The Internet and Anti-military Activism in Russia

Abstract

This study investigates the forms and networks of civic activism on the Russian-language segment of the internet through the data of anti-military web pages and weblogs in 2007. The results of the web page analysis are complemented by interviews with Russian activists and discussed in the context of the role of the internet in Russian democratisation. Although the state of anti-military activism on the Russian internet currently seems fragmented, the role of the internet and one particular weblog platform, LiveJournal, are considered to contain important potential for future forms of Russian activism.

Notes

E.g., the Russian Soldiers’ Mothers’ Committee in Moscow (Komitet soldatskikh materei Rossii), The Union of Russian Soldiers’ Mothers’ Committees (Soyuz komitetov soldatskikh materei Rossii), Social Organisation in Defence of Human Rights ‘Soldiers’ Mothers of Saint Petersburg’ (Obshchestvennaya pravozashchitnaya organisatsiya ‘Soldatskie materi Sankt-Peterburga’), and the Interregional Movement ‘Soldiers’ Mothers’ (Mezhregional'noe Dvizhenie ‘Soldatskie Materi’). As the name implies, various soldiers’ mothers’ groups in Russia focus on the problems of servicemen, but the goals and strategies of the groups may differ.

For studies of the Russian internet, see Semetko and Krasnoboka (2003), March (2004, 2006), Rohozinski (1999), Alexander (2004), Fossato et al. (forthcoming), Schmidt (2003, 2006) and Schmidt et al. (2006).

The study was inspired by Kevin Gillan's research on UK anti-war websites (Gillan 2006). I thank Sylvi Nikitenkov for her assistance during all phases of the research, Philip Torchinsky for his invaluable advice and help, and several other colleagues and activists for their comments. I am also obliged to the students and researchers of the ‘Spaces for Democracy’ seminar led by Academy Professor Risto Alapuro at the University of Helsinki and of the ‘Sociologie Politique de la Russie contemporaine’ seminar coordinated by Alain Blum, Gilles Favarel-Garrigues and Myriam Désert at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. Finally, I am grateful to the two external reviewers of Europe-Asia Studies for their criticism and suggestions. The study is financed by the Academy of Finland.

‘A blog (short for web log) is a website where entries are written in chronological order and displayed in reverse chronological order. Blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject such as food, politics, or local news; some function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs. Most blogs are primarily textual, although some focus on photographs (photoblog), sketchblog, videos (vlog), music (MP3 blog), or audio (podcasting), and are part of a wider network of social media’ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog, accessed 17 March 2008).

See also Alapuro and Lonkila (2000).

See Webber (2006, pp. 8–11) for a more detailed discussion on militarism and militarisation.

See Webber and Mathers (2006) for a recent in-depth account of military–society relations in Russia.

www.worldvaluesurvey.org, accessed 14 May 2008. The corresponding figure was 84% both in the UK and Finland. According to the same survey, there is practically no peace movement in Russia: 0.1% of Russians compared with 0.6% of British and 1.3% of Finns claim to belong to peace movements.

See also Webber and Zilberman (2006, p. 165) and surveys concerning attitudes towards the army by the Levada Center, available at: http://www.levada.ru/army.html, accessed 17 March 2008.

Oleg Kozlovsky, a leader of the Russian opposition youth movement Oborona (‘defence’, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oborona, accessed 14 May 2008), was conscripted against his will at the end of 2007 and released after two months due to a public campaign (Stolyarov & Petrenko 2008).

Federal'nyi zakon Rossiiskoi Federatsii 28 March 1998, N 53-FZ, 21 July 2005, N 100-FZ.

See Webber and Zilberman (2006, pp. 180–82) on the success of these attempts prior to 2004. Although the federal law on education (N 100-FZ, 21 July 2005, available at: http://www.obj.mosuzedu.ru/33.htm, accessed 16 May 2008) made military education obligatory at Russian schools, its implementation seems to have failed until recently.

The siloviki are, however, not a monolithic unit but consist of people from various institutions such as the army, the interior ministry forces (MVD) and the security forces (FSB).

In Russia, the mother (but not the conscript himself) is considered to have a natural right to protect her son against all enemies, even the Russian army (Caiazza 2002; Zdravomyslova 2004; Zawilski 2006; Elkner 2006). According to Sundstrom (2006), political activism on soldiers’ rights issues is also based on the elementary normative principle of not causing bodily harm to human beings.

http://www.levada.ru/army.html, accessed 17 March 2008.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Russia, accessed 17 March 2008.

