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Moscow Times
March 3, 2005
A Student Plots an Information Revolution
By Francesca Mereu
Staff Writer

Laid up with a sports injury, 22-year-old politics student Alexander Korsunov was reduced to following January's street protests against social reforms on television and over the Internet.

Korsunov said he was shocked to see that "such important protests were not given airtime" on state television, while reams of information were available online.

"It was disgusting and unfair -- as a young person I felt I had to do something to help," Korsunov said in an interview in central Moscow early this week. "People approve of the Kremlin's policies because they are not informed, they do not know how bad the situation in the country is."

Korsunov and his friends at Moscow's Higher School of Economics decided to launch a web site giving details of the hundreds of protests across the country, which erupted after the law replacing a range of Soviet-style benefits with meager cash payments came into effect Jan. 1.

The web site, www.skaji.net, or Say No, received 45,000 hits in its first month, and elicited inquiries from journalists seeking more information than they could glean from just the mainstream media.

The site is one of several initiatives by youth groups that have sprung up on the coattails of the benefits protests, as opponents of President Vladimir Putin's government have taken issue with what they say are its increasingly authoritarian policies -- from the scrapping of direct gubernatorial elections to a proposal to draft students into the military.

To gather data, Korsunov and his friends contacted various organizations and political parties involved in the protests, and read online news media from around the country, including regional news agencies.

Political analyst Vladimir Pribylovsky, who heads the Panorama think tank, said he sent the skaji.net site the list of State Duma deputies who voted for the controversial benefits law. The list is posted on the web site under the link "About the Law."

"We came up with the idea of the map after seeing television coverage in which journalists tried to plant the idea in people's minds that the demonstrations were limited events. Looking at the map, people can see that this isn't true," Korsunov said.

On a home page map of Russia, a forest of small red flames indicates the places where protests took place. The markers -- now 107 in number -- are mainly in European Russia, but also as far afield as the Far North, the North Caucasus, Siberia and the Far East, and show the extent of the protests nationwide.

Visitors to the site can click on the flames and see how many protests have taken place in each town or city, and how many people took part in them, while a calendar gives information about upcoming protests.

In the Siberian town of Chita, for example, the site lists three demonstrations, on Jan. 19 and 20 and Feb. 20, says that the number of protesters grew from 900 to 2,000 and names the organizers. The site also gives the source from which the information was taken.

Korsunov said the web site came about thanks to the support of some small businesses that offered the students free office space and Internet access.

The businessmen supporting the project, Korsunov said, are "tired of the power vertical Putin has built in the country" and think the Kremlin's increased control over civil society and the media is "hindering the development" of their businesses. The businessmen declined to be interviewed, saying through Korsunov that they were afraid of reprisals from the authorities.

The liberal Yabloko and Union of Right Forces parties and the populist Rodina party also moved to associate themselves with the project, putting their banners on the web site.

Alexei Navalny, deputy chairman of the Moscow branch of Yabloko, said Korsunov and his friends contacted the party and joined in with its protests in the city against the monetization of benefits.

After participating in the demonstrations, Korsunov said he and his friends came to the conclusion that they needed "to act offline as well."

On Feb. 17, they created a youth organization called Lyudi v Kurse, which means roughly People in the Know.

Korsunov's organization is one of a plethora of small youth organizations that have sprung up on the back of the pensioners' protests. Yabloko's youth wing and the new youth group Idushchiye Bez Putina, or Moving Without Putin, announced last Thursday they would work together in opposing "authoritarian" government policies.

"Thanks to these protests, many young people who used to be passive have started organizing themselves into small groups. This is a positive trend," Navalny said.

In a manifesto published on the skaji.net site, Lyudi v Kurse said that it would seek to use information as a weapon to fight against the Kremlin's policies.

"In today's Russia, federal and electronic media are under the strict censorship of the government, whose propaganda machine is trying to create a loyal civil conscience and a single political brand. Any demonstration of dissent is persecuted and punished; independent media are closed and independent and professional journalists harassed. Television newscasts cannot satisfy the thirst for information Russians have. We want to know the TRUTH and be INFORMED," the manifesto said.

The sprouting of youth protest groups is worrying Kremlin officials, who fear that a united youth movement could organize street protests similar to those that led to changes of government in Ukraine and Serbia.

Ukraine's Pora, or It's Time, movement that played a key role in last year's Orange Revolution, and Serbia's Otpor, or Resistance, movement that led protests against President Slobodan Milosevic in 2000, both started from small scattered groups like those now in Russia.

For its part, the Kremlin is fighting back on the youth front with a revamping of its Idushchiye Vmeste, or Moving Together, movement, that the Moving Without Putin group mockingly took its name from.

The new pro-Kremlin youth movement, Nashi, or Us, has opened two web sites, www.zaputina.ru and www.reloading-sps.narod.ru, both devoted to Putin and praising the government's social reforms.

For now, Lyudi v Kurse knows it is but a speck on the Kremlin's horizon.

At the core of the group are a dozen current and former students of the Higher School of Economics, a school headed by former economics minister and prominent liberal Yevgeny Yasin. Around that core are about 150 young people "unhappy with the present situation," Korsunov said.

Korsunov said Lyudi v Kurse hopes to link up with other like-minded groups in opposing the Kremlin, and in the meantime is working on new ways of getting its message out.

Its launch was a rock concert given by two bands that support the group, and future plans include taking part in protests and spreading their message through the Internet.

"Information is the first step toward democracy, " Korsunov said.