Putin

By its very nature, the Internet is everything Putin dislikes. It is infinitely horizontal while he prefers the Vertical of Power. The Internet decentralizes, Putin recentralizes. The Internet eludes control and so Putin prefers television, which is easy to manipulate. Television demands that you be in a certain place at a certain time—for the large number of the VCR-less in Russia—while with the Internet you can get your news whenever and wherever you please. Television is real, large, physical, the Internet insubstantial, somehow gay.

Putin never lost his respect for television. It had been a television miniseries, The Sword and the Shield, that had inspired him to become a KGB agent. It had been television that had won Boris Yeltsin reelection in 1996 when a Communist resurgence was very much in the offing. And it was television that won Putin his first election and every subsequent one. It is probably not coincidental that 80 percent of the Russian population get their news from television, and 80 percent is exactly the level that Putin’s popularity seems to hover at.

Putin had also felt the sting of television’s power every time the satirical puppet show Kukly came on showing him with a rubbery nose, too red lips, watery blue eyes. In 2002 it disappeared from the air.

Even the main crisis of his presidency—the economic suffering caused by low oil prices and Western sanctions—was described as a battle between the TV and the fridge, what Russian saw on the one and in the other.

In Soviet times, most of the televisions were made in the Gulag by prisoners known as Zeks. Those sets often caught fire or even exploded. Whether this was due to the Zeks’ indifference or to their malice will never be known. But Putin arose in post-Soviet times. The televisions were better and so were the production values. It was perfect for what Lilia Shevtsova of the Carnegie Moscow Center called “imitation democracies … television with fancy graphics but Kremlin-dictated scripts, elections with multiple candidates yet preordained outcomes.” As Stalin’s foreign minister Molotov had put it quite succinctly: “The trouble with free elections is that you never know how they’re going to turn out.”

Initially, it did not seem important to control the Internet—it was something only the urban intelligentsia cared about, like foreign films and foreign food. And the people involved in it as inventors and founders of companies were as alien as the Internet itself.

Pavel Durov was a perfect example. Born in 1984 of all years, Durov is habitually called the Mark Zuckerberg of Russia for having created in 2006 the social media site V Kontakte (In Contact or In Touch, both translations are good). In time VK would outdo Facebook in Russia with 46 million monthly users as compared to Facebook’s 11.7 million. The year 2006 was a good time for the Internet in Russia—there was creative ferment among the young generation and benign indifference from the old. Durov said: “The best thing about Russia at that time was that the Internet sphere was completely not regulated. In some ways it was more liberal than the United States.”

From the start Durov embodied the anarchic spirit of the Internet, a Merry Prankster of high-tech. Handsome, raised in Italy, always dressed all in black, he “envisioned his country as a tax-free and libertarian utopia for technologists.” Durov identified himself as a libertarian, vegetarian, and pastafarian, a mock religion whose name is a blend of Rasta and pasta; it worships a supreme being called the Flying Spaghetti Monster and can involve the wearing of a colander on one’s head. As Durov said, “I like to make fun of serious things.”

One of Durov’s more colorful pranks was to fold 5,000-ruble notes, worth about $150 at the time, into paper airplanes and sail them out his office window in the Singer Building in St. Petersburg. Needless to say, fistfights broke out on the sidewalks below. (This is reminiscent of a scene in the 1959 novel The Magic Christian, by Terry Southern, a screenwriter for Dr. Strangelove, in which a malicious billionaire, Guy Grand, opens to the public a bubbling vat filled with animal excrement and cash.)

Some of Durov’s other antics did not sit so well with the international business community. A year after founding VK, Durov began allowing users “to upload audio and video files without regard to copyright. Such policies drew criticism from the United States Trade Representative and lawsuits from major record labels.” Later, Durov would admit to having been “very careless.”