The examples of Sima and Andrei Petrov demonstrate that Russian social media have become a relatively safe digital space for constructing transgressive non-heteronormative masculinities as far as adult audiences are involved. The online practices applied by Russian women also include transgressive patterns of gendered behavior, which is consistent with the emergence of new gendered identities over the post-Soviet decades and which refects the ongoing renegotiations of gender inequality and the relationships within the binary dichotomy "men–women." For example, resisting the neo-conservative socio-political turn which took place in Russian public discourses throughout the 2000s and 2010s (Cucciola 2017), women have been challenging the imposed gender stereotypes about women's primary social roles being those of mother and wife. On the Russian social networking site VKontakte, public online communities like "*S*̂ *ast'e materinstva*" (Ze joy of motherhood; over 75,000 subscribers in March 2020)10 and "*Ŝast'e byt' ženoj*" (Ze joy of being a wife; over 28,000 followers in March 2020)11 aim to disclose the truth about the challenges, diffculties and obstacles women face when performing the "traditional" gender roles, including domestic violence, mental health problems, fnancial struggles and broken relationships. Female inclusivity bloggers on platforms like Instagram, for example, Eleni (@loukoumh; over 65,500 followers in March 2020) or Ekaterina (@ekaterinaxiii; over 23,900 followers in March 2020), share digital images representing body-positive non-stereotypical concepts of female physicality and beauty.12 Feminist bloggers like Tatyana Nikonova (@ nikonova.online; over 243,000 subscribers on Instagram in March 2020), who is active across various social media platforms—Telegram, VKontakte, Facebook and Instagram—tackle various aspects of female sexuality and desire, offering open and honest advice on a range of issues, from choosing a sex toy to resolving the problem of sexual incompatibility between partners.

These insta-gender practices represent non-violent resistance or quiet activism women have been employing in the past decade to carve out their online space.

## 12.3 Digital Services for (wo)men: Creating Gender-Specific Spaces

Challenging gender binaries and traditional gender roles is also achieved by translating socio-economic materiality into digital spaces. With the rapid digitalization of services Russian state has been offering, women move online to perform their femininities and "traditional" roles of motherhood by using digital services to take care of their health, diet, body politics and, even, protect themselves from abuse. Women frst organized around internet or web forums that served as an online discussion/message boards specialized around certain themes. Eventually those evolved into full time web resources and communities for women to exchange experiences and get help and information. Forums such as www.myjulia.ru (launched in 2008) or www.woman.ru (based on internet magazine launched in 2016) cater to different groups of women and cover a wide range of topics on health, beauty, personal relations, intimacy, family and sex. More specialized forums include www.baby.ru (launched in 2009) or www.materinstvo.ru (in existence since 1999) that provide health and educational advice for expecting and experienced mothers, but also provide a discussion space for women. While these online spaces are tagged by scholars as "traditional" (Gnedash 2012), they can also be viewed as a site of quiet activism (Pottinger 2017) where women manage and practice their femininity the way they see appropriate to them.

Women have also quickly learnt the advantages of digital citizenship, that is, using state-provided digital platforms to improve their wellbeing. One of these digital platforms—omnipotent *Gosuslugi* (Public services portal)—offers a range of services to make women's lives better. Thus, everyone can make an appointment with health services, that is often important for women with small children, that they could do it from home and not call or go in person. Another service—enrolling children into kindergarten or school—is supposed to remove obstacles for disadvantaged families and make the procedure more transparent. While these services are positioned as gender-neutral—any one of the parents could use them—in reality it is still women who are tasked with everything related to motherhood and family obligations. Therefore, women not only become active digital citizens, they also are the ones who provide a feedback to the state to make these technologies better (see also Vivienne et al. 2016).

The IT industry has recently moved to create gender-specifc apps to gain additional markets and better appeal to the user. In this move, gender dynamic remained essentially the same and even has been further re-enforced by pushing women to use more health apps (such as mHealth, dieting, yoga, ftness and other apps) and reproductive apps (such as baby.ru app to monitor pregnancy and breastfeeding or time-factor app to monitor monthly periods, both created by men). This distribution of apps promotes the healthy female subject who is embodied in three types of subject positions: (1) Barbie; (2) Earth goddess, and (3) entrepreneur. These themes fx White, middle-class, skinny, young, and fertile female bodies as the standards for health. Women are encouraged to achieve these bodies through practices of self-surveillance, disclosure, and self-advocacy, which are encouraged and normalized through routine use of apps. Thus, apps allow women to actively participate in choosing traditional subject positions, revealing the postfeminist sensibilities of this form of technology-based embodiment (Doshi 2018). At the same time, maternity apps help women self-survey their reproduction and claim autonomy by avoiding medical professionals for frequent check-ups.

 In Russia, app market is especially full of barber and other grooming apps (such as Muzhikipro app) that claim to turn men into "real men." Other apps such as Yourbro app are reinforcing heterosexual male identity by exploiting porn and female body. Sex is central for new digital technologies. Dating apps occupy a signifcant segment of Runet: alongside international Tinder and Grindr apps, Russia developed their own dating services such as Rambler dating app or the newly produced by VKontakte's owners the Lovina app. Scholars suggest that while hetero-apps have a power to reinforce gender stereotypes and heteronormativity, they empower and compromise women at the same time (Solovyeva and Logunova 2018; Chan 2018). Women receive opportunities to challenge traditional feminine behavior as chaste by arranging multiple and anonymous dating as well as sharing their experiences about dating apps (as above-mentioned blogger Tatyana Nikonova does). At the same time, they put themselves in a position of criticism and vulnerability.

Women's safety has become a part of Russian public discourse, thanks to massive online campaigns and activism, which we will look in detail in the following sections. The app market responded by creating safe apps (such as Between Us from Vodafone) for women that allow to share locations, make fake calls, and push the emergency button. The feminist non-governmental organization (NGO) Nasiliu.net (Stop violence), that has a very prominent presence online and provides services to survivors of gender-based violence, created their own app (bit.ly/NasiliuNetIOS for IOS and bit.ly/ NasiliuNetAndroid for Android), which has the complete information regarding shelters, crisis centers, legal aid and other useful information for women, but mostly importantly has an SOS button that allows to alert people who the user trusts about danger at home and on the street. The developers hope that the app radically contributes to women's wellbeing.13

Assessing women's presence online, cyberfeminist theoretical framework offers to look at it as an "alliance" or "connection" between women and technology by exploring the intersection between gender identity, culture and technology (Mohanty and Samantaray 2017). Digital space liberates women and challenges binary gender order by its very process of transgressing material reality into digital one. Women increasingly use online and social networking for activism and mobilization in ways that were not possible before. One of those ways is to make women visible via *feminitivy* (feminitives)—feminine gender counterparts of all lexical terms denoting professional occupations used by Russian feminists to fght against the invisibility of professional women in public discourses (Guzaerova et al. 2018). In linguistics, the category of gender includes grammatical, lexical, referential and social gender (Hellinger and Motschenbacher 2015, 6), and the fact that Russian is a language with a grammatical gender means that all nouns fall into a gender category—masculine, feminine or neuter. Masculine and feminine gender nouns are unmistakably recognized by Russian speakers as referring to the social categories of femininity and masculinity. Although most terms denoting occupations have both masculine and feminine forms, quite a few nouns do not have a feminine counterpart, which aggravates the already existing issue of higher frequency of masculine–male expressions in Russian public communication (Hellinger and Bussmann 2001, 261). In the 2000s, to overcome the "androcentric perspective" of the Russian language (Hellinger and Bussmann 2001, 270), feminist activists started introducing into their online communication new feminine counterparts of masculine nouns formed with the suffx "k" and feminine gender ending "a," for example, "doktor—*doktorka*." These words were used in cases when the Russian lexicon did not have a feminitive to refer to a female professional: for example, "*avtorka*" (authoress), "*redaktorka*" (editoress), "*direktorka*" (directoress). Throughout the 2000s and early 2010s, discussions about effectiveness and urgency of feminitives were mainly conducted within the Russian feminist movement, primarily online but also in offine spaces. As of the late 2010s, these debates have entered mainstream public discourses, both in digital and offine spaces, and have polarized Russian society into supporters of such linguistic visibility for women and opponents, who are worried about the purity of the Russian language affected by feminist linguistic innovations.

## 12.4 Women's and Queer Online Activism

When it comes to challenging and transgressing patriarchal discourses on women's gendered behavior and social roles, digital media offer Russian women invaluable opportunities for activism. In the same way that digital media have impacted politics in general, transforming top-down political hierarchies into participatory networks (Dartnell 2006), social movements and the notion of social activism have also evolved in the Internet era. Protest voices (Couldry 2010) have been amplifed by social media campaigns (Jenkins et al. 2016; Kaun 2017) and citizen journalists generating amateur media-content on social media have come to be considered a reliable and trustworthy source of information (Bewabi and Bossio 2014). Since their appearance in the global media landscape, social networking sites, or social media, have evolved from focusing on "bonding social capital," that is, social bonds within a family or a small local or ethnic community, to "bridging social capital" by providing links across ethnic groups or between various communities and "linking social capital" by offering a new means of communication between political elites and the general public and between different social classes (Flew 2014, 66–67). Social networks have become an integral part and a valuable tool of participatory media cultures across the globe (Flew 2014, 77–78). Like other internet resources, social networking sites can be viewed as dynamic horizontal communication spaces (Youngs 2013, 176), which, due to the shared internet tools' characteristics of multiplicity and interactivity, are often perceived as resources with "radical liberatory potential" (Curran et al. 2012, 151).

Despite Runet being prone to state surveillance and political monitoring (Uldam 2018), its users nevertheless enjoy a high level of participation and autonomy (Curran et al. 2012, 164), which is especially high on social media platforms. Taking political and social protest to social networking sites provides activists with wider opportunities for contacting like-minded people and promoting individually framed agendas. Social networking sites thus afford a means of coordinating and boosting collective action of various social movements: "collective actions are also becoming more inclusive, that is, they encourage participation of those who would not want to commit to the interpretations of a formal group and who would traditionally not be the target of organizational outreach efforts" (Schumann 2015, 55). Although the digital divide still has a gendered dimension, in that women have suffered from inequalities in terms of access to the internet and other ICT (Ross and Byerly 2004, 187), the Internet has also enabled a considerable empowerment for women through cyberpolitics and cyberfeminism (Ross and Byerly 2004, 197–198). This is especially so for women involved in grassroots and community groups, whose activism increasingly takes place on the internet (Ross and Byerly 2004, 200). Internet-based activism has become vital for feminist activists and activist groups promoting the rights of lesbian, bisexual and transgender (LBT) women (Brown et al. 2017; Serano 2013).

Online feminist activism in Russia is developing fast and evolving consistently, comprising a variety of platforms and employing various strategies, among them—those of emotional capital and of "do it yourself" (DIY) brand identity (Turner 2010). Social media platforms offer Russian feminists such important tools as opportunities for transgressing patriarchal discourses, creating safe digital spaces in the form of emotional communities, and managing their own online identity as personal celebrity or infuencer brands. On the other hand, activism performed online entails potential threats in the form of cyberbullying. For example, the case of the 2019 "*Lushgate*" campaign in support of prominent Russian feminist and lesbian activist Bella Rapoport, introduced into media discourses a debate on what kinds of online emotional expressions are acceptable for a woman. In March 2019, in an Instagram story Bella expressed her disappointment in the Lush handmade cosmetics brand which claims to be pro-feminist but failed to extend its support to her, that is, rejected her offer to collaborate. This made Bella a subject of cyberbullying across various social media platforms: she received hate mail via direct messaging on Instagram; Twitter users (both personal and corporate accounts) started a fashmob making a ridicule of Bella's correspondence with Lush; the activist received hateful and threatening comments and messages on her personal Facebook page.14 The cyberbullying was further promoted by multiple online media and mainstream media. The emotions shared in the Instagram story were interpreted as a transgression of socially acceptable feminine emotional boundaries by an overdemanding and self-absorbed feminist: a "good" woman does not use her emotions to demand benefts for herself but uses them to provide benefts for others. The example of "Lushgate" is only one of the numerous cases where Russian feminist activists faced a backlash of complex societal responses to their transgressive emotional expression and gendered behavior while performing their activism online.

