NEW YORK -- Sergei Kuznetsov, who founded one of Russia's first blogs in the early 1990s, was recently approached with an offer from a company affiliated with the Kremlin.
The company, whose name he did not reveal, presented a budget of millions of rubles to be used exclusively for public relations in the world of Russian blogs. Kuznetsov had the influence and the technical skills, and the government evidently had the interest.
Kuznetsov's situation is not unique in today's Russian Internet, or RuNet.
The second fastest-growing national cyberspace in the world, it has nearly 4 million blogs and counting -- which means an increasing opportunity for dissenting voices and pluralism of opinions.
But the co-opting of prominent bloggers and leaders of online-based political movements exemplifies the Kremlin's use of "soft," or indirect power to counter the Internet's democratizing potential, says Robert Saunders, a member of russian-cyberspace.org, an online scholarly research group focusing on the Russian Internet.
Read more:
http://www.rferl.org/content/Kremlin_Soft_Power_Keeping_Participatory_Internet_In_Check/1332812.html
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