EDITORIAL: The Fall of Yandex

EDITORIAL

The Fall of Yandex

We’ve repeatedly exposed the absurd neo-Soviet lie that Russia has a viable Internet society.  In fact, virtually nobody in Russia has the means to access the Internet, and those who manage to get there find only a ravaged wasteland of neo-Soviet terror and repression. But the Kremlin is still not satisfied, and now it has moved against the Yandex search engine, Russia’s Google, forcing it to shut down one of its most powerful features, its blog traffic ranking. 

This wonderful feature gave bloggers the power to generate national attention when they reported important news, and generate it at the grass-roots level through the democracy of simply counting web hits (in the words of one leading Russian blogger “the ranking is created by a robot on the basis of objective parameters”).  It gave bloggers the ability to turn a wave of opposition into a tsunami, and so of course the Kremlin simply could not tolerate it.

A Russian blogger says what everyone already knows:  “It became known as early as in October that someone ‘at the top’ wasn’t very happy with the free ranking of alternative points of view.”  Another states:  “A pleasing picture that we saw in  TV newscasts was very different from the things that bloggers, especially politicized ones, were writing about. Now this has been ended.”

Let’s be clear:  Even if there was nothing really objectionable in the Yandex rankings, the Kremlin would still fear it because it was objective, because it was grass-roots, because something could happen in the future. But in fact, the Yandex rankings contained all sorts of highly controversial topics, topics that the neo-Soviet government simply doesn’t want the people of Russia to discuss.

What’s most disturbing about this new crackdown isn’t that the Kremlin would do it.  In fact, it’s surprising that it hasn’t happened sooner.  What’s disturbing is that, once again, it seems the craven people of Russia are prepared to let Yandex go down without a fight.  They said and did nothing when the Kremlin moved against the Skype service, they’ve done nothing as the Kremlin has prosecuted blogger after blogger on criminal charges based on their writing, and now they are letting one of the last bastions of the Internet collapse without a struggle.

This was, of couse, exactly how Stalin got started.

Opposition leader Oleg Kozlovsky recently attended a protest rally and was arrested after the protesters were harrassed by pro-Putin youth cult members without protection from the police. He writes:

I was arrested while trying to tweet what I saw. Apparently, one of the officers recognized me. Along with some 20 more people in the bus I was taken to a police station where we were charged with … lighting flares, chanting slogans and throwing leaflets — the ones that the Putin Youth were throwing. As the police officers were filling in the papers with these fake charges, we looked at the walls of the police station’s lecture hall. Portraits of proud police officers as well as of Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev hung there next to Yagoda, Ezhov and Beriya, the three heads of Stalin’s NKVD and Gulag.

This what fully-realized neo-Soviet horror looks like.