Hashtag campaign mobilizations work to make women's and feminist voices heard in situations of aggressive misogyny. Similar to emotional management, hashtags provide a form of active and quick mobilization as an immediate response to abusive actions. A hashtag, created as a means of structuring content in social networks, is increasingly used to attract attention to social and political issues and events. After its emergence, hashtag campaigns were considered mainly in the context of protests against government actions and decisions. Nowadays more and more attention is being attracted to hashtag campaigns, which are against existing social practices, behavior and norms. In these cases, the protest is addressed not so much to the state as it is to power in a broader sense. Such campaigns often take the form of discursive activism that was described by Shaw (2012) as "speech or texts that seek to challenge opposing discourses." Here the issue of participants' choice of discursive strategies might be raised (Arbatskaya 2019).

Russian feminists and activists have started using hashtags increasingly after a very powerful "fashmob" *#yaNeBoyusSkazati/t* (in Ukrainian and Russian, respectively; "I am not afraid to tell") started by a Ukrainian activist, Anastasiya Melnichenko, in Summer 2016. In response to a Facebook post blaming women for becoming victims of rape, Melnichenko shared her own story of sexual assault with the hashtag.  In the frst two months alone, there were 12,282 original posts and over 16 million views (Aripova and Johnson 2018). Following the success of *#yaNeBoyusSkazati/t*, other hashtag campaigns followed: *#etoNePovodUbit'* (#ItIsNotaReasonToKill) in 2018 and *#yaBoyusMuzhchin* (#IAmAfraidOfMen) in 2019. All of them represent an example of participants' attempt to challenge patriarchy by sharing stories of abuse that women are not supposed to talk about. By articulating trauma and translating it into narratives, these campaigns also provided therapeutic effect as well as solidarity and space for sharing.

At same time, there is plenty of online resistance to feminist and women's activism. Conservative social movement organizations (SMO) utilize online spaces for their own brand of activism to claim legitimacy by supporting traditional values that include stereotypical gender roles, the heteronormative family, protection of the family, and attacking anyone who says different. They effciently use tools that are similar to those used by feminist activists: exclusive online spaces and hashtags as a response to what they see as a threat to "authentic Russia." The SMOs such as *Sorok Sorokov* (www.soroksorokov.ru) and All-Russian Parental Resistance (RVS, www.rvs.su) have very visible online presence by conducting aggressive mobilization campaigns and organizing fake media events. Their media is de-personifed by using the pronoun "we"; they rarely mention any representatives by names, instead hiding behind webpages and hashtags. Their most recent campaign is resistance to passing prevention of domestic violence law in the Russian Federal Assembly (Russian parliament). Not only they started an abusive and aggressive media campaign against the law and its authors (all women), they also mobilized online using hashtag *#zaSemyu* (#ProFamily) to encourage their supporters to participate in an online discussion of the draft at the Council of Federation (upper house of the parliament) webpage.

## 12.5 Conclusion

Mirroring the complex discourse on gender roles and gender equality in contemporary Russian society, digital spaces have evolved into a battleground for new gender politics and identities. Early cyberfeminists and activists considered those spaces safe, safer than actual public spaces for protest (see, e.g., Rollestone Collective 2014), which has resulted in the existence of a wide and diverse variety of online communities, activist public accounts, and personal blogs with a solid potential to infuence and shape offine debates on the feminism, nonheteronormative identities, men's and women's rights. However, the example of Runet together with other "nets" suggests that people take their politics and their materiality to virtual spaces that, in turn, are becoming even more dangerous due to illusion of safety. Cases of cyberstalking, cyberbullying, and simple online campaigns calling to "deal" with feminist and LGBTQ+ activists make us revisit the concept of cyberspace. In Russia, the situation is further aggravated by selective but tight state-imposed control and censorship over internet as well as state's offcial patriarchal discourse.

Yet, the development of gendered online practices, tools and strategies point to an emergence of mosaic virtual reality in which multiple identities debate and negotiate but remain fuid in its discursivity. Russian feminist and antifeminist and anti-gender confict online mirrors a global backlash against feminism in digital media. Online spaces and digital platforms reproduce materiality of "real-life" confict with serious political consequences. In Russia, gender politics online and offine indicates the debates and negotiations important for constructing identities in situations when freedom of expression can be limited. Russians use online and digital platforms as a strategy to communicate their difference to the State and to their fellow Russians.

## Notes

## References

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence and indicate if changes were made.

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## Digitalization of Consumption in Russia: Online Platforms, Regulations and Consumer Behavior

*Olga Gurova and Daria Morozova*

## 13.1 Introduction

Digital consumption is a complex feld that can be defned as "online retail, marketing approaches, or seen as an expanding feld of technological platforms and mobile applications that advance various forms of production, distribution, and consumption" (Ruckenstein 2017, 562). Within Russian studies, this is a still emerging feld. At the moment, scholarship on digital consumption in Russia is quite limited, although think tanks and marketing companies have been following the situation closely and provide the most up-to-date data.

In this chapter, we focus on two main topics within digital consumption which have emerged from the two main areas of scholarly interest: online shopping and the sharing economy. Research into online shopping has examined e-commerce business models (Doern and Fey 2006), barriers and drivers of e-commerce (Daviy et al. 2018; Daviy and Rebiazina 2015), effects of national culture on e-commerce acceptance (Kim et al. 2016), and the emergence of one of the biggest Russian e-retailers—Ozon (Hawk 2002). The sharing economy has been studied from the point of view of its barriers and drivers in acceptance of services (Rebiazina et al. 2018) and of socio-cultural meanings of particular sharing platforms, such as the gift-giving platform DaruDar.org (Polukhina and Strelnikova 2014; Strelnikova and Polukhina 2014; Polukhina and Strelnikova 2015; Bocharova and Echevskaya 2014; Ivanenko et al. 2014).

In alphabetical order, contribution of both authors is equal.

Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark

e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS><EMAIL_ADDRESS>
O. Gurova (\*) • D. Morozova

D. Gritsenko et al. (eds.), *The Palgrave Handbook of Digital Russia Studies*, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42855-6\_13

Whereas marketing researchers mainly apply online quantitative surveys, sociologists utilize qualitative methods—in particular, netnography or online ethnographic research (Kozinets 2010) complemented by face-to-face interviews. Of the marketing companies and think tanks providing data, we are drawing upon studies conducted by Morgan Stanley (2018), PayPal Inc. (2018), Russian Association of Internet Trade Companies (2017) and Data Insight (2014, 2017, 2018, 2019). Therefore, for this chapter we utilized three types of data: academic articles on the subject; research produced by think tanks and marketing companies; and media publications to identify the current trends in digital consumption in Russia.

The frst section of the chapter focuses on e-commerce, while the second section sheds light on the sharing economy. Each section contains defnitions and brief theoretical concepts related to the phenomena and concrete empirical examples taken from the context of digital consumption in Russia. In conclusion, we summarize the fndings and suggest directions for future research.

## 13.2 E-commerce, M-commerce and Online Shopping

Digital transformations of retail and shopping are linked to the shift from offine to online retail (e-commerce, m-commerce) and various forms of their co-existence. E-commerce is broadly defned as "using the internet to sell products and services" (Doern and Fey 2006, 315). M-commerce refers to purchases made from mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. These transformations are enabled by the emergence of digital solutions for retailers and consumers, which transform the traditional offine retail and shape the everyday shopping experience. Digital transformations of retail and shopping occur in the context of a broader transition to the "service economy," where retailers act as "integrators of services" based on knowledge-intensive service innovations (Pantano and Gandini 2018, 1). This results in a new concept of retail that "overcomes the traditional physical boundaries of the store … to foster the growth of new forms of commerce strongly based on the usage of technologies such as online and mobile for shopping" (ibid., 1).

Digital transformations of retail in Russia can be approached through the concept of "liquid retail," that is an open metaphor that helps to problematize the dynamics of retail, with the purpose of shedding light on the current circumstances in which retail stakeholders and consumers navigate the accelerated transformations (de Kervenoael et al. 2018, 417–418). Following this framework, in this section we pay attention to macro-level changes of market transformations, normative shifts, techno-economic (infra)structures and meso- and micro-level activities of multiple actors (new retail formations, changing consumption practices, etc.) (ibid., 418) in order to refect upon how digitalization has changed retail and shopping in Russia.

#### *13.2.1 E-commerce, M-commerce*

E-commerce has been acknowledged as one of the fastest growing markets in Russia. According to Statista, e-commerce is expected to show an annual growth of 7.5% in the coming years (Ecommerce Foundation 2018). In 2018, it was considered to be in an emerging state, with high potential for contributing to the development of the Russian national economy (Daviy and Rebiazina 2015, 4). As for m-commerce, statistics (Ipiev 2018) show the share of mobile payments by July 2018 rose by 11% compared to the frst half of the year. At the same time, the number of payments from desktop computers dropped by 4%. Nevertheless, 55% of e-commerce purchases were made from desktop and 45% from smartphones and tablets. Yet, the number is expected to change in favor of m-commerce, since retailers actively continue developing shopping apps and platforms for mobile devices (ibid.). In addition, shopping with an emphasis on "social commerce"—meaning shopping on social media—has become a noticeable phenomenon (Pantano and Gandini 2018, 2). According to research conducted by Yandex.Kassa and Data Insight, near 39 million Russians made purchases in various peer-to-peer platforms, such as social media and messengers (Yandex Kassa and Data Insight 2018).

There was virtually no e-commerce in Russia prior to 1998 (Hawk 2002, 702). It started to gain popularity after the Russian fnancial crisis of 1998, which forced many people to become self-employed and turned out to be a catalyst for entrepreneurial activities. The crisis was one of the reasons for the companies to start to operate more effciently and develop e-solutions. As for other factors, such as internet penetration rate and access to computers, Hawk (2002, 703) mentions that the Internet usage in Russia was still very low at the time. Interestingly, the majority of those who accessed Internet did it at work (57%), whereas only 27% accessed it at home. Between 1998 and 1999, the number of dot-com companies in Russia grew from 50 to 400 (Doern and Fey 2006, 317). Compared to the developed economies of the United States, Canada and Western Europe at this time, in developing countries such as Russia, India and countries in Latin America, e-commerce was miniscule (Hawk 2004, 181).

In the years that followed, e-commerce developed rapidly and continued to boom in Russia up till 2013, though its growth slowed down during the fnancial crisis of 2008–2009 (Daviy and Rebiazina 2015, 9). As for the situation in the second half of the 2010s, the economic recession followed by the Crimea crisis in 2014 had a signifcant effect on the development of Russian e-commerce (Sadyki 2017, 1). On the one hand, these changes included a drop in gross domestic product (GDP), a decrease of buying capacity of consumers, and increased political risks for Western companies to operate in Russia due to sanctions and counter-sanctions implemented after the annexation of Crimea. At the same time, these changes helped push Russian companies into the e-commerce market (ibid., 1).

According to global ratings, Russia lags behind in terms of Internet penetration (23rd in 2017), reaching an estimated 62% in 2018 (Ecommerce Foundation 2018, 13), with the majority of users concentrated in Moscow and major cities (Sadyki 2017, 2). The country was placed 99th in the United Nation's logistical performance list, 35th in its ease of doing business list, and 35th in e-government Index (ibid., 14). In addition, there is a substantial gap in regional development across the country (Morgan Stanley 2018, 3). Considering these barriers, the Russian e-commerce market is characterized as under-developed and fragmented—for instance, the four major e-commerce players in Russia account for 27% of the market compared to 63% in the United States and 84% in China (ibid., 6), it is regionally highly disproportionate, and dominated by cash payments and poor quality of service, especially delivery (Sadyki 2017).

One of the drivers of e-commerce has been the increase of the quality and availability of Internet connections in Russian regions. There have been signifcant improvements in the services provided by the Post of Russia—the main operator of delivery services. Further, the development of numerous services, online payment platforms, digital signatures and a general increase in trust towards these types of tools contribute to e-commerce progress (ibid., 11).

