Editor's Note:This article originally appeared in Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty here.
Svetlana Privalova was a 19-year-old student in the Tatar capital of Kazan when she watched, helplessly, as residents in North Ossetia struggled with the cataclysmic grief of the death of more than 300 children and adults in the Beslan school siege.
“I really wanted to help,” she said of the 2004 crisis. “We were all so worried. But I didn’t know what to do.”
This July, Privalova watched another tragedy unfold as an overloaded cruise ship, the “Bulgaria,” sank in the Volga River outside Kazan, drowning more than 120 people, mainly women and children.
This time, Privalova didn’t hesitate. She quickly joined a support group, helping to provide care for children orphaned by the disaster and organizing a traditional mourning ceremony 40 days after the incident.
“This was a group that was formed with the aim of helping out, rallying together, uniting. We even held a special event, a memorial day, for the 40th day,” Privalova says. “No one from the authorities even responded, they didn’t do anything. The entire thing was the initiative of ordinary people.”
So what changed in the seven years that passed between Beslan and the “Bulgaria”?
“I think everyone understands that the police are corrupt, the entire government is a kleptocracy. But what can somebody in Murmansk to do to oppose the government in this abstract sense? When people are faced with real-life situations that really affect them, they’re much more likely to participate and use the Internet as a tool for that.” For one, Privalova had become an independent adult, a professional marketer and mother of a young daughter. But perhaps more significantly, the country had changed as well.
Long an unplugged media monolith dominated by state-run television and a dearth of political compassion, Russia had evolved into a fast-growing Internet market where “ordinary people” suddenly had options for getting their information — and options for acting on it as well.
In Privalova’s case, this was a special page dedicated to the “Bulgaria” tragedy on the so-called “Russian Facebook,” the social-networking site Vkontakte. The “Bulgaria” site, which includes a photo gallery of the victims, a detailed breakdown of the accident, and a constant stream of dialogue about ways to help, now has more than 5,000 supporters, from locations as diverse as St. Petersburg, Istanbul, Sochi, and Nizhnevartovsk.
In an otherwise bleak media landscape, the rapid rise of the Internet is shifting the Russian information industry from a top-down operation to a looser, more pluralistic affair where regular Russians are no longer expected to be passive consumers of traditional news.
Television, which still reigns supreme as a source of news for 85 percent of Russians, may provide a glossy and orchestrated image of the world that suits the Kremlin’s needs. The dwindling newspaper trade may deliver tailored bulletins to niche audiences. But the Russian Internet, or RuNet, is the first medium in the country to come without a built-in ideological bent.
And along the way, it’s fueling a new wave of civic activism — one that may not bring sweeping political change or find common cause with the traditional opposition, but which is rapidly giving regular Russians power to bear on issues that affect them most, from car inspections to community safety to bureaucracy and corruption.
Vadim Nikitin, a Russian-born blogger and RuNet analyst, says the rise of social networking, blogs, and video sharing have handed Russians an unprecedented opportunity to free themselves from larger political debate and simply connect over “real-life problems.”
“In the West, YouTube is a place for cat videos. In Russia, YouTube is a place where you see videos about police corruption and traffic abuses,” Nikitin says. “Really, YouTube has been a big channel where civic activism is involved. And those kinds of questions that touch on people’s ordinary lives are the ones that have the biggest scope for bringing in participation.”
Read the rest of the story here.
