full swing during the coming elections in a few months. Most LiveJournal users probably have nothing to fear from the Russian procuracy, but the principle of transparency isn’t thrilling,” a fourth blogger sums up.

During the recent arrests of Other Russia activists in the run-up to the November Dissenters’ Marches, and State Duma elections, it came to light that law-enforcement officers already actively read LiveJournal. Thus, among the questions posed to the detained activists were: “Is it true that *** is the nickname of your LiveJournal?” “Which other users do you actively communicate and coordinate actions with? Who’s hiding behind the ***, *** and *** nicknames? Do you know the real names of these people?” Internet users are also familiar with the first cases of criminal prosecution for posts and even for comments left on LiveJournal. The most odious of them is the so-called “Savva Terentyev affair,” galvanized in conjunction with a blogger from the Komi Republic. The blogger posted, and even rescinded a joking comment, that “the unjust cops should be incinerated on Stefanov Square.”

In short, the situation with LiveJournal from now on is reminiscent of the situation with the REN-TV television channel, and with the “Ekho Moskvy” (Echo of Moscow) radio station. For now there are no indications that the owner, in this case “SUP,” is plotting anything against Russia’s bloggers. Just like Gazprom [which owns Ekho Moskvy] isn’t yet pressuring its nonconformist radio station. But the theoretical capability of that Sword of Damocles, hanging over the last island of freedom, worries me in and of itself. Since, as is well known, in politics it’s the capabilities that are important and not the intentions. Like in that classic joke: “You weren’t distilling moonshine, but you’ve got the device.”

Sergei Petrunin

[The complete anecdote goes like this:
During a search of a collective farm worker, a moonshiner’s still is found.
“So,” says the officer. “Wonderful! We’re gonna bring you in for distilling.”
“But I wasn’t distilling!”
“But you have the device!?”
“Then you’d better try me for rape too!”
“What, you raped someone!?”
“No! But I’ve got that device too!”]

Translated by theotherrussia.org