The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [139]
Perhaps, nationalism and the Internet are something of natural allies. Anyone eager to satisfy their nostalgia for the mighty Soviet, Eastern German, or Yugoslavian past can do so easily on YouTube and eBay, basking in a plethora of historical memorabilia. But it’s not just memorabilia; historical facts, too, can now be easily compiled and twisted to suit one’s own interpretation of history. Fringe literature dealing with revisionist or outright racist interpretations of history used to be hard to find. Major publishers would never touch such contentious material, and the independent publishers that took the risk usually published only a handful of copies. That world of scarcity is no more: Even the most obscure nationalistic texts, which previously could only be found in select public libraries, have been digitized by their zealous fans and widely disseminated online. Thus, extreme Russian nationalists who believe that the Great Ukrainian Hunger of 1933 was a myth or, at any rate, does not deserve to be called a genocide, can now link to a number of always-available scanned texts, residing somewhere in the cloud, that look extremely persuasive, even if historically incorrect.
And it’s not just myth-making based on frivolous interpretations of history that thrives online. The Internet also abets many national groups in formulating legitimate claims against the titular nation. Take the case of the Circassians, a once great nation scattered all over the Northern Caucasus. History was not kind to them: The Circassian nattion was broken into numerous ethnic pieces that were eventually crammed into Russia’s vast possessions in the Caucasus. Today, the Circassians make up titular nations of three Russian federal subjects (Adygeya, Karachay-Cherkessia, and Kabardino-Balkaria) and, according to the 2002 Russian population census, number 720,000 people. During the Soviet era, the Kremlin’s strategy was to suppress Circassian nationalism at all costs; thus most Circassians were separated into subgroups, depending on their dialect and place of residence, becoming Adygeys, Adygs, Cherkess, Kabards, and Shapsugs. For much of the twentieth century, Circassian nationalism lay dormant, in part because the Soviets banned any competing interpretations of what happened in the Russian-Circassian war in the nineteenth century. Today, however, most of the scholarly and journalistic materials related to the war have been scanned and uploaded to several Circassian websites, so that anyone can access them. Not surprisingly, Circassian nationalism has been quite assertive of late. In 2010 a dedicated website was set up to call on residents of the five nations to list themselves simply as “Circassians” in Russia’s 2010 census, and an aggressive online campaign followed. “The internet seems to offer a lifeline to Circassian activists in terms of rejuvenating their mass appeal,” notes Zeynel Abidin Besleney, an expert on Circassian nationalism at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London.
Russia, with its eighty-nine federal subjects, has certainly more than one Circassian problem on its plate. Tatars, the largest national minority in Russia, for a long time had to suffer under the policy of Russification imposed by Moscow. Now their youngsters are turning to popular social networking sites to set up online groups that focus on the issue of national Tatar revival. Not only do they use such groups to watch new videos and share links to news and music, but they are also exposed to information, often missing from Russia’s own media, about Tatar history and culture and the