The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [72]
The Kremlin has been particularly successful in cultivating strong connections with Russia’s vibrant Internet culture, leveraging it to the government’s own ideological advantage. Take Yevgeny Kaspersky, the founder of the popular antivirus software Kaspersky Lab and one of the brightest minds on matters of Internet security, who was persuaded to join Russia’s Public Chamber, a quasi-state institution composed of pro-Kremlin celebrities, businessmen, and intellectuals that puts the stamp of civil-society approval on whatever initiative the Kremlin demands of them. On joining the Chamber, Kaspersky began advocating that online anonymity may need to go to keep the Internet working.
But no one embodies the immense sophistication of the Russian Internet propaganda machine better than Konstantin Rykov. Born in 1979, Rykov is an undisputed godfather of the Russian Internet and has had a major part to play in some of its most bizarre countercultural projects since the mid-1990s. In 1998 he was one of the founders of an e-zine with the suggestive URL of fuck.ru, mixing reports about Moscow’s nightlife with jokes, light entertainment, and articles about art. He has even fashioned himself as Russia’s first pornographer in numerous media interviews.
Few of Rykov’s earlier collaborators would have predicted that just a decade later he would become a respected deputy of the Russian Duma—actually, one of its youngest members—also moonlighting as the Kremlin’s unofficial ambassador to “all things Internet.” Gone was the radicalism of the 1990s; Rykov the deputy established himself as a strong defender of family values, arguing for a crackdown on violence and pornography in the media, and proposing to ban all children younger than nine from surfing the Internet on their own.
What made Rykov so appealing to the Kremlin was that in the intervening years he had built a successful propaganda empire, spanning both traditional and new media. On the traditional side, Rykov founded “Poplit,” a publishing house that specializes in popular fiction and aggressively uses social media to push its works to the broader public. Rykov’s Internet presence, clustered mostly around his company New Media Stars, consists of sites like zaputina.ru (“‘For Putin!’”), a short-lived Internet campaign that urged Putin to seek a third term as president; dni.ru, a popular Internet tabloid; dozory.ru, a science-fiction Internet game; and vz.ru, something of a Russian Slate with a strong conservative bent.
Rykov, one of the founders of Russia.ru, the hedonistic Internet TV station that produces “The Tits Show,” is thus responsible for churning out heaps of highly propagandist video content. One of the highlights of Rykov’s propaganda career came when his company produced a documentary called War 08.08.08: The War of Treason, which dealt with the highly sensitive subject of 2008’s war between Russia and Georgia. Cut from hours of video footage that Georgian soldiers themselves had supposedly shot on their mobile phones—later confiscated by Russians—the film analyzed the war from a highly ideological position, portraying Georgians in the worst possible light imaginable.
The film quickly became a viral sensation, with 2.5 million people watching it online. The success of the online campaign owes much to the zeal with which producers of the film embraced all forms of digital distribution, putting it on all important peer-to-peer networks and encouraging piracy. Putting the film on Russia.ru helped to make it visible. The film made a smooth transition to TV screen, too: On the first anniversary of the war, the film was shown on one of Russia’s national patriotic channels. And to ensure absolute media dominance, it was followed up by a book, which was well received by Russian bloggers and journalists. This is a level of media convergence that most Western content producers can only dream of.
As one of the most knowledgeable people about the Internet in today’s Russia, Rykov understands the Streisand Effect and is thus