of the site’s staff are defectors from the world of professional television). Some of those shows discuss politics—there are even a few odd interviews with Russia’s president, Dmitry Medvedev—but most are quite frivolous in nature. A sample episode of the “books show”: an exploration of the best books about alcohol available in Moscow’s bookstores.
If one reads the Western press, it’s easy to get the impression that the Internet in Russia is an effective and extremely popular vehicle for attacking—if not overthrowing—the government. Nevertheless, while civic activism—raising money for sick children and campaigning to curb police corruption—is highly visible on the Russian Internet, it’s still entertainment and social media that dominate (in this respect, Russia hardly differs from the United States or countries in Western Europe). The most popular Internet searches on Russian search engines are not for “what is democracy?” or “how to protect human rights” but for “what is love?” and “how to lose weight.”
Russia.ru does not hide its connections to the Kremlin; senior members of the Kremlin’s various youth movement even have their own talk shows. The need for such a site stems from the Kremlin’s concern that the transition from the world of television, which it fully controls, to the anarchic world of the Internet might undermine the government’s ability to set the agenda and shape how the public reacts to news. To that effect, the Kremlin supports, directly or indirectly, a host of sites about politics, which are usually quick to denounce the opposition and welcome every government initiative, but increasingly branches out into apolitical entertainment. From the government’s perspective, it’s far better to keep young Russians away from politics altogether, having them consume funny videos on Russia’s own version of YouTube, Ru-Tube (owned by Gazprom, the country’s state-owned energy behemoth), or on Russia.ru, where they might be exposed to a rare ideological message as well. Many Russians are happy to comply, not least because of the high quality of such online distractions. The Russian authorities may be onto something here: The most effective system of Internet control is not the one that has the most sophisticated and draconian system of censorship, but the one that has no need for censorship whatsoever.
The Kremlin’s growing online entertainment empire may explain why there is little formal censorship in Russia—the Kremlin doesn’t ban access to any of its opponents’ websites, with the minor exception of those created by terrorists and child molesters—and yet surprisingly little political activity. Russia.ru, with its highly skilled team and flexible budget, is just one of the many attempts to control the space; it does so by relying on entertainment rather than politics. Could it be that the vast online reservoirs of cheap entertainment are dampening the enthusiasm that the Russian youth might have for politics, thus preventing their radicalization? What if the liberating potential of the Internet also contains the seeds of depoliticization and thus dedemocratization? Could it be that just as the earlier generation of Western do-gooders mistakenly believed that Soviet office workers were secretly typing samizdat literature on their computers (rather than playing Tetris), so Westerners today harbor futile hopes that Russians are blogging about human rights and Stalin’s abuses, while they are only flipping through ChatRoulette, Russia’s quirky gift to the Internet?
How Cable Undermines Democracy
Here again the focus on the role of broadcasting in the Cold War keeps the West ignorant of the complex role that information plays in authoritarian societies. Two theories explain how exposure to Western media could have democratized the Soviets. One claims that Western media showed brainwashed citizens that their governments were not as innocent as they claimed to be and pushed people to think about political issues they may have previously avoided; it’s what we can call “liberation by facts” theory. The second asserts that Western media spread images of prosperity and fueled consumerist angst; stories of fast cars, fancy kitchen appliances, and suburban happiness made citizens living under authoritarianism dream of change and become more active politically. This is what we can call “liberation by gadgets” theory.
While projecting the images of prosperity was easy, getting people to care about politics was more difficult—at least people who were not previously politicized. To that extent, Western broadcasting efforts included both entertainment and lifestyle programs (one of Radio Free Europe’s hits was Radio Doctor, a program that informed listeners about recent developments in Western medicine and answered specific questions from laypeople, exposing the inefficiencies of the Soviet system in the process). Banned music was frequently broadcast as well