#### *<IP_ADDRESS> Russian E-commerce Retailers*

Digitalization and the development of e-commerce and m-commerce have affected retailers of all sizes, from large- to small-scale. According to a report by Morgan Stanley (2018, 1), "Russia is the last major emerging market without a dominant online retailer." In the same report, it is estimated that the Russian e-commerce market will reach 31 billion dollars by 2020. In 2018, the two most infuential actors on the Russian market were Yandex (the largest technological company specializing in internet products and services, including the search engine Yandex.ru) and the Mail.ru Group (a major technological company, operating the most popular Russian social networking sites VKontakte.ru, Odnoklassniki.ru and "Moj mir" [My.mail.ru]). Yandex joined forces with the largest state-owned bank, Sberbank, in order to create "a leading e-commerce ecosystem" based on the existing Yandex marketplace (Henni 2017). On the other hand, Mail.ru Group partnered with Chinese retail giant Alibaba, the owner of Aliexpress.com—the most popular online platform in Russia—to develop a "one-stop platform for social communication, gaming and shopping" (Henni 2018).

Meanwhile, some of the largest international e-commerce retailers have not been successful in their attempt to conquer the Russian market. eBay.com entered Russia in 2011, but so far has failed to gain signifcant traction. JD. com—China's second largest e-commerce player—left Russia in 2016 after just one year of operating. Among the main challenges, the executives of the company listed cross-border logistics and high marketing expenses (Sun 2018). In 2018, a number of German e-commerce giants such as Otto, Quelle and Westwing ceased their activity in Russia due to reduced purchasing power of consumers and signifcant revenue drops after converting funds from rubles into euros (East-West Digital News 2018). This latter phenomenon resulted from serious Russian ruble depreciation after 2014 (Urbanovsky 2015). The notable exception is Aliexpress.com, which has been one of the leaders on Russian online market, and will be discussed in more detail in the section on cross-border shopping.

At the same time, digital transformations in retail gave a signifcant boost to Russian small-scale innovative companies and startups—for instance, in fashion. Online retailing has various benefts: it allows these companies to reduce costs associated with launching and operating their businesses; it gives the opportunity to be discovered by consumers more quickly; it allows using new business models and fexibility in adjusting to fuctuations of the market; it gives data and instruments for the immediate analysis of consumer behavior; and, it also provides tools for immediate interaction with consumers through videos, blogs, messages. In a separate study, we noticed a "boost" in small-scale fashion businesses (Gurova and Morozova 2018) when startup companies created formal and informal businesses through social networks, using Instagram or VKontakte as sales channels.

#### *<IP_ADDRESS> New Retail Platforms*

Digital transformations have globally led to the development of online retail platforms (Daviy and Rebiazina 2015; Doern and Fey 2006). The fastestgrowing and most highly valued e-commerce platform in Russia has been Wildberries.ru, an online platform for selling clothes, accessories, home goods and so on. The platform operates in Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan and has plans to enter the European Union market in 2019, starting with Poland (Ganzhur 2019). By 2019, Wildberries was ranked number one among online fashion retailers worldwide with the highest traffc volume, followed by H&M and Zara (Popova 2019). Wildberries' revenues have soared, showing 85% growth in the frst three months of 2019 compared to the same period in 2018 (Intellinews 2019). Their fastest growing segments have been electronics, offce equipment, gardening equipment and kitchen equipment (Kommersant 2019). The co-owner of Wildberries, Vladislav Bakalchuk, admits that their strongest advantages are the wide network of delivery points across Russia (with fewer couriers and the possibility to try clothes on the spot), and its commission model in which a supplier/producer pays commission for every sale (Kommersant 2018b). In 2018, the second and third most popular e-commerce sites in Russia were Ozon.ru (one of the leading multicategory retailer, offering goods in about 20 categories, including electronics, household appliances, clothes, food, Digital Versatile Discs (DVDs) and Citilink.ru (an online platform that positions itself as an electronics discounter), respectively (Kommersant 2018c).

Online retail platforms in Russia can be classifed into seven categories (see Table 13.1). We have taken mostly examples from the list of top-100 companies in e-commerce in Russia in 2018 (Data Insight 2019) to illustrate the

**Table 13.1** Classifcation of online retail platforms in Russia

platform types. According to the top-100 list, among the top-10 companies are online marketplaces (Wildberries.ru, Ozon.ru), price-based online platforms (Citilink.ru) and "category killers"1 (Mvideo.ru for electronics, Lamoda.ru for clothes and Petrovich.ru for homeware).

In 2011, Darrell K. Rigby wrote about "omnichannel retailing." It refers to retailers who are "able to interact with customers through countless channels—websites, physical stores, kiosks, direct mail and catalogs, call centers, social media, mobile devices, gaming consoles, televisions, networked appliances, home services, and more" (Rigby 2011). Retailing in Russia is developing in the direction of omnichannel retailing. Therefore, in addition to traditional brick-and-mortar stores, companies operate as click-and-mortar stores, merging offine and online formats of retail in different ways. For instance, the online retailer Lamoda expressed its interest in opening the frst offine store (Kommersant 2018a). Offine supermarket Perekrestok voiced a plan to launch a "shop-window" on its website where consumers can order commodities unavailable in the stores and offered by partners, and then pick them up in one of Perekrestok stores (Ishchenko 2018). Clothing online retailer Aizel.ru opened a pop-up store in the Moscow department store Atrium in 2018 (Utesheva 2018). However, managing director of KupiVIP.ru Miroslav Zubačevskij noted that although the omnichannel retailing is emerging in Russia, it is still underdeveloped and faces various problems, ranging from inconvenient Information Technologies (IT) solutions to logistical issues (Fashion United 2014).

An important dimension of the service economy is the consumer experience. Therefore, retailers use technological solutions to address the needs of retail and shopping as part of the experience economy (Pine and Gilmore 1998). Retailers actively use online tools to enhance the experiential dimension of shopping online with videos, blogs and other interactive formats. For example, Bonprix.ru has a rubric "Fashion and life" featuring news on current fashion trends and useful advice regarding fashion and lifestyle from editors and bloggers. At the same time, they aim at individualization or customization of experience and products. For instance, Vsemayki.ru offers to "construct" your own T-shirt with chosen print, while Holodilnik.ru offers the option of customizing the color and adding exclusive decorations on fridges, washing machines and dishwashers.

Augmented reality and virtual reality technologies are emerging trends in retailing, also in Russia (Utesheva 2018). For instance, the Russian company Mirow (Mirow.ru) developed a touch-screen mirror that is able to identify which items are taken to a ftting room and to give personal recommendations on what is usually bought or may suit with those items. It can also provide information about discounts, including personalized ones, offer to call a consultant or ask for a different size/color of an outft, and to arrange the issuing of a loyalty card. Another technological solution, Tardis (Tardis3d.ru), helps to identify a customer's clothing size and the way outft will look on their fgure with the use of a selfe and a short questionnaire. There is also a startup, Fittin. ru, that has developed virtual ftting for shoes. Although these solutions are to a large extent at the experimental stage, they are in line with global trends, with a direction towards "smart retail"—that is, the search for digital solutions for retail and further consumer acceptance of these solutions (Dacko 2017).

#### *13.2.2 The Profle of Online Consumers*

Between 2011 and 2014, major indicators of e-commerce in Russia were on the rise, including the quantity of orders and average purchase amount, followed by a substantial drop in 2015 (Data Insight 2017). However, after a steep decline, Russian e-commerce started to slowly recover, and as of 2018, 65% of the country's online users have shopped online at least once (Data Insight 2018).

As far as socio-economic characteristics are concerned, between 2011 and 2017, Russian trends remained typical for developing countries, where factors such as place of living, income and education have more infuence on internet activity than physical access to the Internet (van Deursen et al. 2011; van Dijk and Hacker 2003). On the other hand, immaterial resources such as the knowledge of a foreign language and availability of free time may also infuence the popularity of the online shopping (Firsova 2013, 47). Interestingly, gender did not show signifcant correlation with the frequency of online shopping for a household; therefore, the researchers suggest that inconspicuousness of the online shopping (e.g. sitting alone in front of the monitor versus trying new clothes in public) might challenge the stereotype of shopping as a female prerogative (ibid., 48).

The leading group of online consumers, particularly in terms of frequency, are residents of megacities with higher education and above-average incomes, while poorer rural dwellers with less than 10 years' education lag behind (Data Insight 2018). However, experts (Morgan Stanley 2018; Data Insight 2018) assume that the current growth in online purchases is driven by shoppers from small towns, residential communities and villages who are quite price-conscious and have embraced online shopping in search of a better deal. Additionally, Russian rural settlements are now better equipped with pick-up points for online orders: in January 2017, 76% of all delivery points were located in small towns and villages (Data Insight 2017). Furthermore, over half of Russian internet users make online payments and transfers: this indicator equals 61%, 55% and 44% for large cities, middle-sized cities and the rest of the settlements, respectively (Data Insight 2018).

For a long time, the three most popular categories for online shopping have been electronics, clothing and household appliances (Russian Association of Internet Trade Companies 2017, 27). In addition to material goods, the popularity of food delivery, airplane and train tickets, as well as online games' complement products have been on the rise (Data Insight 2014).

The results of a poll by BrandMonitor, published in 2018, revealed that a large proportion of Russians (63%) may mistake fakes for luxury brand items (Tishina 2018). An even larger proportion (84%) of Russians shopping online is actually quite eager to buy counterfeit items (usually A-brands such as Apple or Louis Vuitton). As a rule, these consumers have some previous experience of buying fake goods through traditional channels, and afterwards turn to the Internet as an information tool. Frequently, the webpages of original brands are used as points of reference for comparing how well the fakes match the descriptions and pictures of authentic products (Radon 2012).

Overall, some pieces of research conclude (Firsova 2013) that the growth of the Internet shopping has great potential in Russia, but it will primarily spread among people who have previous positive experience of using the web.

#### *13.2.3 Online Cross-Border Shopping*

Online retail gives a boost to cross-border shopping. In 2015, 30% of the Russian population made at least one online cross-border purchase in the course of the year (Ecommerce Foundation 2018). In 2017, 30% of Russian online shoppers were limiting their purchases to the domestic market, whereas 56% were shopping both domestically and abroad, with 14% abroad only (PayPal Inc. 2018). These shares of cross-border online purchases are among the highest in Eastern Europe (ibid.)

Clothes and accessories, smartphones/tablets (including related items), home appliances and electronics have been the most popular goods for ordering abroad (Yandex 2016). The main reasons for cross-border shopping among Russians have been better deals in terms of price, wider selection of goods, and access to brands unavailable in Russia (ibid.), which corresponds to the crossborder shopping drivers among US (Invesp Consulting 2016) and European Union (EU) shoppers (Hunter and Wilson 2015, 25), but differs from Chinese consumers who are primarily interested in certifed and authentic goods (Zhang 2018).

China has been the most popular country for cross-border orders in Russia, accounting for up to 80% of all cross-border sales in 2016 (East-West Digital News 2017, 22). In 2014, AliExpress became the number one e-commerce platform in Russia, and since then has been offering, in addition to Chinese goods, products made in Russia with a same-day delivery option and purchases on credit (ibid.). Honoring Russian-language consumers, the platform has translated its web-interface into Russian. However, the automated translation is not always grammatically correct or smooth and the descriptions of consumer goods can look like a mere collection of words without proper declension, for instance, "new fashion print design Russian crime tattoo." AliExpress gave rise to social media groups educating Russian consumers on how to navigate online shopping with the retailer. The company takes the Russian market seriously; it experimented with 3D virtual stores, and Russia is the only country where the retailer has tested an opportunity to enter the brick-and-mortar market (Vedomosti 2017).

#### *<IP_ADDRESS> Regulation of the Online Cross-Border Shopping*

As online shopping has experienced noticeable growth, so did the number of purchases from the foreign platforms that have to cross the Russian border. As a result, substantial legislative changes regarding cross-border shopping have been introduced recently. From 2019, individual purchases with a price over 500 euro and weight over 25 kg are charged with a customs duty. Previously, customs duties were levied on individual purchases totaling over 1000 euro and weight over 31 kg per month. From 2020, this tax border for online crossborder shopping will be further decreased to 200 euro. Therefore, the direction of changes is to increase taxation by lowering the threshold amount for tax-free purchases. Experts and entrepreneurs working in the e-commerce sector question the necessity of this measure and predict low revenues to the government (Russia Business Today 2018; Skuratova 2018). As of 2018, very few online purchases in Russia exceed 200 euro, and 90% of receipts on the most popular platform AliExpress amount to less than 100 euro (Russia Business Today 2018).

