Oates, Sarah Revolution Stalled: The Political Limits of the Internet in the Post-Soviet Sphere (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 793 Oates, Sarah. Revolution Stalled: The Political Limits of the Internet in the PostSoviet Sphere. Oxford Studies in Digital Politics. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2013. ix + 225 pp. Figures. Tables. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £35.00: $58.00. Inonesense,theappearanceofSarahOates’sRevolutionStalledcouldn’tbemore timely: as the book went to press, Russia had just experience its most dramatic politicalcrisissince1993,VladimirPutinwasneverthelesscommencinghisthird presidential term, and all eyes — both inside the Kremlin and out — seemed to be directed toward the internet and its potential for bringing about radical transformation. On the other hand, the timing almost required the author to leave her story midstream. Indeed, since its completion, Russia’s ruling elite has ramped up efforts to restrict if not repatriate the Russian-language internet, or ‘Runet’, as a tool for democratization, with over twenty different pieces of regulatory legislation since Putin’s May 2012 inauguration. This being the case, one can only be impressed by the extent to which Sarah Oates got it right such that Revolution Stalled remains a relevant, insightful study of the ‘the political limits of the internet in the post-Soviet sphere’. On the broadest level, the book offers readers ‘a model for understanding how, why, and even when the online sphere becomes an overwhelming catalyst for protest and change in non-free states’ (p. 1), positing — and then employing — five key dimensions for analysing the political potential of the internet: content, community, catalyst, control and co-optation. Secondly, Oates insists (in chapter two) that information and communication technologies (ICTs) must be examined within the political, historical, social, economic and technological contexts of their national domains. In the case of Russia, this means coming to terms with the long tradition of state control over the media and the function of the latter as a mouthpiece of the former. It also means understanding the more subtle limitations of glasnost´ as a tool for transparency, but which never really was intended to lead to the transformation of the media into a true ‘fourth estate’. Without viable political institutions such as parties and fair elections, Oates questions the degree to which efforts such as those championed by the likes of Alexei Navalny can translate into concrete political change. At the same time, Oates argues in chapter three, by virtual of its growing clout in comparison to television media, particularly among younger Russians, there is some evidence that, with the right catalyst, the internet can serve as a tool for political mobilization and that, even where online behaviour tends to be ‘more social than political, there is clear evidence that the internet expands the public sphere of the Russian audience’ (p. 68). Chapter four provides a sober antidote to this neat picture of web-fuelled democratization, mapping out the conflict between constitutional guarantees of free speech and freedom from censorship and the growing number of media- SEER, 93, 4, OCTOBER 2015 794 related laws designed to enable selective legal pressure on anti-government web-based forces. A good portion of these are pitched as laws guaranteeing Russia’s national security and aimed at preventing ‘extremism’. While Oates largely skirts the slippery nature of this legal term, she identifies a number of case studies of legal procedures directed toward online voices that demonstrate its loose and arbitrary nature. Her discussion demonstrates that initiatives commonly associated with Putin’s third presidential term were set in motion well before May 2012 — particularly in the form of SORM surveillance systems and the Information Security Doctrine (which dates back to 2000). Althoughoneofthemoredatedpartsofthebookduetotherapiddevelopment of online media, chapter five, which focuses on the parties’ online presence in the form of party websites, offers a useful overarching point — that as long as political parties in Russia function as ‘a tool for elite consolidation of power’, rather than ‘a way to interpret the will of the people’ (p. 130), their effectiveness and prominence in the ICT world will be minimal. Precisely thanks to its turn away from big-‘P’ politics, chapter six stands out as one of the more important of the book, showing that there is, in fact, a vibrant political presence on the Runet when one strays from the main halls of power politics to issues of...