Russia's geek-in-chief

Posted By Evgeny Morozov Friday, April 3, 2009 - 1:19 PM

In case you were wondering why the Kremlin needs its own English-language news channel targeting an international audience, it's to run stories like this one.

With the world's leaders all around him at the G20 in London, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has been seen breezily chatting away on his mobile phone.

It is the first time a Russian president has ever been seen in public using a mobile.

Medvedev is known to like keeping up with the latest high-tech gadgets, and even has been seen wearing a James Bond-style watch complete with a camera, GPS navigator, radio and video player.

As a true geek, Medvedev is probably also not a big fan of Microsoft. While the rest of the world has been battling Bill Gates' empire for almost two decades, it's only now that Russia has waken up to the challenge and has placed the company on a government antitrust watchlist. CNET has more.

I wonder if the persecution of Microsoft is somehow related to much-discussed plans for the development of a genuine Russian “national open-source operating system” that could overtake other open-source projects like Ubuntu. Most open-source systems are - how should I put it – already (or still?) very hard to use; giving them an extra Russian edge would make them appealing only to the small tech-masochist niche – or, perhaps, the Russian bureaucrats who are the usual victims of such experiments (in late 1990s, they were all complaining about having to drive Russian cars to work). But of course, the situation would change dramatically if the Russian geek-in-chief were to ban Microsoft from Russia!

Photo by Worldeconomicforum/Flickr

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Mars attacks, Stalin reacts!

Posted By Evgeny Morozov Thursday, April 2, 2009 - 8:30 PM

Cyberspace is not immune to the growing obsession with all things Stalin that is sweeping Russian public life. It looks like the most popular game of 2009 in the country might easily be "Stalin vs Martians: The Unknown Pages of the Second World War," an upcoming war-strategy game from a consortium of game studios. The script doesn't sound too captivating (unlike the song -- called the "Stalinator" -- in the game's trailer):

Year 1942. Summer. The martians suddenly land somewhere in Siberia and attack the glorious people of Holy Mother Russia. It is a hard time for USSR as you might know from the history books if you ever attended school. The situation is really f**ed up, so comrade Stalin takes the anti-ET military operation under his personal control. The operation is a top secret and virtually nobody knows about the fact of extraterrestial intervention.

I already hear a horde of Kremlinologists speculating that Stalin's hardcore fans need to argue for a massive and undocumented invasion by Martians to prove his legacy, for -- without the Martians -- they are simply running out of arguments for Stalin's greatness. And still, the very sight of a dancing Stalin screaming "I command you to dance!" in the game's trailer would easily compensate for the lack of creativity in the script. Perhaps the game would make much more sense as a quest than as a war strategy. Navigating Stalin through the mazes of the NKVD would make for a truly eerie experience.

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Cyber-Komsomol chooses safe Internet over safe sex

Posted By Evgeny Morozov Monday, March 30, 2009 - 11:11 PM

Maticulous/Flickr

Why did the Soviet Communist Party beget so many youth wings? It was undoubtedly very helpful in instiling the right set of Leninist values in the younger generations. Komsomol, the most famous of those young wings, founded in 1918 and boasting several thousand members at the peak of its popularity, emerged as a very effective mind-control tool for most Soviet teenagers.

Now, the cyber-Komsomol strikes back on the newly discovered (at least by them) World Wide Web. GZT, a reputable Russian online newspaper reports (in Russian) that authorities are preparing to hold a competition for the best Russian youth site that promotes a"positive spirit". Their announcement comes on the heels of a round table organized as part of events associated with -- and I am not joking here -- "the year of the safe Internet in Russia" (yes, while the rest of the world usually devotes a day to commemorate such matters, Russians are acting typically grand).

And what does "safe Internet" mean to the organizers? Is it, perhaps, safe from online predators or cyber-spies? Not at all. To make our Internet safer, we need to "create more positive online content in order to counter all the negative content." Wait, don't other nations simply call that "spin"? Given that a few years ago members of Nashi, the most famous Kremlin-controlled youth movement, were organizing sex camps in the provinces, I reckon that "safe Internet" is currently more valued than "safe sex.

Photo by Maticulous/Flickr

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