Another legislative measure related to e-commerce offered by the Russian Association of Internet Trade Companies is the introduction of value added tax (VAT) for foreign online retailers. Arguing for this measure, the association maintains that the taxation of foreign e-retailers will support domestic companies (Russian Association of Internet Trade Companies 2018, for more, see also Chap. 5). In addition, in its statement, the Russian Association of Internet Trade Companies stresses that customs duties will bring approximately 300 million rubles to the Russian budget in the frst three years (ibid.). The measure has so far been postponed due to a lack of agreement on how the procedure should be carried out technically. For instance, it is unclear if VAT should be paid by the online platform (e.g. AliExpress) or by the retailers that are using the platform. Experts argue that additional taxes may force international e-commerce platforms to cease their activity in Russia: equaling just 0.7%, Russia is a minor player for world-wide operating companies (TASS 2017); additionally, foreign retailers are already paying operational costs, commission for using the online platforms and service providers' fees (Kommersant 2018d).

It is unclear how the new measures will infuence cross-border shopping. In the meantime, new platforms are emerging to address the needs of the consumers. For instance, there is a Russian platform called Tudatuda.com where consumers gather to fnd someone who could buy and pass on a needed item from abroad. This service has been helpful for those looking for medicines or brands that are unavailable in Russia or when local prices are too high (for example, Apple products).2 Such practices suggest that, even if affected by the changes in legislation, cross-border shopping will most likely adjust, for instance, by changing its format.

## 13.3 Online Exchanges: Sharing Economy and Collaborative Consumption

The sharing economy and collaborative consumption refers to the collective use of consumer goods (Botsman and Rogers 2010) enhanced by the development of online platforms. Collaborative consumption is "the peer-to-peerbased activity of obtaining, giving, or sharing access to goods and services, coordinated through community-based online services" (Hamari et al. 2015, 2047). The sharing economy is an environment in which goods and services are offered and consumed through community-based platforms (ibid.). The terms can be used interchangeably since there are common denominators, namely, the mediating role of new digital technologies connecting various actors and modes of transfer. One position even argues that collaborative consumption is embedded in the sharing economy and is one of its forms (Wahlen and Laamanen 2017); therefore, we use sharing economy as the term embracing both categories.

The sharing economy has been triggered by the development of the Internet and technology, thanks to which it is easier to create trust between strangers (Botsman and Rogers 2010). There are other reasons for the growing popularity of the sharing economy, including economic (saving money), environmental (reducing ecological footprint) and social (expanding one's networks) (Schor and Thompson 2014).

In Russia, the sharing economy has become a noticeable phenomenon for several reasons. On the one hand, its wider emergence has been linked to the fnancial crisis of 2008–2009, after which the use of many sharing services was a coping strategy of dealing with economic hardship. For example, the giftgiving platform DaruDar.org, launched in 2008, where participants make gifts of different daily objects such as books, children's products, furniture, homeware and others in exchange for gratitude, illustrate this copying strategy (Polukhina and Strelnikova 2014, 90). The boost of the sharing economy can also be seen as a result of people searching for alternative income sources during cutbacks. For instance, Youdo.com, launched in 2012, matches people who need minor home services (repair, cleaning) with service providers. The platform has been positioned as an opportunity to earn extra money in one's spare time and, on the other side, solve a home problem for a lower price.

At the same time, the proliferation of the sharing economy was connected to deeper socio-cultural processes in Russia. The frst decade of 2010s was associated with the relative growth of well-being of Russian citizens ("fat noughties"); hence, there were people whose fnancial conditions made them eligible to participate in various lending and gift-giving activities. Bocharova and Echevskaya (2014, 102–103) have noticed that some people join DaruDar due to surplus rather than need, and share the motive of contributing to the common good. This is evidence of the fact that the increase in well-being resulted in a shift towards post-materialist values, among which are contributions to the common good, self-expression and environmentalism (Polukhina and Strelnikova 2014, 88). In addition, participation in the sharing economy has become a form of "consumer solidarity." Since the sharing economy is often a part of the "informal economy" (Polukhina and Strelnikova 2015), not directly regulated by the government (Polukhina and Strelnikova 2014, 87) and existing along with the "formal economy" of online stores (ibid.), it serves as a horizontal grassroots form of solidarity.

#### *13.3.1 Types of Sharing Economy*

Treapăt et al. (2018) distinguish between three types of sharing economy. The frst one is paying for the beneft of using some good without purchasing it, such as the platform Rentmania.com launched in Moscow in 2013. The most popular items for borrowing (Shlyahov 2017) are children's goods; sports equipment; various gadgets, including laptops, game consoles, and scooters; and evening and carnival garments. Goods for borrowing are provided by both companies and individuals. The former dominates in the sector of larger sports equipment, such as treadmills, that is characterized by seasonal demand. The latter usually prevail in children's and gadget sectors. There are particular types of goods, such as photo booths, 3D printers or cotton-candy machines that are borrowed along with service providers. In addition, a separate and infuential group of goods providers is comprised by winter downshifters, that is, people who leave Moscow for the whole winter period and are willing to offer long-term lease of their items. Rentmania was initially launched as a start-up with venture capital for Moscow region only. Without any interest from the consumers, it ceased its operation in Russia. In 2018, the owners of the platform decided to move from Russia to the United States due to lack of investors and, consequently, limited perspectives in the home market (Mihajlova 2018).

Another type of sharing economy is the redistribution of used and no longer needed goods to the users who need them, for money or exchange (Treapăt et al. 2018). In Russia, the most popular platform of this type is Avito.ru founded in 2007 by Jonas Nordlander and now owned by a South-African company, Naspers Holding. At frst, Avito was a platform for re-selling various everyday products such as clothes, cutlery, furniture etc., but eventually it has expanded into other directions, including recruiting, real-estate and shortterm property leases. According to a Mediascope study (Ishunkina 2018), Avito's audience reached 4.3 million people aged between 12 and 64 years old by September 2018; and over 14 million Russians used Avito monthly with average 8 minutes per day (as of January 2019) (Mediascope 2019).

Finally, the third type of sharing economy is sharing of lifestyles, meaning that in addition to tangible goods, something intangible such as space and time is offered (Treapat et al. ̆ 2018). Various rental services such as AirBnb.com are part of this type. In Russia, AirBnb has become popular in Moscow and St. Petersburg, showing growth of 121% between 2015 and 2016 (Egorova 2017). A research on AirBnb offers on Tverskaya street (Moscow) shows that Muscovites are renting out the rooms (40–72 euro per night) or apartments (69–120 euro per night) in Stalinist high rises for prices 5–15 times lower than hotels (from 499 euro per night) on the same street (Treapat et al. ̆ 2018). On the one hand, Russians have been known for a quite conservative and protective attitude towards their homes ("My home is my castle"); on the other, they have a long history of sharing homes (*kommunalka*, a communal apartment in the former Soviet Union, typically shared by several families). According to Treapat et al. ̆ (2018), apart from extra income, people in Russia are opening their fats in order to gain new experiences, broaden horizons and practice languages.

#### *13.3.2 Participants of Sharing Economy*

The proliferation of the Internet in Russia facilitated the increasing number of participants of various sharing services, spread far beyond one's close circle and scaling the sharing economy to a higher level. According to a survey by Data Insight (2018), 394 million transactions equaling 591 million rubles (7.5 million EUR) within the Russian sharing economy were conducted in 2018. The most popular product category was clothing and boots with an average transaction price of 1950 rub (25 EUR). The second and third most popular categories were electronics and real estate. The online platform Avito was the most popular source for offering one's goods (65% of users), followed by a similar platform Youla.ru (39%), social networking site VKontakte (33%), and Instagram (9%) (ibid.).

In relation to socio-demographic characteristics of consumers, researchers (Rebiazina et al. 2018) have shown that people aged 18–35 and those who live in big cities across Russia used services based on the sharing economy several times per month, while older generations (35–60) and residents of smaller towns used the services once every few months. The majority of consumers had an average income. The fndings showed no difference between them and high-income consumers. Representatives of both income groups used services several times per month. Therefore, the sharing economy is a mostly urban phenomenon and is not linked to a particular income group. It has been found that the most popular services are Uber, GetTaxi and Avito, which were each used by 4 out of 10 people (ibid., 394).

#### *13.3.3 Drivers and Barriers of Sharing Economy*

Scholars have studied drivers and barriers of the use of services based on the sharing economy in Russia (Rebiazina et al. 2018). Regarding drivers, they found that although 60% of consumers trust the services and are ready to rent things, only 30% want to rent out their own things due to risks related to sharing, personal safety and hygiene. They also found that the ownership of things is considered to be a symbol of status; therefore, some consumers prefer to own things rather than to rent them (ibid., 394). Among the drivers, the following were named: (1) interest, comfort and utility towards/of sharing services, (2) recommendations of reference group (family, friends), (3) ecological and environmental benefts and (4) ease of use. Barriers included: (1) risks associated with participation in sharing, (2) additional efforts caused by participation (time, fnancial costs) and (3) preferences for ownership as an indicator of higher status. The researchers concluded that the companies willing to build their business in the Russian market should take into consideration the meaning of ownership as a status symbol and the necessity of building credibility and trust; a major issue in an emerging market (ibid., 397).

Noticeably, the researchers mostly discussed the sharing economy as a new phenomenon, coming from the Western countries and sometimes appearing in contradiction to the Russian mentality with its inclination towards ownership as opposed to renting. However, it is interesting how this new sharing economy co-exists with older practices of exchange and sharing coming from socialist times and familiar to the older generations.

## 13.4 Conclusion

In this chapter, we have approached digital consumption as consumption mediated by the Internet and analyzed it at the level of market transformations, changes in technological infrastructures and solutions, and in the activities of multiple actors (governments, retailers, professional associations, IT companies, consumers). To study digital consumption thus meant to focus on market developments (retail formats, retail culture, business models for companies), regulatory aspects (laws and regulations provided by the governments), technological infrastructure (possibilities and limitations of platforms, IT solutions for data collection and analysis, IT solutions to address the needs of retailing and consumers) and consumer behavior (patterns, objects and channels of purchases, online brand communities).

The key impact of digitalization of consumption in Russia by the end of the 2010s has been the swift growth of online retail platforms, such as Wildberries. ru, which have a potential of becoming global, as well as of sharing economy platforms, such as Avito.ru and Darudar.ru, aimed at arranging circulation of goods and services. Offine retail has evolved in the direction of omnichannel retailing by developing various online solutions aimed at creating, on the one hand, fast and convenient and, on the other hand, an immersive and customized experience of shopping. The interest of government in regulating this quickly developing sphere, in cross-border shopping, particularly with its potential tax revenues, has been observed. In terms of consumer practices, Russian consumers have been turning to online shopping in search of lower prices and a wider selection of goods. Initially, the average Russian online consumer's income and education were higher than the country's average, but recently, consumers from lower income and education and from older age groups have been joining the practice of online shopping more actively. This last development might be attributed, on the one hand, to personal income drops, but, on the other, to positive developments in terms of delivery or pick-up options across the country as well as saturation of internet connectivity. Overall, online shopping trends in Russia are heterogeneous due to sharp differences across Russian regions.

We would like to suggest the following directions for future research: frst, more ethnographic research on the shifts in the culture of consumption caused by digital transformations is needed. Here, such diverse topics as online brand and consumer communities, how they function and shape consumer identities, and new forms of socialities and consumer behavior in Russia are to be addressed. Another research direction could be based on the use of big data on consumption in cooperation with companies. This might help in studying the peculiarities of consumer behavior of various social groups depending on different factors, such as time and place. A third direction could be a more nuanced research on tastes, social characteristics and consumer practices, based on data collected by retailers. The researchers could also take a holistic approach by examining the intersection of various aspects of digital consumption, for example overlaps between regulations, retail, technology, and consumer behavior.

## Notes

## References

russians-weather-the-crisis-by-sharing-beds-rides-and-jobs\_692088. Accessed 28 Dec 2018.

———. 2018d. V posylki podkladyvaût NDS [VAT Is Being Added into the Parcels]. *Kommersant*, September 15, 2018. https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/3410434. Accessed 22 Dec 2018.

