Now I Know Who My Comrades Are

In a much shorter period of time, from 2010 to 2013, I have seen three completely different Russias. The first was a country mired in apathy.

it turned out, getting the Russians on board proved to be far easier than I ever would have imagined. The Skolkovo Foundation immediately expressed its willingness to be a partner, and Google Russia soon followed. Yandex, Russia’s largest search engine, even offered to host the event at its Moscow headquarters.

Navalny used Yandex Money, a PayPal-like product of Russia’s largest search engine, to raise money for RosPil. (Yandex ended up giving personal information about Navalny’s donors to the FSB, Russia’s security services.)

waited there for “Sandra,” who turned out to be a shirtless, potbellied man swinging a beer bottle.
He led us down a deserted block where other members of Voina were sitting on a stairway. Some were painting large signs that each had one Cyrillic letter. One woman had her baby with her. “Sandra” told us he had a plan, but he wouldn’t tell us what it was, only that it involved a supermarket. He asked us to participate, we declined, and we thus parted ways. I later learned that their “plan” involved a blond woman named Natalia going to a public supermarket, spreading her legs, and inserting a raw chicken into herself.

On my first night in Novosibirsk, I arranged to meet Elia Kabanov, who earlier that year had won the Deutsche Welle award for the best Russian blog.

Elia had brought two other bloggers with him, and I was struck by how trendy they were. Elia wore well-fitting dark jeans and stylish white sneakers with stripes. His friend Alex, whom he had met online, was tall, with soft suede shoes and an angelic face. Both Elia and Alex worked in public relations. Eugene, a news anchor, wore black pants and had sunglasses clipped to his button-down shirt. They had already ordered beer by the time I arrived.

One of the most definitive early academic studies of the Russian Internet is tellingly titled “The Web That Failed.” The paper, published in 2008 by Floriana Fossato, John Lloyd, and Alexander Verkhovsky, paints a dismal picture of opposition politics on the Russian Internet. It concludes that “new communications developments are not yet breaking down well-established patterns of power. The state remains the main mobilizing agent in Russia.” The Russian Internet does help spread information, “but largely among closed clusters of like-minded users who are seldom able or willing to cooperate.”

Reinaldo explained it to me this way. Say you have a friend who wants to learn how to play guitar with his toes. One day you are on the Internet and you miraculously find an entire page dedicated to the art of playing guitar with your feet. In America, one would simply copy the Web address and send it by email. In Cuba, you would copy the page onto a flash drive, get on a bus, and deliver the drive to your friend. It takes a little more effort, but the information still gets there.

But I also spent hours in crowded cafés listening to bloggers and journalists loudly complain about Putin while drinking $8 cappuccinos. Nobody lowered their voices, nobody cared who was sitting at the next table. People could speak freely because their speech ultimately didn’t matter.

Aside from selected news items, the billboard posted such provocative messages as “In a free country you don’t need permission to leave the country. Is Cuba a free country?”
The Cuban government fought back by putting more than 100 tall flagpoles in front of the building, each with a black flag with a white star.