Federal'nyi zakon Rossiiskoi Federatsii 28 March 1998, N 53-F3, ‘O voinskoi obyazannosti i voennoi sluzhbe’.

Newsru.com, 2 October 2006, available at: http://www.newsru.com/russia/02oct2006/priziv_ print.html, accessed 17 March 2008.

On 4 April 2007, the Moscow city Duma decided to ban any public gathering in the city where there were more than ‘two persons per square metre’. Meetings held inside must have seating for a precise number, approved by city officials (International Herald Tribune Europe, 4 April 2007, available at: http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/04/04/europe/EU-GEN-Russia-Moscow-Protests.php, accessed 17 March 2008).

Although the main TV channels do not as a rule criticise the government, it would be erroneous to claim that the entire Russian media is censored by the state. Newspapers and online news sites, for example, openly express critical views of the government. As an example related to anti-militarism, Sundstrom (2005, p. 443) investigated a database containing the main Russian newspaper contents and television and radio news summaries during 2002 and 2003. She found that 180 newspapers, 21 television news and 26 radio news items mentioned ‘soldiers’ mothers’. However, she does not mention the content or tone of these items. See also Renz (2006a) for a discussion of anti-militarist topics in the Russian press.

http://www.advesti.ru/news/tvradio/1442006tvlider, accessed 17 March 2008. Furthermore, ‘in the two months of the monitoring, the state-funded First Channel provided 93% of its political news coverage to the ruling powers, 99% of which was assessed as either positive or neutral in tone. In the same period, the opponents of the current establishment [KPRF (Kommunisticheskaya Partiya Rossiiskoi Federatsii), the Union of Right Forces (Soyuz Pravykh Sil), Yabloko, the Republican Party (Respublikanskaya partiya Rossii) and others] received a combined total of some 1% of mostly negative or neutral coverage’ (Russian political scene in the media, 2nd report, released on 6 July 2006, available at: http://www.memo98.sk/en/data/_media/russia_2nd_report_final.pdf, accessed 17 March 2008). See also Fossato (2006).

Central to its development were the nuclear research institute in Moscow and the Demos company, established in 1989 (Cooper 2006). Demos was the first commercial Russian company which managed to organise the exchange of information between the Russian and Western computer communication networks.

For a more detailed depiction of LiveJournal, see the section below: ‘The socio-political importance of the Russian LiveJournal’.

The Public Opinion Foundation, available at: http://bd.fom.ru/report/map/projects/internet/internet0701/int0701, accessed 17 March 2008.

www.govcom.org and www.issuecrawler.net, accessed 17 March 2008.

For more information, see the end of the next section below.

See footnote 1.

The remaining organisations were the Novokuznetskii Committee for Defence of the Rights of Servicemen (Novokuznetskii komitet zashchity prav voennoslyzhashchikh) and the Federation for Peace and Conciliation (Federatsiya mira i soglasiya). The Federation was one of the very few ‘pro-peace’ types of organisation detected during our web search. Its historical roots date back to the Soviet Committee for the Defence for Peace established in 1949.

The President of the Russia–Chechnya Friendship Society was imprisoned, and the society was disbanded in 2006: ‘In February 2006, the group's executive director and editor of its newspaper, Stanislav Dmitrievsky, was convicted of “inciting racial hatred” for publishing articles about Chechnya. Arguing that the Russian–Chechen Friendship Society had failed to distance itself from Dmitrievsky, prosecutors moved to liquidate the organisation. They also accused it of several administrative violations, such as changing its address without informing the authorities and failing to remove the word “Russian” from the group's name’ (Human Rights News, 13 October 2006, available at: http://hrw.org/english/docs/2006/10/13/russia14391.htm, accessed 17 March 2008).

On the role of social networks in post-Soviet Russia, see Alapuro and Lonkila (2000), Lonkila (1998, 1999) and Lonkila and Salmi (2005).

In addition to the registered political parties, anti-militarist actions are supported and carried out by Russian anarchist groups.

The website of the anti-military Radical Association (Antimilitaristskaya Radikal'naya Assotsiatsiya) run by the Radical Party (www.ara.ru) was referred to on several pages but did not open.

