Moments after seeing TV images of Vladimir Putin professing a liking for a then poorly rated white leopard as the Sochi Winter Olympics mascot, which was being chosen through a nationwide poll, my dad said: “Mark my words: that will be the one”.
Funny how a lifetime spent living in Russia can develop one’s clairvoyance!
Of course, jokes aside, it’s pretty depressing that the Tandem can’t resist rigging even an innocuous phone poll, let alone a national election.
But maybe the rigged poll is a manifestation of its larger social-network-o-phobia, the fear that social media is even scarier than free elections?
Writing in today’s Moscow Times, Andrei Soldatov describes how the FSB and Interior Ministry reacted to the unrest in the Middle East
by proposing Criminal Code amendments that would have made the owners of online social networks responsible for all content posted on their sites. Apparently, the idea is not to incriminate the owners of Facebook and Vkontakte of extremism personally, but to force them to pass responsibility on to individual users by requiring each to sign a contract that includes their passport information.
Of course, it seems that the Kremlin has uncritically swallowed the propaganda of the Western twitterati: the role of social media in social protests has been greatly exaggerated, making the current anxiety a misplaced overreaction.
However, at least this means that Medvedev’s whole internet infatuation is not just some cheap PR ploy. After all, as the Soviet authorities showed with their approach to great literature, in Russia, a crackdown is often the highest form of flattery.