Such a plethora of official initiatives could give the impession that, in spite of some difficulties, Russian e-democracy, under governmental leadership, will shortly lead to a political democratization in Russia (Iliya Massukh, for instance, wrote as much) A closer look at the situation, however, does not confirm the purity of government intentions. When Schegolev held the position of Communications Minister, he said the following about his vision for Russian e-democracy: “It is a rather promising project because it works in accordance with outsourcing principles. When we are able to see – with the help of analytical tools – which areas of our work receive the largest number of complaints, then we will be able to assess the performance of particular entities, agencies, and managers.” His words demonstrate that the purpose of Russia’s e-democracy initiative is not about expanding citizen participation per se, but about improving the government machine through a form of citizen participation. The public interests, in this view, are therefore secondary.
"These democratic decorations of the authoritarian regime [just serve as] an exhaust valve for protest sentiments."
To many analysts, the ambitious government project on e-democracy is merely an attempt to play a democratic game while actually strengthening control over society. Commenting on “Russian Public Initiative”, Lev Gudkov, Director of the Levada Center, asserted that “the authorities are trying to find solutions by creating fictitious, imitative entities. The Public Chamber, Open Government, and similar websites, are extremely ineffective and useless, because they are in no way part of the decision-making process… These democratic decorations of the authoritarian regime [just serve as] an exhaust valve for protest sentiments.”
Judging by recent initiatives, Russia’s official “e-democracy” is unlikely to be developing in a free environment. According to many experts, the new law “On the Protection of Children from Information Harmful to their Health and Development,” which prescribed certain limitations on publishing information in the mass media and the internet, was designed to further strengthen government control. There is a good chance that pressure will continue to increase. A recent proposal offered by Vadim Dengin, a member of the Duma Committee on Information Policy, would require a person’s passport data as a condition of registering on a social media website. Alexey Pimanov, a member of the Federation Council, proposed subjecting internet resources to the same regulations as the mass media.
Despite all the talk of “e-democracy”, the circle of actual decision-makers is likely to remain as narrow as it has been before. A good example is the recent internet discussion of the draft law “On the Police.” As Kommersant reported, the “legislators commented favorably on the experiment with citizen participation, while the representatives of the opposition did not feel that this participation had any effect.” According to official sources, the bill received 20,000 online proposals, but their impact was minimal. Prominent human rights campaigner Lev Ponomarev observed that “experts proposed amendments to the Law ‘On the Police’, sent them to President Medvedev, but did not hear back from anyone.” This situation hardly resembles New Zealand. It is difficult to imagine a truly democratic deliberation on a legislative initiative (to say nothing of a Draft Constitution as in Iceland) in today’s Russia. Or, rather, the deliberation might take place, but key decisions will still be made by a very limited group of individuals.
Dmitry Medvedev's enthusiasm for modern technology did not result in the development of a genuine e-democracy in Russia.
The aforementioned UN report ranks Russia highly along with South Korea, UAE, and a number of other countries. But while receiving good marks for e-information and e-services, Russia, is ranked very low (17 points out of 100) on decision-making. Even when Russian citizens have access to information and participate in consultations, the degree of their influence on the actual decisions remains insignificant.
E-Democracy in Russia: An Alternative Version
According to Alexey Grazhdankin, deputy director of the Levada Center, in the 1990s there was “an attempt to connect the history of the people with the history of the state”, but “since the 2000s, this project has been suspended, and, again, the government started demonstrating to its people that matters of the state are only for a limited number of competent people. The state has distanced itself from the people.” As the distance increases, a new dimension is being created on the internet. It is in that dimension that Russians, tired of the official indifference, are finding a genuine democracy. Popular blogger Rustem Adagamov has observed that “every day and every year, the internet’s political influence increases.” Facebook, VKontatke and LiveJournal have played a key role in organizing last December’s protest rallies in Moscow (the largest since 1991). According to the latest estimates, 25 million Russians use VKontatke, and 13 million use LiveJournal. The number of Russian Facebook users is approaching 7 million.
In addition to utilizing social media, the internet activists have created a variety of websites with the aim of protecting citizens’ rights and freedoms. One of the most famous is Aleksei Navalny’s RosPil. Among the much publicized cases that were uncovered by Navalny’s anti-corruption activity were the theft at Transneft and accusations of fraud against the management team of VTB (Vneshtorgbank, majority owned by the government). RosPil is aimed at establishing and maintaining “control over budgetary spending in public and municipal purchases.” The website has publicized cases of unfair competition as well as tender announcements in which the time for implementation is clearly inconsistent with the work volume. Among the examples: a procurement by the Russian Government’s Academy of National Economy “to analyze the regional factors that increase economic competitiveness” (the cost is 9 million rubles, while the time for implementation is 2 days), and a Federal Service for Transport Supervision procurement to create a system of distance control and oversight (53.2 million rubles, 30 days). Another of Navalny’s projects is RosYama that publishes photographs of pits, cracks, and other defects in Russia’s roads. The website gives its users an option to file a complaint with the State Traffic Safety Inspectorate, and after 37 days (if the issue is not addressed) it generates a complaint that can be sent to the prosecutor’s office.
Also deserving attention is the website RosGosZatraty, the Russian equivalent of USAspending.gov, which gives information on public contracts, the contracting agency, and those performing the contracts. This resource was developed by Ivan Begtin at the request of the Institute of Contemporary Development. The website provides free access to information on state contracts from 2007 to 2009. Unlike the official website zakupki.gov.ru, Begtin’s project is focused on actual spending, rather than plans.
