No one said the protest movement's "cloud democracy" initiatives were going to be easy.
For the Russian opposition, the Internet has always been about
circumvention. Circumventing the monotone pro-Putin media; circumventing
the injustices of a political system that has shut them out for years;
circumventing Putin's narrative of rebirth, national pride, and
stability.
Thus it made perfect sense when the opposition decided to hold elections for a new Coordinating Council online.
Starting on October 20, opposition supporters were given the chance to
choose 45 members (from over 200) of a new Russian Opposition
Coordinating Council. Over 80,000 people took part in the three-day
poll.
The organizers of the online vote, however, have come under fire for
potentially exposing participants' data, which could provide a database
of dissent for the Russian authorities. And plagued by cyberattacks and
"zombie voters," the opposition vote has shown how susceptible such
platforms are to hijacking from malicious parties.
Things haven't been easy for Russia's opposition in recent years. A
hodge-podge of hard-core leftists, Soviet-era dissidents, tech-savvy
urban hipsters, and moneyed socialites, it has suffered from in-fighting
and lacked a cohesive narrative or charismatic leader.
It was fitting then that Aleksei Navalny, an anticorruption blogger and
opposition poster boy, came from the Internet. (Navalny came in first
place in the online elections.) He became a symbol of this new
Internet-powered civil society: diverse, atomized, and yes, mere blips
on Russia's vast radar, but an emerging and important force nonetheless.
Generation VKontakte weren't bound together by the ties of ideology,
but rather by the social networks and blogging platforms they used.
The Opposition Coordinating Council is an attempt to bridge these
divides and bring more organizational and ideological cohesion. In the
future the council will coordinate protests and be involved in picking
candidates for elections.
The man behind the opposition's election platform is Leonid Volkov, an
IT specialist and municipal deputy from Yekaterinburg, an industrial
city in the Urals. Volkov, who had once been prevented from running for
the regional parliament and has called for a "cloud democracy" with
virtual mayors, set up cvk2012.org,
which features candidate lists, essays, discussion forums, and links to
Facebook groups where participants could chat with the candidates. An
independent Internet television station, Dozhd, ran debates between the candidates. Most importantly, cvk2012.org allowed people to vote for their preferred candidates.
The voting platform ran into trouble before the voting started when MMM,
a shady pyramid scheme whose founder, Sergei Mavrodi, wants to bring
down global capitalism, started registering candidates (and paying the
$325 fee). Volkov claimed that the MMM has been paid by the Kremlin to disrupt the elections and blocked its candidacies.