The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [74]
They are putting money into training as well. In 2009 a Kremlin-affiliated think tank launched The Kremlin’s School of Bloggers, a series of public talks and workshops given by the leading ideologues and propagandists of the current regime. The origins of this project illustrate how seemingly benign actions by the West could trigger destructive counter-actions by the very governments the West seeks to undermine. The founding of this project was a direct response to another “school,” pompously called The School of Bloggers, that was organized by the Glasnost Foundation, an organization funded in part by America’s own National Endowment for Democracy (of which the hawkish Ambassador Palmer—the one seeking to overthrow dictators with the help of the Internet—is a cofounder).
Once conservative Russian bloggers, led by none other than Maksim Kononenko, discovered that a foundation so closely associated with the U.S. government was somehow involved in funding schools of bloggers (there was more than one) across Russia, the blogosphere was brimming with all sorts of conspiracy theories and suggestions on how to counter the “virtual threat” to the Russian sovereignty, which eventually coalesced into The Kremlin’s School of Bloggers. (It certainly didn’t help that the person the Glasnost Foundation chose to lead this project was a prominent Russian journalist once accused of spying for the Japanese.) Of course, much of the controversy could have been easily avoided if the project carried a less catchy name. Few pro-Kremlin supporters would have ever even noticed a seminar called “Basic Electronic Technologies for Professionals in the Non-Profit Sector: An Introduction.” But given the growing politicization of blogging, any training course or conference that has the word “blog” in its title is increasingly perceived as a guerrilla camp for launching the next color revolution. If anything, the publicity associated with the initial School of Bloggers made the Kremlin painfully aware that it needs to be present in the new media space or risk losing it to the West.
The mastermind behind The Kremlin’s School of Bloggers is Alexey Chadayev, age thirty-two, now the top ideological functionary in the ruling United Russia Party and one of the most sophisticated intellectual apologists of Putin’s regime. In 2006 Chadayev even published a serious work on the subject with the revealing title of “Putin and His Ideology,” which United Russia later proposed to consider “the official interpretation of the government’s ideology.” Chadayev, who wrote his master’s thesis on how subcultures form on the Web, entered politics by means of technology: He designed a website for a prominent liberal Russian politician. A few years later, he even ran an anti-Putin online campaign, before switching sides and going to work for the Kremlin.
Chadayev is the opposite of the populist and anti-intellectual Sergeyeva and is not afraid to flaunt his erudition. He is particularly fond of discussing the relevance of thinkers like Slavoj Zizek, Jacques Lacan, and Gilles Deleuze to the Kremlin’s propaganda strategy on both his blog and, more recently, his Twitter account. In July 2010 a series of his angry tweets even forced the head of the Kremlin’s human rights commission,