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence and indicate if changes were made.

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## Digital Art: A Sourcebook of Ideas for Conceptualizing New Practices, Networks and Modes of Self-Expression

*Vlad Strukov*

## 14.1 Introduction

Computer-enabled, digital technologies have altered the ways in which art is produced, experienced and thought of. For example, in the 1990s, European, North American and Russian art museums and galleries developed multi-media products—Compact Discs (CD), Compact Disc Read-Only Memory (CD-ROM) and Digital Versatile Discs (DVD)—featuring images of artworks from their permanent collections along with critical commentary. The user was now able to appreciate works of art on the computer screen, and not just in the space of the gallery or in a book format. The user was also able to modify the image of an artwork, or add it to their personal web page, thus emerging as an "active" consumer of art. In the same period, online galleries appeared on the internet, competing with established institutions. In the early 2000s, online galleries emerged. For example, the Olga Gallery (abcgallery.com) was set up by teenage brothers Yury and Sergej Mataev, who published catalogued works by famous artists, frst Russian and later world masters. Their clandestine gallery became an important teaching tool for those in the feld of Russian Studies and Arts, providing easy access to quality reproductions of artworks.

At the same time, large museums started to provide online tours of their galleries. The Russian State Hermitage Museum was a pioneer of innovative virtual tours. On the one hand, the museum allows users anywhere in the

V. Strukov (\*)

University of Leeds, Leeds, UK e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
<sup>©</sup> The Author(s) 2021 241

D. Gritsenko et al. (eds.), *The Palgrave Handbook of Digital Russia Studies*, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42855-6\_14

world to experience its galleries online. On the other, visitors to the museum in St. Petersburg can watch 3D movies and become a witness of historical events that had taken place in the Winter Palace. These experiments with virtual reality occurred at the same time as the production of Aleksander Sokurov's 2002 *Russkij kovčeg* (Russian Ark), a movie that was shot entirely in the Winter Palace of the Russian State Hermitage Museum on 23 December 2001 using a single-take single 96-minute Steadicam sequence shot. Russian Ark has become a digital artwork itself insofar as it had challenged existing theories of flm and audio-visual presentation, paving the way for experiments with digital flmmaking in Hollywood and elsewhere.1 With the rise of social media in the late 2000s, museums started to use digital technologies, including providing immersive experiences so that the visitor can enjoy art across different platforms. Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow leads the way in terms of using digital technologies in its various inclusivity and access programs such as those for deaf people and people with visual impairments.

Digital technologies have changed the ways in which museums and galleries operate, including the kind of objects and practices they acquire for their collections. The debates about what constitutes art and how to collect, curate and exhibit it are ongoing. Digital art is commonly understood as a form of art produced, distributed and appreciated with the help of digital technologies. For the purpose of this chapter, I limit this defnition to that kind of art which exists exclusively in the digital form. For example, an installation featuring objects, photographs and a digital component such as digital animation has been eliminated from my consideration. This process of elimination is not discriminatory but empowering because it makes one wonder about some principal notions helping us understand the nature and purpose of art. For example, is the digital a new medium or a new form of expression? Is digital just another way to say "contemporary"? Does the digital convey new forms of subjectivity or does it translate existing issues into a new "language"?2

The discussion is based on the analysis of specifc works of art, archival work, interviews with artists3 and critical assessment of exhibitions, biennales and festivals of contemporary art. The discussion is organized around two nodes: (a) historical and artistic contexts and (b) the scope and dynamics of Russian digital art. In the frst instance, the chapter traces the evolution of digital technologies, artistic practice and cultural and aesthetic transformations. In the second instance, the chapter supplies a conceptualization of a diverse range of artworks around the notion of image transformation thanks to new digital technologies. All artworks and images discussed in the chapter are available in the public domain and so can be easily found in Wikimedia commons and other sites.

#### 14.2 Re-structuring the Image: <sup>4</sup> Olga Tobreluts and the Digital Collage (the 1980s and the 1990s)

Computer technologies and digital literacy is one of the key components to a successful economy. This was recognized at the state level already in the 1980s under Soviet late socialism. Articulated as an imperative to develop new means of automation, the policy of digitalization was at the core of Mikhail Gorbachev's *perestroika*, which translates into English as "re-structuring." It aimed to supply new, more effcient means to carry out planning and management for the Soviet economy. It encompassed a development of a few generations of computers and computational technologies and a development of a workforce capable of operating complex machinery and running computer programs. These goals were achieved thanks to professional training made available to school pupils, students and those already in employment through re-training programs. As a result, in the late 1980s there was a large supply of engineers and other personnel involved in the production and maintenance of computer technologies (for more on digital education, see Chap. 10).

They were involved—often anonymously—in early experiments with computer art, or the application of algorithms capable of producing or copying artworks. These included, for instance, images rendering famous works of art with the help of zeros and ones, thus visualizing the computer code. Other experiments involved visualizations of mathematical formulas such as fractals. These are curves or geometrical fgures, each part of which has the same statistical character as the whole. Fractals are used in modeling of complex structures such as snowfakes. On one level, digitally produced images incorporating and imitating fractal laws had the characteristics of geometrical patterns and so appeared as decorative elements. On another, they were works of art insofar as they enquired about the laws of the physical world and their mathematical representations, making references to abstract art and its predecessors such as the Russian avant-garde. These artworks were exchanged freely among communities of technical intelligentsia who experimented with computer technologies, moving beyond their utilitarianism and producing artworks. In doing so they embraced Gorbachev's neoliberal reforms such as unregulated information exchanges, the privatization of national resources and self-suffciency.

The growing availability of computers and the emergence of new software such as Adobe Illustrator meant that artists started experimenting with digital art. In the early 1990s, in St. Petersburg, a young artist Olga Tobreluts (b. 1970) joined the art scene after making friends with Timur Novikov, an infuential art manager and curator. At that time Novikov was pre-occupied with hangings made of different kinds of fabric and decorated with appliqués. These were "textile collages" aimed at re-organizing space in novel ways. Later he presented his ideas in the form of a theoretical treatise in which he called his visual experiments "*perekompoziciâ*" (re-compositions), a term which designates re-modeling and re-structuring of space (Andreeva 2007). Tobreluts responded to Novikov's ideas by making digital collages. She learned computer graphics and 3D modeling while on a visit to Berlin. On her return to St. Petersburg, she produced a series of images that featured digital "recompositions." They were shown at exhibitions in Russia, the United Kingdom (UK), the United States of America (USA) and other countries, securing Tobreluts the title of "a leading Russian digital artist" (Geusa 2013).

The novelty of her work was in the realistic "effect": instead of rejecting perceptive realism of classical art, Tobreluts utilized it to query the status of image and illusion in the digital era. For example, her project *Models* from the late 1990s consisted of re-interpretations of classical art for the digital era. Tobreluts followed the conventions of traditional portraiture by choosing a "head and shoulders," full face or three-quarter view, and depicting her subjects with a thoughtful expression of face. She enhanced the conventionality of her portraits by using sculptural elements available from antiquity. At the same time, Tobreluts challenged the viewers' perceptions by applying bright colors and making use of symbols from popular culture, for example, the Lacoste fashion brand. Ultimately, the artist enquired about the value of art and individual expression in the era of digital reproduction. Here originality stems from a "re-composition" of elements, not from new elements. Tobreluts "restructures" the artistic canon and the image itself by accentuating the composite quality of culture and memory. She conceives of digital art as a new medium, and by employing classical imagery she re-inscribes the digital into art history.

In an interview published in 1995, Tobreluts defnes digital art in the following way. "First, the work is composed of different pieces. Then it is transferred from the computer to a compact disc (CD). Then a negative is printed, and then a photograph is printed …  It is just a metal box that can do nothing unless it is instructed to do something"5 (Sharandak 1995). Tobreluts describes different stages in the production of a digital artwork whereby the digital is materialized, that is, different manipulations are used to present the digital as an object. Different stages in the production of the artwork refer to the process of layering employed in image editing programs such as Photoshop. Another artist—Natalia Kamenetskaia from Moscow—described the same process in an interview in 2011. Speaking of her digital collage titled *St. Sebastian* and produced in 1993 with the help of Photoshop, she notes that "St. Sebastian is a multi-layered, poly-semantic fgure which brings together images and characters from classical and contemporary art" (Strukov 2011, 123–124).6

In her 1995 interview, Tobreluts conceived of computers and digital technologies as a new medium. She compared them to "a new kind of brush which is just more convenient to use"7 (Sharandak 1995). In my interview with her in 2017, Tobreluts spoke about "*cifrovaâ èstetika*" (digital visuality), or a particular way of thinking about the world, not just representing it artistically (interview with the author, 2017). In other words, in twenty years Tobreluts' understanding of computers and digitality has evolved from one which considers the digital as a more effcient medium to one which utilizes the digital to construct new worlds. The change in her thinking is manifested artistically: from using the digital to re-structure the image in the 1990s, in the 2010s she turned to using the medium of painting to reveal the nature and dynamics of the digital. I argue that this reversal of her artistic focus reveals the transformations propelled by the greater use of digital technologies in the present-day society.

In the early 1990s, Tobreluts, Kamenetskaia and other artists centered on the image as a key component of artistic expression. Their attempts to "restructure" the image using digital technologies resulted in a new understanding of artistic originality and authorship. Like their predecessors such as Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol and Ilya Kabakov, Russian digital artists queried art as an autonomous sphere of production. They continued to challenge the notion of the artistic genius by engaging with technologies that they could not fully control.8 Kamenetskaia acknowledges that "the computer was an unpredictable thing that would generate unplanned, unexpected results. Working with a computer was a mystical process" (Strukov 2011, 122–123). On one level, Kamenetskaia ascribes some degree of authorship to the machine which, in her view, is responsible for the outcome without discernible human intention. Like Dadaists, she embraces chance as a stimulus to expression in the work of art. Like Pollock, who practiced the technique called "Action Painting," which relied on chance, she is interested in random connections generated by the computer software.

On another level, Kamenetskaia re-claims ownership of art as a collective enterprise, thus opposing the long-standing tradition of perceiving art as a result of individual expression, or Romantic genius. She reminisces (Strukov 2011) that in the early 1990s she did not own her own computer and made use of her friends' computers, for example, of a computer that belonged to Irina Sandomirskaia, now a professor of Russian Studies at Södertörn University. Kamenetskaia would spend hours working on her computer at night. According to the artist, it was more than borrowing some tools from a friend; rather it was a collective enterprise insofar as they wanted to achieve something new in their work, namely, to open to the global community. Kamenetskaia recalls Sandomirskaia saying that "by learning how to use the computer we can show to the western world that we are part of it. The computer was a language in which all modern people communicated but Russians not yet" (Strukov 2011, 123).9 In this regard, Kamenetskaia and her friend, perhaps unknowingly, rehearsed the vision of global solidarity originally articulated by Sergei Eisenstein for the medium of flm. For him, flm would be a universal language, one that does not require translation, which would unite people of the world (2007 [1934]).

## 14.3 Re-wiring the East: Olia Lialina and net.art (the 1990s)

These ideas of shared knowledge, collective authorship and international solidarity were at the core of an artistic movement known as net.art. The main members of the movement were Vuk Ć osić, Jodi.org, Heath Bunting, Aleksei Shulgin and Olia Lialina, based in countries that just a few years ago were separated by the Iron Curtain. To achieve a new post-Cold War commonality, they formed an artistic collective, defning their art as "net.art," or "internet art." Though they wished to explore similar political and social concerns, from the aesthetic standpoint their works were very different. Net.art is a synonym of "internet art." According to Shulgin, who allegedly coined the term, net.art stemmed from "conjoined phrases in an email bungled by a technical glitch (a morass of alphanumeric junk, its only legible term net.art)" (Greene 2004, 12). The term has been used in the title of various exhibitions celebrating internet art. It covers a wide range of artistic practices that use the internet as its main medium.

