More Proof of the Internet’s Power

Sergei Guriev

Sergei Guriev is a professor of economics and the president of the New Economic School in Moscow.

Updated March 18, 2013, 5:26 PM

What a difference one week can make! On Dec. 3, everybody was expecting that Russia’s ruling United Russia party would comfortably win the parliamentary election.

The government placed too much trust in its own censored TV news reports of the regime’s popularity -- and did not sense a threat.

Both the election results and the followup protest rallies came as a surprise for both government and opposition leaders. Even the top opposition blogger Alexei Navalny, who led the successful campaign against United Russia, did not expect the party to do so badly.

Why did this happen? The answer is so obvious it's boring: it's the coordination power of Internet.

As an economist, I would be happy to provide an economic explanation but there is none. Russia's state-dominated and oil-dependent economy will face serious challenges in the long run but currently it is doing reasonably well (which is not surprising given that the price of oil is above $100 a barrel). Moreover, the government kept close control over TV and most newspapers. This is not surprising: oil-rich nondemocratic regimes are happy to control the news media. Even though censors jam the feedback channels and thus undermine the governance quality, oil revenue compensates for inevitable inefficiencies. Such regimes hate media freedom because it allows the opposition to organize. Even if one citizen is unhappy, she is afraid to go to a rally for fear that others might not join her. In this sense, censorship is a crucial tool for divide-and-rule politics -- combined with the government’s threat that they may round up and beat protesters if there are just a few of them.

But this argument is moot in the presence of blogs, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. The opposition disseminated links to YouTube videos of outrageous electoral frauds on blog posts and Twitter. And Facebook immediately provided a platform to count the potential number of protesters. By Dec. 7, more than 20,000 people had registered for the Dec. 10 rally -- there was no way the government could stop them.

What I don't understand is why the Russian government failed to foresee this and did not put in place a firewall to prevent networking. Probably, the government placed too much trust in its own censored TV news reports of the regime’s popularity -- and did not sense a threat.

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Topics: Europe, Russia, Vladimir Putin, World

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