The situation had been stood on its head by 2010. Russia was now the largest Internet market in Europe, with the greatest online penetration rate amongst the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China), with the most engaged social networking on earth and a huge and sophisticated blogosphere with more interlinking between different political poles than in the USA.36 This ‘Runet’ was mostly being trafficked through Russian search engines, Russian email giants and Russian-owned blogging platforms. Partially this is because the state allowed the Internet to develop without government interference. Mostly, it was driven by the innovation that made the Internet and computers cheap enough around the world for vast numbers of people to have them at home. These technologies – unlike upgrading whole industries or bureaucracies – could be implanted into Russia by any individual who wanted to.
As Putin’s videocracy was created he chose not to follow China and erect a ‘great firewall’, despite suggestions from the security services. Attempts by the FSB to have a surveillance role in the Internet were not followed up. At the time, mobile phone and Internet penetration rates were minimal – as were the capacities of the Russian state to monitor them. With almost all the population getting their news from national TV stations, which the Kremlin had brought under its control, the existence of an online discussion world did not seem harmful but useful. Authoritarian regimes usually struggle to deal with the paradox of needing to censor information about their country’s problems whilst needing reliable information about those same problems. The Internet was seen as something that could help policymakers to know how bad things really were. The Kremlin also felt that a small world commenting freely on the problems of Putinism could be useful as an echo chamber, for dissenters to let off steam. Keen to promote science and technology as part of ‘catching up with the West’, these ideas came together – around the time that Putin made the fateful decision to leave the Internet open.
The Russian Internet developed around three defining features. The first was that, unlike in other Eastern European countries, the platforms that hosted it were largely indigenous because of the Cyrillic script, allowing it to become a ‘pole’ in the emerging online world, like China, which also uses home-grown platforms. The largest search engine, Yandex, was Russian, as were the largest social-networking sites, VKontakte and Odnoklassniki, and the largest email provider, Mail.ru. Moscow was keen to encourage national champions and let them get on with their business. In an area unconnected to the Putin state, many online companies became islands of decent corporate governance. According to Anton Nossik, one of the fathers and leading blogger-managers of the Runet, this was the very secret of its success:
The Internet in Russia evolved into a kind of alternate reality to the rest of the economy. As it began to boom there were no FSB raids, no hostile takeovers, no state monopolies and no ministries that needed bribes. The Internet grew in Russia in a kind of utopia – where there was no state. This was the only part of the economy where to be a player and to be a winner you needed no political connections, no United Russia membership card and no visits to the Kremlin. Its triumph was possible as this was the only bit of Russia without bureaucrats.
The second defining trait of the Runet was the incredible success of social media. By fortunate coincidence VKontakte lured students online at the same time, between 2006–7 that the site Odnoklassniki pulled online all those with very little reason to be there – those in their fifties and sixties. By promising to reconnect them to their old classmates, and thus the Soviet Union, this site brilliantly brought online the demographic that no one expected to see in social networking. There was one popular foreign exception amongst the dominant platforms – Livejournal. Originally a US blogging portal that was somewhat popular in the early 2000s, the site took off in Russia. It allowed blogs to have ‘friends’ or followers, blending blogging with social networks. Initially, it was also invite only. This appealed to the original community of Russian bloggers, who were mostly exclusive, well-to-do Moscow journalists and writers who knew each other offline. This platform became the heart of the Russian blogosphere.
Over the course of the decade the opposition – be they nationalists, liberals or ecologists – migrated into blogging. As censored TV news declined, losing 40 per cent of its audience between 2000 and 2006, the online world thrived and social networking flourished. By 2010 the country had the most engaged social networking community in the world – whose users were increasingly following and linking to blogs. Russian political blogging, due to its elitist and ‘Moscow community’ feel, was more convivial than the American blogging scene – where partisan bloggers simply linked to each other. In Russia, one Harvard study showed that bloggers from different political ‘poles’ were more inclined to link one to another. The same study also picked up that there was a ‘nationalist’ and a ‘liberal’ cluster online – but in an interesting indication of the next generations’ politics, there was no ‘Putin’ cluster.37
The third feature of the Runet was that it went mainstream in the second half of the 2000s, exploding just at the start of the credit crunch, unlike in Western Europe where it had taken place a decade before. This meant that the web’s cultural imprint was defined by the financial crisis. Yet few were optimistic in the late 2000s about the possibility for the Internet to affect change. The title of the publication The Web that Failed summed up expert opinion on its political potential.38
The Kremlin did not begin to comprehend that they had set themselves an online trap. In 1999 it would have been possible to censor the Internet without major protests – users were only 1 per cent of the population. By 2005 this was already impossible, with users at 15 per cent. By 2010 a majority of Russian households had a personal computer and an estimated 43 per cent were users.39 The Putin videocracy that managed democracy depended on only worked when the crushing majority got their news from state-controlled TV. With more and more of them switching online – it was being hollowed out by millions of bloggers.
The Rise of Migrant Russia
Russia in the 2000s was not just becoming richer – it was becoming less Russian. The boom was sucking in so much cheap labour that Caucasian and Central Asian migrants could now be found literally anywhere, even on a third-class train ride to Siberian Omsk. That was where I met Hamid, the only man on the night-train who wasn’t drinking. He still had a long way to go. Hamid drove a clapped-out Soviet bus in a Russian mining colony beyond the Arctic Circle, where temperatures regularly plunge below –40ˆC. Yet this native of desert Uzbekistan had few regrets about migrating to Russia. ‘In my country there are more men than jobs – in Russia there are more jobs than men,’ he explained.
Hamid was no strange oddity but one of at least sixty Uzbeks in the carriages. He is a staple of today’s Russia, because in the 2000s Russia became a migrant country. This influx was at odds with the conventional Western narrative, where demographic collapse is endlessly cited as driving Russian decline. Whilst true that the native Russian population fell dramatically during the 1990s, there was also a huge, and under-recorded, influx of people like Hamid. Russia is now the second most popular country for migrants in the world after the United States.
Starting in the early 2000s Moscow and other major cities were transformed. Migrants flooded in from the former Soviet republics of Central Asia, the Caucasus and Eastern Europe to do the work that natives turned down. It created a racially distinct underclass out of the old ‘little brother nations’ of the imperium. Today, Tajiks sweep the streets, Azeris wait tables and Uzbeks work on construction sites. They are treated as something between invisible inferiors, children and slaves.