Similar goals are pursued on the sites goslyudi.ru and govweb.ru. Another portal devoted to the fight against corruption is Roskomvzyatka.com that publicizes cases of bribery across Russia. The navigation tool allows the user to select a category, within which the bribes fall and select a city of interest. To submit information on bribes, users must indicate the problem and category (health, education, etc.), as well as “the amount of the bribe, currency and the address of the guilty agency.” All the information is posted anonymously.
In February 2010, the portal Democrator.ru became available on the internet. According to its creators, the portal is a “global, universal, and structured platform for public and open interaction among the citizens, state and local agencies, organizations, parties, and social movements.” Citizens are offered the opportunity to “get together around common socially significant problems, work jointly on editing collective petitions to state and local agencies, and monitor what is being done in response to such petitions.”
With the support of the “League of Voters,” a group of lawyers, journalists, and other dedicated individuals launched the project "Vse V Sud!" (“All – To Court!”), addressed to those “who are ready to continue the fight for fair elections in Russia, who intend to protect their right to vote and the constitutional guarantees for freedom of expression.” According to journalist Sergei Parkhomenko, even meaningless responses to the legal claims would be important. In June 2012, the first 160 claims of election fraud were submitted to the Krasnopresnenskiy court in Moscow. The project’s creators plan to set up a conveyor belt of court claims in order to gauge the response. Since this project covers Russia as a whole, any citizen of the country, 18 years or older, can participate. Parkhomenko predicts that, in the future, thousands of individuals will be submitting claims to the courts.
A significant step towards further development of e-democracy in Russia was made by the recent elections to the Coordinating Council of the Opposition.
In March 2011, Yekaterinburg municipal legislator Leonid Volkov launched a project entitled “DalSlovo” to “monitor fulfillment of the promises” given by public figures during election campaigns and speeches. The website outlines the promises (for instance, to fix a road or to provide plots of land to families with multiple children) as well as the timeframes within which those promises were expected to be fulfilled. In June 2011, Volkov and Fedor Krasheninnikov, the president of the Institute of Development and Modernization of Public Relations, published the book Cloud Democracy, which addressed the questions of the “future development of electoral systems and the principles of democracy based on information technologies.” In October of that year, Volkov and Krasheninnikov presented a new website – http://democratia2.ru - based on the concept of cloud democracy, a system of “dispersed decision-making by a large group of people, which combines the best characteristics of direct and representative democracy.” According to the authors of Cloud Democracy and the creators of the website, a participant in the system can delegate his or her vote to a representative, reserving, at the same time, part of the decision-making authority for him/herself, which would permit real democracy.
A significant step towards further development of e-democracy in Russia was made by the recent elections to the Coordinating Council of the Opposition. Russian citizens were offered an opportunity to vote for the “Parliament of their dreams:” opposition leaders asserted that “the Coordinating Council must become the first legitimately elected entity in Russia, in contrast to the Duma and lower-level legislative bodies, which … were elected through widespread ballot stuffing thus undermining trust in the results of the elections.”. The election was held over the course of three days, from October 20 to October 22, 2012 (initially, it was supposed to take place over two days, but the period was extended because of hacker attacks.) The total number of persons registered to vote was 170,012, of whom 97,727 were verified. The number of actual voters was 81,801 (some 10,000 votes of the supporters of the notorious Ponzi-schemer Sergey Mavrodi, whose intention was to sabotage the election, were nullified.)
Leonid Volkov, who recently received the nickname “anti-Churov,” [Vladimir Churov heads Russia’s Central Election Commission] oversaw the election, which was based on the principle of transparency and internet voting. According to Volkov’s estimates, the results of online voting (80 percent of the voters) and offline voting (20 percent) were almost the same, which demonstrates the similarity of political preferences among the different generational and social groups. Also, there were no significant differences between the voting results in Moscow and in the regions.
The election of the Coordinating Council of the Opposition, held on October 20-22, 2012, was the first major experiment with online voting in Russia.
A few months before the Coordinating Council election, Volkov and Navalny visited Estonia, a pioneer in e-democracy, and had a chance to learn about its experience. After the visit, Navalny said: “In Estonia I saw that it works quite effectively ... There I understood there are no technical obstacles because in Estonia they use the internet for real elections”. According to Garry Kasparov, the chairman of the United Civil Front movement, “The idea of conducting elections on the basis of internet voting, which was considered by many as a failed concept, has proved its viability.” Volkov and Krasheninnikov believe that “In authoritarian societies, online activity is the only way to coordinate efforts of a considerable number of people in different parts of the country.” In their view, voters should be enabled to discuss all important decisions and offer their own alternatives, and could use the Democratia2 website as a platform for deliberations. Ilya Yashin, a member of the federal council of the Solidarity movement, argues that the election to the Coordinating Council played an important role in expanding the democratic process, and that the mechanisms of e-democracy will help to bring about an immediate “feedback between the candidates and their voters.”
According to an online survey developed by writer Boris Akunin, 67 percent of the respondents believe that the election to the Coordinating Council was a success for the Russian opposition. This success was achieved in spite of the actions by Kremlin loyalists, which ranged from demonstrating total indifference toward the election to implementing measures to “establish order” (the film “The Anatomy of Protest-2,” the detention of Sergei Udaltsov, Mavrodi's attempted sabotage of the election, the “discovery” of illegal literature of Islamic fundamentalists at a regional election committee, hacker attacks, etc.) One of the most recent measures was the kidnapping in Kiev and the arrest of Udaltsov’s “accomplice” Leonid Razvozzhaev.
In the absence of free elections on the official level, the alternative e-democracy allows Russian citizens to influence political processes and stand up for their rights. It is to be hoped that both the domestic and the foreign experience will prove useful to Russian society in the task of developing a democratic system.