Lacking evidence, cyber-attack is here listed only as a hypothetical cause.

This emulates the work of the specialised software IssueCrawler (www.govcom.org, www.issue crawler.net, both accessed 14 May 2008), which was used in the early stage of the study. However, it soon became evident that the wide variety of hyperlink types between the web pages required a more qualitative approach.

A few other selection criteria need be mentioned. First, the analysis units were individual web pages. Second, since only hyperlinks were included in the analysis, if an organisation mentioned another organisation as a ‘partner’ without a hyperlink, it was not included. Third, of the links shown on the starting-list page, only those which actually opened were incorporated. Fourth, only external links, that is, those referring to locations outside the organisation's own website, were counted. Finally, if a great number of link types were present, those referring to civil society actors were selected.

Two starting-list pages, both of them belonging to the soldiers’ mothers’ organisations, did not have any outgoing links at all.

The fifth page of the starting list missing from Table 1 is that of the march for a voluntary army in Moscow on 19 April 2007.

This was confirmed by private communication with a person who had been responsible for the web pages of one of the soldiers’ mothers’ organisations (Paris, summer 2007).

The graph was produced by UCINET 6 (http://www.analytictech.com/downloaduc6.htm, accessed 14 May 2008).

These included three soldiers’ mothers’ organisations, the Institute of Human Rights in Moscow, the Moscow–Helsinki group, the Committee for Democratic Alternative Civil Service, the Mothers’ Right Foundation and the Center for the Development of Democracy in Moscow. All the calls were made between 8 and 22 January 2007 by Sylvi Nikitenkov, who took notes during the phone discussions.

However, see Sundstrom (2006).

Cited in Caiazza (2002, p. 131). According to Nikolai Khramov, who was the director of ARA (The Anti-militarist Radical Association, Antimilitaristskaya Radikal'naya Assotsiatsiya), the various mothers’ groups began working more closely together toward the late 1990s, ‘although CSM [Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers] was substantially more powerful than the others’. Our interviews suggest that the only ties of co-operation between the organisations we interviewed were with the Mothers’ Right Foundation, while the ties between the various soldiers’ mothers’ organisations we interviewed were strained.

My intention is neither to devalue the extremely important and difficult work carried out by the soldiers’ mothers’ organisations, nor to evaluate their claims. It suffices here to note the tensions observed.

I am obliged to the researchers of the ‘Sociologie Politique de la Russie contemporaine’ seminar co-ordinated by Alain Blum, Gilles Favarel-Garrigues and Myriam Désert at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, for emphasising the role of LiveJournal in Russia.

Both because of space limitation as well as technical issues, CATNET analysis is not applied to LiveJournal communities here but remains a task for future research.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveJournal, accessed 14 May 2008.

On 17 March 2008, there were 49,986 messages written on the Russian LiveJournal and 38,801 messages on LiveInternet (http://blogs.yandex.ru/, accessed 18 March 2008).

According to Boyd and Ellison (2007, p. 212), LiveJournal was the second of the major social network sites worldwide. It was launched in 1999, two years after SixDegrees.com, which closed in 2000.

Although new and popular social network sites such as ‘moikrug' (http://moikrug.ru), ‘vkontakte’ (http://vkontakte.ru/) and ‘odnoklassniki’ (http://www.odnoklassniki.ru/) have recently emerged in Russia, they have not gained a similar role in terms of socio-political debate.

Bloggery i tkachikha, Ogonek 43, 2007.

Because of the nature and size of LiveJournal, there is no guarantee that we would have been able to find all such communities.

Only the posts, not the comments on the posts were counted.

http://community.livejournal.com/stop_prizyv/2007/11/23/, accessed 15 May 2008.

For both technical reasons and lack of space, these connections cannot be dealt with in this article but would form an important topic for further study.

See Stolyarova (2007) for a discussion of online spies on LiveJournal.

P. Torchinsky, ‘Practice of the Internet Access Restriction in Russia’, Lecture held at the University of Helsinki, December 2006.

This research should, among other things, also pay attention to the effect of the sale of LiveJournal to SUP, a Russian-based company in December 2007. The sale aroused concerns among LiveJournal users since, according to the press, the company is controlled by Alexander Mamut, a Kremlin-friendly Russian businessman (Adelaja 2007; Womack & Stewart 2008).