One of the most celebrated net.artists is Olia Lialina (b. 1971). She is widely recognized for developing the internet as a medium for artistic expression and storytelling. For example, her network-based artwork *My Boyfriend Came Back from the War* (1996) tells the story of a young woman and man who have been separated by war. To a Russian user, Lialina makes a reference to the frst Chechen War, which had devastated the newly founded Russian Federation (RF); to other users, she speaks of a universal situation. The lovers attempt to engage in a conversation, but they fnd it diffcult. It is not entirely clear whether they are communicating in the "real" or online world; the boundaries between spaces, lines of communication and identities are constantly blurred, creating a Chekhov-style drama of misunderstanding. Unlike other examples of net.art, *My Boyfriend Came Back from the War* is directly involved with the user's emotions. In fact, the work refects on what constitutes expression, meaning and emotion on the internet. In many ways, it anticipated the conficts and dramas of social media which are to appear a decade later.

*My Boyfriend Came Back from the War* makes use of interactive hypertext storytelling. The work consists of nested frames with black and white web pages and grainy GIF images that show human faces and objects. Lialina conceives of the internet as a space where the boundaries between words and images, and between connections and emotions, are erased. Each element is an arena of action, refection and observation. When clicking hyperlinks in the work, the frame splits into smaller frames and the user reveals a nonlinear story about the couple. The story takes on a number of routes but eventually it leads to the point where the screen becomes a mosaic of empty black frames. They stand for emotional emptiness, a breakdown in communication and impossibility of genuine dialogue in the modern world (for more on hypertext, see Chap. 15).

On one level, the squares and frames make a reference to the flm strip, that is, a roll of frames. The grainy black-and-white images and intertitles evoke early silent movies. Like Eisenstein, Lialina is interested in montage as a means to construct meaning on the internet. On another level, the work reveals the potentialities of the internet as a new medium, particularly the role of the user in assembling data and constructing meaning. Without the user, the frames and images in *My Boyfriend Came Back from the War* would remain static. With the user's involvement they become animated. Here, reading the story is a ludic experience insofar as the user is guided but not directed to act, thus producing new connections and exploring new spheres of meaning. The user begins to wonder about their role and about the impact of their actions: are they there to observe an intimate conversation between a man and a woman? Are they responsible for the breakup of communication?

*My Boyfriend Came Back from the War* was displayed in Lialina's online gallery, which was one of the frst internet-based galleries in the world. Nowadays artists employ the internet to produce, showcase and distribute their work, with many artists boasting profles on numerous platforms. What Lialina has been interested in is the exploration of the possibilities of the new medium, on the one hand, and, on the other, the challenges of preserving early internet art and culture for future generations. With many programs now obsolete, how can a user experience the internet of the 1990s? Particularly, how can they feel the joy of connecting with someone they do not know in another country? This seems banal in the present-day world, but in the early 1990s with the world just emerging from the Cold War, being able to communicate directly with someone from another country was an extraordinary experience. What net.artists did in that period was to re-wire Europe and re-connect the world in new ways that would be free of government controls, ideological blocks and national, racial and gender stereotypes. *My Boyfriend Came Back from the War* is a record of this kind of aspiration of the post-Cold War Europe.

In her pioneering net.art, Lialina poses a number of important questions. The ethical ones are: what is the nature of communication? How does the internet change communication? What is privacy? How can we be intimate when there is no privacy? And the aesthetic questions are: what is duration on the internet? How do users defne time? Does the digital have its own ontology? What kind of visuality and visibility does the digital supply? Is it possible to conserve the digital? In other words, *My Boyfriend Came Back from the War* and Lialina's other works are about knowledge and its calibrations and misnomers, about the scale and trajectory of communication and performance, and about the difference between connectivity and community. Lialina's works are simultaneously contextual—they exist within a specifc technological and social context—and universal as they speak of global issues and assert universal values.

## 14.4 Mini and Maxi: Global Visions from Oleg Kuvaev and AES+F (the 2000s and 2010s)

While Lialina's works are signifcant from the standpoint of art criticism, history of communication and theory of the internet and the digital, they remain marginal from the standpoint of popular cultural industries and global consumption. Who were the artists who made digital art popular? Conversely, how did artists respond to the rise of popular use of digital technologies? What effects did the changes in technologies have on the aesthetics, distribution and signifcance of digital art? In this section, I aim to answer these questions by addressing two interrelated concerns. The frst is the role of individual artists in the development of the cultural industry with its digital segment. The second is the transnational realm of Russian culture in general and digital art in particular. Indeed, my analysis of the works by Tobreluts and Lialina indicates that Russian digital art has been international from its inception. Here I wish to emphasize that it has always occupied a transnational domain. For instance, Tobreluts' collages signify the process of symbolic layering of culture in the era of globalization. She mixes tropes and forms stemming from different periods and contexts, and, following the imperial tradition of artistic expression such as the classical architecture of St. Petersburg, what makes her works Russian is the radical appropriation of seemingly un-Russian symbols. She reveals subjectivity through renouncing identities, or, to be precise, by demonstrating their constructed nature. With Lialina, transnational social networks defne the processes of articulation and dissemination of her art. She works with artists based in other countries, and she makes art which is possible thanks to the actions of users located anywhere in the world. Lialina's interest in specifcity and universalism points to the effects of global communication networks which, on the one hand, allow us to connect to anyone anywhere and, on the other, keep us trapped in our information bubbles. In addition, I argue that individual artists, not government-funded or corporate initiatives, are responsible for the emergence of cultural industry and digital economy in the RF.

The developments occurred at different levels and through employment of sundry strategies. Here I refect on two of these, which I coded using the terms "mini" and "maxi." The former stands for a particular sense of intimacy, personal space, refexivity and a steer toward abstraction (see the discussion of Lialina's works above). The latter signifes an infatuation with popular culture, spectacle and a steer toward fguration. To showcase the latter, I frst investigate the work of Oleg Kuvaev before turning to the art collective known as AES+F (the name is initials of the artists Tatiana Arzamasova, Lev Evzovich, Evgenii Sviatskii and Vladimir Fridkes). Kuvaev's work characterizes the tendencies of the early 2000s while AES+F address the concern of the late 2000s and early 2010s.

In 2001, Kuvaev (b. 1967 in St. Petersburg) founded a small animation studio called Mult.ru and started promoting *Masyanya*, a series of short clips about the adventures of a young girl called Masyanya who lives in St. Petersburg with her boyfriend. Kuvaev worked with Macromedia Flash to produce flms that were distributed over the network using viral marketing. Macromedia Flash uses vector technology to produced layered imagery. It appears quite simple—geometric lines, bright colors, lack of shading, and so on, but this simplicity, or rather naivety, was the key to success. In a few years, and in spite of Kuvaev being involved in a legal battle over his brand,10 *Masyanya* was the most popular phenomenon on the Russian language internet, linking communities in the RF, Europe, Israel, North America and elsewhere. Some describe the 2000s as "Putin's Russia" due to the rise of the new form of governance associated with the fgure of the president (see, for example, Wegren 2018). I argue that the 2000s were "*Masyanya*'s Russia" (see Strukov 2004 for full analysis) because Kuvaev and his *Masyanya* transformed the ways in which people communicated online, and gave rise to digital economy (for more, see Chap. 4).11

Kuvaev employs caustic humor and depicts Masyanya's absurd behavior while refecting on the struggles of the young generation of Russians who had been affected by neoliberal reforms. Visually, *Masyanya* is an example of naïve, or primitive, art, that is, art that (looks as if it) was produced by non-professional artists. Elsewhere (Strukov 2004), I called *Masyanya* "a visual anecdote," meaning that the series functions as a digital form of joke-telling which has traditionally characterized Russian culture. Indeed, *Masyanya* has the qualities of humorous GIFs and memes, making it an alternative to commercial, mainstream culture. It is also a good example of how niche digital art may become popular. On the one hand, *Masyanya* resisted the dominance of Hollywood12 with its specifc visual language and symbolic economy. On the other, it constructed its own alternative form of globalization based on principles of free labor, pirating and sharing. These practices have become commodifed and commercialized since the emergence of Western social media giants such as Facebook and Instagram. *Masyanya* spoke of community, intimacy and honest conversation before they became catch phrases in the new global digital economy.

AES+F are also interested in the effects of digital globalization on local communities. Their award-winning multi-channel digital video installation *Allegoria Sacra* (2011–2013) shows some passengers stranded in an international airport. The location alludes to Arthur Hailey's eponymous novel which has been hugely popular in Russia. It represents a global community stuck in some kind of temporal warp. The title of the video is of course a reference to Giovanni Bellini's painting (1490–1500) which represents the purgatory. Their artwork speaks of limbo and of the intemporality of the internet where everything is available forever and yet changes and disappears all the time. AES+F present a series of biblical fgures, mythological creatures, cyborgs, clones and so on who are transposed into the eternal realm of Bellini's painting. Like Tobreluts, AES+F adopt classical forms for the digital environment when, for example, the Saracen-Muslim is transformed into a group of refugees and St. Sebastian turns into a young, shirtless traveler, hitchhiking his way through tropical countries. Yet, AES+F's artwork is more of an allegory of the contemporary life than a postmodern reinterpretation of Bellini's painting.

*Allegoria Sacra* weaves complex global issues such as the refugee crisis, global warming, identity politics, and gender and sexuality into visually rich metaphors. The group conceives of the digital as the element that holds the global society together. However, it is not clear whether this hold is a genuine bond or, in fact, a form of captivity. Like Lialina, AES+F are concerned with the issues of identity, privacy, freedom and choice. *Allegoria Sacra* refects on human condition from a Russian yet global perspective. This global vision is accounted for by the artwork outreach—it has been shown at art venues all over the world—and it is encoded aesthetically through the use of a multiscreen projection which creates an extraordinary spectacle of performance and immediacy such as the slow digitally enhanced movement of characters and objects against the pulsating background. The massive scale of the project—the digital maxi—is also a refection on the spectacularity of the digital, its omnipresence and panopticism. If Kuvaev ignited Russian digital economy by supplying a product that speaks of intimacy, community and commonality, AES+F showcase the might of this digital economy as they orchestrate a global show of connectivity and (mis)communication. All the artists address ethical and aesthetic questions posed by Lialina a decade ago, which suggests that these questions remain unanswered. This leads me to enquire about the legacy of digital art experiments in the RF.

## 14.5 The Digital Archive: Cyland and Cyfest (the 2000s and the 2010s)

After early experiments since the late 1980s, in the 2010s digital art has become a mainstay of Russian contemporary art scene. For example, there are art galleries that specialize in showing digital art, such as the Multimedia Art Museum headed by the diva of the Russian art scene Olga Sviblova and the Solyanka Art Gallery, which hires young curators to stage shows. Both are located in the center of Moscow and both are sponsored by the government. However, if the Multimedia Art Museum puts on big exhibitions showing blockbusters such as AES+F's *Allegoria Sacra*, for which the Museum gets sponsorship from Russian oil and gas monopolies, the Solyanka Art Gallery is a small space, hidden away from the tourist crowds and specializing in edgy, intellectually challenging exhibitions of international artists and artists from Russian regions. In addition to art spaces, there are numerous mergers—art and fashion as well as art and technology spaces—which include digital art in their programs. For example, Art Play Design Centre in Moscow stages immersive digital shows that enable the visitors to interact with artworks and digital environments.13 This type of exhibition does not engage with innovative technologies and complex issues; however, they do attract wider audiences to museum spaces, thus promoting digital art generally. Another example would be the use of digital art in popular culture, such as 3D projections and immersive videos during live concerts of the Ukrainian-born Russian singer Svetlana Loboda.

The burning issue facing Russian cultural managers is not the promotion of digital art but its preservation. Indeed, how does one conserve pieces produced using obsolete technologies like Lialina's *My Boyfriend Came Back from the War*? And how does one ensure that the Russian public, especially in Russian regions, remains aware of advances in digital art nationally and internationally? While these issues are being acknowledged in the professional community (Biryukova 2018), more work is needed in this direction. At present, no Russian national (federal) museum of digital art exists, and principal museums do not list digital art as their priority area in terms of acquisition. Three major institutions—the Hermitage, the Tretyakov Gallery and the Russian Museum have departments specializing in contemporary art but acquisition of digital art is still very rare. This reveals a gap between artistic practices and the cultural economy whereby there is a perceived lack of national strategy in terms of promotion and preservation of digital art. For example, digital art does not feature in the nationally funded government-led program of digitalization of Russian economy introduced by President Dmitry Medvedev, and discussions in the Russian government and parliament tend to focus on digital literacy, which is, in fact, a re-hash of Gorbachev's policies of perestroika ("greater automation and greater effciency"), and on digital security, which is in actual terms a string of legislation limiting freedoms of communication on the internet.

