Russian cyberspace as an alternative social sphere

The Russian Cyberspace Journal has an excellent first issue (Issue 1. Virtual Power: Russian Politics and the Internet) dedicated to how the internet changes, or not, power structures, which concludes that in Russia, the internet fails as an activist tool, but it has created an alternative social sphere.

This matches with our approach at the P2P Foundation, which adds a twist: what we are saying is not that the internet is a magical tool for activism (although it enables many new forms of self-organization), but rather that it is instrumental in creating new forms of production, governance, and property, which change the very structure of our political economies and societies.

In one of the articles, Floriana Fossato insists that the internet is a tool of the state, “an adaptation tool”, but at the same time, describes the alternative social universe that it enables in an article for Open Democracy:

“What is peculiar about Russia is not the absence of institutions as such, but rather a fatal discrepancy between those institutions and the functions they were created to fulfil…The most important result of this social deformation has been the spontaneous evolution of informal, parallel infrastructures of social life in Russia, which usually remain in the shadow of public attention and are therefore difficult to access for outsiders. (Prokhorova,2005).

This situation, Prokhorova argues, has clearly created a “cultural duality,” one of the consequences of which has been the strengthening of Russian literature as a social institution.This, in turn, supported the emergence and consolidation between the 1950s and the 1980s of a strong and varied Russian underground movement.

Prokhorova emphasises that the underground movement should not be seen as a unified group opposing Soviet totalitarianism (a fairly common point of view until recently in the US and Europe) but rather as “an alternative social universe with its own creative associations and circles, its own authorities and aesthetic criteria, its own press, an efficient distribution system for its political and artistic production, its own literary prizes, a social life with its own peculiar rituals, its own foreign contacts”. (Prokhorova,2005).

It could be said this description corresponds quite neatly to the model of the Russian Internet. This feeling is reinforced by Prokhorova’s assertion that the style of behaviour characteristic of the underground movement centred on a narrow circle of friends. It continued, and in many new professional ways developed, in the 1990s and remains valid to this day. Prokhorova talks about the “internet boom, which spawned a plethora of virtual projects.”

She singles out the economic crisis of 1998, which triggered a shift of political priorities, setting off mechanisms that she defines as “partial re-Sovietisation.” She specifically identifies the restoration process set in motion after the crisis, targeting the weak socio-cultural institutions of the late and post-Soviet periods, “in an attempt to concentrate all means of influencing public opinion in the hands of the state.”

Prokhorova perceives the role of the internet as a response to just such developments. The new medium follows on from the pioneering age of self-made and naïve websites. In Russia and elsewhere this age has given way to web-based platforms with endless networking possibilities. The natural modus vivendi of these networks in Russia is aimed, in Prokhorova’s view, at preserving and restructuring the system of cultural initiatives that supported the existence of an alternative social universe in Soviet times. It was legitimised, albeit on a very shaky base, in the first post-Soviet decade.

It is in this alternative social universe, she maintains, that heated political debates and fully-fledged literary disputes take place. As researchers of the Russian Internet will have noticed, debates and disputes are indeed intense and at times fierce, but they are far from mobilising enduring forms of activism, particularly activism with tangible social and political repercussions offline.

Should these repercussions be relevant for Russian internet users involved in a vibrant and varied alternative social reality? I have discussed this with a large number of Russian Internet users and experts. In their view researchers seeking signs of political activism are repeating the pattern of their colleagues who, in Soviet times, regarded the underground movement as a single whole united in its opposition to Soviet totalitarianism. A handful of activists were undeniably committed to that cause and bravely ready to risk their own life and freedom. It should not, however, be forgotten that the vast majority of the Soviet underground movement was motivated by the very natural urge to express publicly various points of view on personal, artistic and cultural issues and ultimately to have fun amid the grim realities of Soviet life.”

(via Graeme Taylor)

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