As a result, the arena of preservation of digital art has been occupied by private initiatives. One of the most infuential ones is Cyland Media Lab. Founded in 2007, Cyland is a non-proft organization dedicated to digital art and broadly the intersection of art and technology through exhibitions, a collection of art, and educational programming. Overall, Cyland aims to connect emerging and established artists, educate how to use creative technology and foster innovation in new technologies (http://cyland.org/lab/about/). Co-founded by Marina Koldobskaia and Anna Frants, Cyland is sponsored by Frants, who, in addition to being a philanthropist, is an internationally renowned multi-media artist specializing in interactive art installations. Cyland collaborates with museums such as the Hermitage and the Chelsea Art Museum (New York, USA), but it has an ambition to build a museum of its own. For a decade Cyland has been building an online collection of artworks. Divided into a video archive and a sound archive, Cyland's online collection is a comprehensive survey of Russian and international art (over 100 individual artists and groups from the RF). Video and sound are understood as a means to categorize works, whereas in actual terms, the collection, managed by Viktoria Ilushkina, features video art, experimental flms, computer graphics, 3D animation and so on. The collection reveals the technological, platform and genre diversity of what is understood as digital art.

In addition to an online collection, Cyland is committed to promoting digital art nationally and internationally through Cyfest. Running since 2008, Cyfest is an annual festival celebrating digital and new media art. The main part of the festival takes place at different venues in St. Petersburg, and some parts of the festival at exhibitions in partner institutions in London, New York, Venice and other places. As with similar festivals in other countries, Cyland festivals are themed; for example, in 2019 the theme was "ID," and in the previous year it was "Digital Cloudness." These themes refer to pressing social, political and aesthetic concerns in the contemporary world. Unlike Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria, Cyfest is a much more focused enterprise with a commitment to experimentation and community building, and not city branding and industry collaborations. Cyfest remains the principal platform for showcasing experimental digital art in the RF. The legacy of Cyland and similar initiatives is to be assessed in future research.

On the one hand, Russian digital art is frequently presented at international art festivals such as Cyfest. On the other, a national museum or archive of computer-based and digital art is to be formed. This is highly unusual for a country obsessed with museums and museufcation. In fact, digital artworks are still to be included in permanent collections of existing museums such as the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg and the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. Similarly, a history and a theory of Russian digital art and new media art are to be written. In this context of research possibilities and probabilities, an essential history of Russian art allows for an in-depth understanding of the development of internet technologies in the RF (for more on types of digital archives, see Chaps. 20 and 21).

Nowadays the internet is a mundane thing and users are more likely to speak of specifc platforms such as VKontakte or Twitter. In the mid-1990s the internet was a novel phenomenon which relied on the user's advanced technical knowledge and produced an important effect of instantaneous connectivity in a world where people still used landline telephone connections, faxes and telegrams to communicate with each other. Indeed, instantaneity of communication and production of online social networks were two focal points of net. artists. They employed a variety of techniques some of which would be considered dubious by present-day users, such as fake websites, spam mails and unsolicited distribution of information. Their purpose was to explore networked modes of communication and interplays of exchanges. They understood collaborative and cooperative work differently whereby they frequently delegated the production of the artwork to the user, not just to other members of the artistic community. Ultimately, they aimed at working across national borders, building a digital utopia for the next generation of artists. For many contemporary Russian artists, the digital remains an arena of utopian possibilities to be explored.

## Notes

## References

Strukov, Vlad. 2004. Masiania, or Reimagining the Self in the Cyberspace of Rusnet. *The Slavic and East European Journal* 48 (3): 438–461.

———. 2009. A Journey through Time: Alexander Sokurov's Russian Ark and Theories of Mimesis. In *Realism and the Audiovisual Media*, ed. Lucia Nagib and C. Mello, 119–132. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

———. 2011. Digital Sebastian: Interview with Natalia Kamenetskaia. *Studies in Russian, Eurasian and Central European New Media* 6: 121–127.

———. 2016. *Contemporary Russian Cinema: Symbols of a New Era*. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Wegren, Stephen. 2018. *Putin's Russia: Past Imperfect, Future Uncertain*. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefeld.

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## From Samizdat to New Sincerity. Digital Literature on the Russian-Language Internet

*Henrike Schmidt*

## 15.1 Introduction. The Hybrid Nature of Digital Literature

No clear-cut defnition exists to describe digital literature, which is characterized by its hybrid nature and which borders on the felds of information technology, media art, media activism and computer games. Katherine Hayles speaks about "new horizons for the literary," emphasizing that digital literature transgresses a restricted understanding of literature, in the sense of discrete texts and established literary devices (Hayles 2008, 4). Scott Rettberg alternatively uses the term "electronic literature" (2016, 2019; see also Tabbi 2018; O'Sullivan 2019), underlining also its inherent hybridity and the diffculty, if not impossibility, of working with fxed genre defnitions. Electronic literature in his view stands at the crossroads of literary practice and critique and is characterized "by the approach rather than content" (2016, 166). In the following, digital literature is understood accordingly as an umbrella term for "literary practices in digital and networked environments." Exemplary manifestations of digital literature are animated poetry, text generators producing poems relying on algorithms and hyperfction, that is, stories told in a digressive, interactive way by using hyperlinks: icons, graphics or text that link to another document or website. For the later phase of increasingly mobile devices, since approximately the early 2010s, one might think of "locative literature" (ibid., 170), in which smartphone apps guide readers through story worlds at real locations,

H. Schmidt (\*)

Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
D. Gritsenko et al. (eds.), *The Palgrave Handbook of Digital Russia Studies*, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42855-6\_15

thus enabling a temporal-physical immersion into the narration. Whether digitized texts, that is, works previously published in print and later converted into digital format, can be classifed as digital literature is a topic of debate (Bouchardon 2017, 3). What unites all appearances of literature or "the literary" in the digital sphere is the fact that they are computer-processed and thus rely on code. The literary texts, which the readers perceive on the surface of the computer screen, are secondary, products of the underlying primary text of the computer code. They tend to either hide their computer-generated nature, which we can call media in-transparency, or display it openly, exposing the texts' mediated nature.

Literary practices on the Russian-language Internet (Runet), ranging from online libraries to Facebook life-writing, have become as of 2019 an established theme in Slavic Literary Studies, which analyzes how such phenomena relate to historical developments in Russian literature. Autobiographical blogging may, for example, be researched in connection to Fyodor Dostoevsky's *Dnevnik pisatela*̑ (A Writer's Diary, 1873–1881). These practices constitute an integral part of the broader sphere of Digital Russia Studies, which investigates the interaction between the different segments of culture, politics and economy, for example, the use of literary memes for political campaigning. The newly evolving discipline of Global Russian Studies (Platt 2019) tackles, in turn, questions of transnationally dispersed communities beyond traditional understandings of exile or diaspora, which are important for analyzing Russianlanguage writing-scapes and reading-scapes. Concurrently, digital literature on the Runet is being integrated into the wider context of Global Digital Studies, including literary aspects (Rettberg 2019; O'Sullivan 2019; Tabbi 2018). For some time now, this feld has been opening itself up to non-English/non-Latin alphabet based case studies in order to overcome its Western-centricism (Russell and Echchaibi 2009).

Runet literary studies do not differ theoretically or methodologically from global approaches. But they do offer interesting insights into the specifc correlations between literary and socio-political evolution in a given national/ cultural context. This is particularly signifcant for the frst phase of Runet development in the early 1990s, when, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, political transformation and media "revolution" coincided. But it is also relevant to the politicized media environment that has established itself after almost two decades of Vladimir Putin's executive rule as President and Prime Minister. This environment is characterized by a return to vertical power structures, neo-imperialist tendencies and new identity politics (for more on history of Runet, see Chap. 16).

The early manifestations of both Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) have been a global inspiration in terms of their potentially democratizing impact, with democratization understood here as access to publication technology, and not primarily in a values sense (Jenkins 2006, 241). Hypertext appeared as the embodiment of a new epistemological system or the realization of long dreamt of literary utopias: the ultimate library—non-linear story telling. In global theory on CMC, researchers coined concepts including the "wreader" (George Landow 2006) and "the prosumer" (Jenkins 2006). "Wreaders" co-create meaning in collaborative literary projects; "prosumers" in today's participatory cultures consume and produce at the same time.

Due to the high technical and fnancial barriers to Internet access in the early phase of Internet development (i.e., from the late 1980s to the mid-1990s), the frst users were mostly scientists, programmers at research institutions or academics at universities. As the Internet became more widespread and commoditized, the technically advanced pioneers and "fathers of the Runet" were replaced by a mass of unsophisticated enthusiasts. With each new succeeding generation, the ways in which digital technologies are used are changing, including of course in the feld of culture and literature. Editing, copying, sharing and commenting are gradually replacing the creation of "genuine" content. The associated discourses range from the concept of an emancipating collective vernacular creativity, as a continuation of traditional folklore in modern garb, to critical interpretations in the sense of an emerging "prosumer capitalism" (Beck-Pristed 2020, 418). This process is taking place in Russia in analogy to global dynamics. As regards the Runet, such global phenomena and terminology are sometimes embedded into national cultural contexts. A characteristic example of this is the study of amateur creativity, a global phenomenon on the Internet, stimulated by the web's easy-to-use publication technologies (Vadde 2017). In Runet contexts, however, amateur culture tends to be "nationalized," that is, explained with an emphasis on historical or cultural traditions. Both protagonists and researchers contextualize amateur writing with reference to the historical phenomenon of Soviet *samizdat* literature (Gorny 2006, 197; Kuznecov 2004). *Samizdat* literally means "self-publishing" (from the Russian "*sam*" = "self" and *izdavat*" = "to publish") and relates to a highly elaborated, clandestine publication system of works that were subject to political censorship.

The present chapter continues with a further clarifcation of terminology. It then offers a survey of the main "genres" of digital literature, ranging from hypertext to blogging. The conclusion outlines main research trends and future desiderata.

## 15.2 Literary Practices/Literary Facts on the Runet: Definitions and Approaches

Roughly two decades have passed since Computer-Mediated Communication was broadly implemented worldwide. In this period, a complex terminology has been elaborated—and continually deconstructed—that distinguishes (1) digitized from (2) digital and from (3) Internet (networked; *setevaâ*) literature (Bouchardon 2017, 3; Gendolla et al. 2010). According to this approach, *digitized literature* denotes previously published print texts, digitized to achieve broader or different dissemination. A reproduction of a historic poetry collection in one of the numerous online libraries would be a typical example. Digitized literature is differentiated from *born digital* materials, texts originally written on a computer and which do not have a paper substrate (Hayles 2008, 3). *Digital literature*, in turn, designates works that rely aesthetically on distinct features of ICT, such as the inclusion of hyperlinks, multimedia or animation. The hyperfction poem *V metro* (In the Subway) by Sergey Vlasov and Georgy Zherdev (together with Aleksey Dobkin 2001), offering multiple possibilities to navigate through a set of stories, may serve here as illustration. *Internet or networked literature* is closely related to digital literature. It also relies naturally on code and is embedded into hyperlinked CMC environments, but its conceptual core is concerned with communication practices (sharing, commenting, liking) and is characterized by the Internet's volatile and often very large communities. An example would be the *virtual personae* that were popular on the Runet in the late 1990s to early 2000s. A *virtual persona* is "a fctitious personality, established by a person or group of people which creates semiotic artifacts" (Gorny 2006, 194). *Virtual personae*, or, respectively, their "authors," use communication forums and websites as a playground for identity games including gender swapping (ibid., 208).

As Scott Rettberg underlines, in electronic or digital literature the individual literary work often is less important than the "exploratory engagement" (2016, 166–167) with contemporary computer technology. Consequently, "toolmaking and platform development" should be considered to be an integral part of it. The latter can be specially generated creative environments. But any existing, even commercial, platforms can also be subjected to poetic uses. On Twitter, for example, literary quotations from an author or on a specifc topic can be posted, individually selected or automatically processed relying on algorithmic procedures. Such (semi-)automated forms of poetic meaning production sometimes play with the principle of chance, in a continuation of aleatory avant-garde practices. There exist numerous Twitter accounts of historical and contemporary Russian writers or celebrities—some real, some fctional. Since 2012, to name but one, the Russian exiled poet and Nobel Prize winner Joseph Brodsky (†1996) has a Twitter account (@brodsky\_joseph), which is followed by around 350,000 users. The "authors" standing behind such *virtual personae* often remain (semi-)anonymous, masked by their pseudonyms. This demonstrates how specifc "genres" or usage patterns can migrate from one technical environment like forums or blogs to another (Twitter).

At the same time, since ICT increasingly infltrates everyday life and routines, including writing and reading, clear-cut distinctions between on and offine become obsolete. Consequently, the concept of a *post-digital* or *post-Internet* literature has evolved. Post-Internet literature refers to texts that have been produced online but re/turn to paper (Hayles 2008, 159). A typical example would be a blog that is subsequently printed in book form as a kind of sequel, as was the case with the popular online diary written by scriptwriter and novelist Yevgeni Grishkovetz (*Izbrannye zapisi*, Selected posts, 2014).

The growing amalgamation of the on and offine spheres poses challenges to fxed defnitions. More fexible approaches (re)gain signifcance, for example, the concept of "remediation." Bolter and Grusin ([1999] 2000) introduced the term in order to describe the multiple processes of media transformation to which any content is subjected. Often labeled "revolutions," these do not, at least in most cases, lead to the extinction of the previous forms but rather to convergence. Concerning the digital sphere, remediations run in opposite directions and on two tracks: from analogue to digital—from print books to digitized manuscripts—and from digital to analogue—from Twitter posts to poetry collections.

Another approach, which relies not on defnition but rather on function, revitalizes Russian Formalist theory, particularly in its concepts of "*literaturnost'*" (literariness) and the "*literaturnyj fakt*" (literary fact) as developed by Viktor Shklovsky and others in the early twentieth century ("Russian Formalism," in Buchanan 2018). "Literariness" is understood as an aesthetic quality (function), which exists not only in literary texts proper but characterizes (online) communication in a broader sense. "Literary facts" are, by contrast, features of non-literary communication (in the present case of digital culture, for example, encodings, media formats or colloquial styles), which in turn affect literary practices.

The chapter follows the typology sketched above, using the concepts of *digitized*, *digital*, *networked* and *post-digital* literature as a rough grid. In so doing, it avoids normative judgments such as the one arguing that digitized literature, as a "simple" remediation, is less culturally signifcant than experiments with hypertext or critical explorations of code.

## 15.3 The Russian-Language Internet (Runet): Horizontal Versus Vertical Communication Patterns

The term "Runet" as an object of scientifc inquiry is not less elusive than "digital literature." On the global Internet, reading and writing audiences cannot be clearly differentiated according to territorial, national, ethnic or language criteria, despite recent trends toward a re-emerging national sovereignty in the digital sphere (for more, see Chap. 2). This is especially true for Russian contexts, with the existence of a large diaspora and the new "global Russians," constantly moving between their native country and the second homes they have chosen across the world. Grigory Chkhartishvili, also known as Boris Akunin, an author of sophisticated historical detective fction, is a good example for a global Russian writer: he lives in Europe, in London and Northern France, and continues to infuence Russian prose as well as the socio-political discourse via his Facebook account. In this chapter, the term Runet designates the *Russian-language* Internet accordingly. Where applicable, it will be distinguished from the Internet in the Russian Federation, for example, with regard to the discussion of legislation and regulation.

In early conceptualizations, the structural horizontality of the Internet was hailed as a technological embodiment of postmodernist concepts, including de-hierarchization and non-linearity (ignoring the fact that the technology was actually developed as part of United States [US] military programs). In the contexts of the Runet, this had two major implications. Firstly, on a philosophical level, media change and the regime change of perestroika seemed to coincide with the metaphor of the horizontal, denoting the non-hierarchical, whether this be realized in political democratization or in digressive narration. Secondly, on a pragmatic level, the abolition of censorship put an end to the hunger for books of the late 1980s, an appetite that was immediately satisfed on the Internet—at least for those who could access it.

The Runet of the early and mid-1990s was a marginal phenomenon, with less than one percent of the Russian population online. The early adopters were either members of the technological elite working at scientifc institutions or living abroad, mostly in the US, Israel or Germany. The foremost implication of this was that early literary communication on the Runet took place using the Latin alphabet, as Cyrillic encodings did not yet exist. This new communication environment stimulated linguistic creativity, including the systematic use of obscenities, traditionally named *mat*. A later offspring of this linguistic inventiveness is the so-called *padonki* slang (*padonki* translates as "scumbags"), which relies on the principle of distorted phonetic transcription. Questions of coding thus turned into literary facts. The *padonki* movement produced, besides an immense corpus of texts that partly can be considered a form of Internet folklore, also its own platform, which was very popular in the 2000s (udaff.com; see Goriunova 2012).

The year 1998 put an end to the Runet's marginal status. Paradoxically, this was a consequence of the severe fnancial crisis, which was accompanied by galloping infation. The new medium demonstrated that broader user groups could effciently exploit it, by monitoring ruble exchange rates in real time.  The opening of the Reading Room (*Žurnal'nyj zal*) in the decisive year of 1998 symbolized and embodied the arrival of established canons and authorities in the digital sphere. The Reading Room represented the *tolstye žurnaly* (thick journals) and published excerpts or whole issues of renowned journals such as *Novyj mir* (New World) free of charge. The thick journals have been a peculiarity of Russian reading culture since the late eighteenth century. They publish both literary works and literary criticism and exemplify what is alleged to be Russian literature's exceptional signifcance, a literature that fulflls not only aesthetic but also ethical and political functions in a public sphere curbed by censorship. As such, they contribute to the essentialist and literature-centric view of Russia as a "reading country." In the perestroika era, their popularity rocketed as they took part in political and social transformation. By the 1990s, however, these journals were ailing, due to an overall tendency of de-canonization and because of the economic problems in disseminating their content to more peripheral regions. Paradoxically, the Runet provided a remedy against diminishing circulation and infuence while simultaneously representing a diametrically opposed attitude of non-hierarchical literary communication.

With the overall growth of the Internet—jumping from 2 percent of the population in the late 1990s to 40–50 percent in the 2010s, and fnally catching up in comparison to average global Internet penetration, reaching 76 percent in 2019—state institutions also arrived on the Runet. A legal framework was elaborated for the previously largely unregulated sphere of the Internet within the Russian Federation. Of major signifcance for literary issues are copyright regulations, implemented in the course of Russia's accession to the World Trading Organization (WTO) in 2012. But legislative measures also include the registration of popular literary blogs under the category of mass media and the blocking of individual works or whole websites for allegedly propagating pornography and pedophilia or "extremism" (for more, see Chap. 5). The ban of the popular instant messenger Telegram in 2018, for example, met with resistance on the part of young users, in particular, and attracted a lot of attention abroad. Experts differentiate between frst, second and third generations of Internet control, with the latter embracing repressive methods *and* so-called positive content, that is, cultural narratives, used to disseminate pro-regime information and values (Deibert et al. 2010, 7). It is writers like the prose author and TV journalist Sergey Minaev who contribute to such content creation in the frst place. In his successful novel *Media Sapiens. Povest' o tret'em sroke* (Media Sapiens. The Story of the Third Term, 2007), Minaev creates an infuential picture of oppositional media as manipulated and corrupt. This needs to be contrasted with protest movements against electoral fraud and against vertical power structures since the 2010s. These movements rely massively on online mobilization, and, by so doing, they challenge offcial Internet policies (for more on digital activism, see Chap. 8). Literary practices on the Runet thus take place in a highly politicized environment. The trope of horizontality, ascribed to the new medium of communication in the postperestroika period, was superseded by the metaphor of the "*vertikal' vlasti*" (power vertical, Ryazanova-Clarke 2009) as a description of the political system of the Putin era.

## 15.4 Literary Practices on the Runet: Libraries and Life-Writing

#### *15.4.1 Digitized Literature: Forming the Canon from Below*

Online libraries fgured among the frst literary projects of the Runet. Born out of the hunger for books in the post-perestroika era, they made previously censored texts available. These frst digital libraries were personal text collections, intended to be shared with like-minded readers. Their initiators belonged to the technical intelligentsia. Typical examples are EEL (*Publičnaâ èlektronnaâ*  *biblioteka Evgeniâ Peskina*, Eugene's Electronic Library, 1992–1998) and the Moshkov library lib.ru (1994), named after its initiator, the programmer Maksim Moshkov. The latter refused the title of librarian, describing himself instead as a mere "doorman" (Mjør 2014, 217). Readers digitized literary works they wanted to see on the virtual shelves and submitted them for electronic publication. The library refected an eclectic mix of individual tastes and previously marginalized genres, ranging from religious and esoteric texts to science and cyberfction writing.

With the arrivals of the "professionals" onto the feld of play, academically trained literary critics and philologists, new library projects emerged. The RVB (*Russkaâ virtual'naâ biblioteka*, Russian Virtual Library, 1999) offered literary works in accordance with academic standards while modifying the canon by including *samizdat* poetry. The FÈB (*Fundamental'naâ èlektronnaâ biblioteka 'Russkaâ literatura i fol'klor'*, Fundamental Digital Library of Russian Literature and Folklore) was the frst online library partly fnanced by state money and affliated to pre-digital academic institutions, in this case the Gorky Institute of World Literature. The FÈB reproduced the literary canon of pre-revolutionary Russia in authoritative digital editions, partly relying on Soviet scholarship and thus implicitly its norms (Mjør 2014, 223).

All libraries provided popular communication forums and metamorphosed from text repositories into social networks in their own rights. For the Runet as a global reading-scape, embracing remote Russian regions and the global diaspora, the online libraries represented a much-needed source of information. At the same time, through their functioning as social networks, they turned into "source[s] of identifcation" (Mjør 2014, 219). In addition to the troika of the renowned Runet libraries, there exists a multiplicity of smaller, less conceptual, but not less popular, online libraries, where books—especially contemporary prose—can be downloaded for free, in part still illegally. Peter Shillingsburg has called such amateur libraries the "dank cellar" of the Internet, worth consideration as an expression of canon formation from below (Shillingsburg 2006, 138).

An abrupt change in the history of these book repositories occurred in 2004, when the Moshkov library was sued for copyright violations. As a reaction to the trial, the "readers' librarian" changed his publication policies. New entries in the library were restricted to texts available in the public domain. In addition, Moshkov initiated a platform associated to the library where authors can publish their texts themselves. Named Samizdat, the nomenclature refers to discourses about the Runet as an extension of unoffcial Soviet publication practices, as detailed above.

A decade later, in 2014, the frst large-scale state-fnanced digital library project was initiated: NÈB (*Nacional'naâ èlektronnaâ biblioteka*, National Electronic Library). The NÈB unites the digital collections of a multiplicity of Russian libraries. It is oriented toward the professional reader. Contemporary fction protected by copyright is not publicly available but can be accessed from the electronically equipped reading rooms of participating institutions.

Thus, 2004 was a watershed year, marked by the Moshkov trial and the gradual implementation of regulations covering authorial rights. Alongside this, a commercial sector for literary content evolved. This process was stimulated technologically, by the availability of mobile devices—including smartphones, tablets and e-book readers—and specifc e-book formats—epub, fb2—which detached reading from stationary computers. Only one year later, the Litres.ru e-book store, originally a network of smaller online libraries, started its activities on a pay-per-download basis. In the years following it established itself as market leader, actively opposing "pirated" resources. Other providers of legal literary content followed, offering different distribution systems. In 2007, Kroogi (Circles), a sharing platform for music, art and literature, went online, based on a pay-what-you-want strategy. Kroogi also offers crowdfunding models. A little later, in 2010, Bookmate was founded as a Freemium service. Users pay a monthly fee to access copyrighted content, which consisted of roughly 800,000 literary texts and audio books as of 2018. In order to structure the abounding wealth of content and to work with their audiences, all of the named e-book services provide multiple communication forums and incentive systems. They arrange editors' and readers' recommendations, rankings and awards, incorporating functions that were previously distributed among different institutions (online libraries, magazines, awards).