A ruling last week by the Internet’s global domain providers will make it easier for countries with non-Latin scripts to introduce domain names wholly in their own language. Unsurprisingly, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev was the first head of state to react, stating that he wished to push for the creation of Cyrillic script Internet domain names as a matter of national priority. The move was trumpeted as the start of a drive to promote the status of the floundering Russian language, but given the Kremlin’s long record of state censorship it is hardly surprising that many are interpreting Mr. Medvedev’s initiative as part of efforts to exert greater state control over the Russian Internet.
The Russian media has been ruthlessly reined in over the past eight years but despite this crackdown the freedoms enjoyed by Russian Internet users have remained largely untouched. However, it would be infinitely easier for the Kremlin to manage the information flow if they are able to establish control over their very own internal Internet empire.
The nightmare of free information
With the number of Internet users growing by the millions with every passing year, the need to grasp hold of this informational anomaly has becoming more and more pressing. In the context of the Russian authoritarian tradition, the Internet represents the worst kind of disorder, where literally anything goes and the state exercises no meaningful control at all. The response, it would seem, is to seek ways to fence off the country’s own Internet users.
The monopoly on site addresses which the English language currently enjoys is not something that would appear to trouble most people, nor has it restricted the evolution of Internet sites in every language imaginable. Despite its in-built English bias, the Internet has never lacked linguistic diversity. On the contrary, it has proved an engine for many a minority or oppressed tongue across the world, but the fact remains that in order to function as well as it does, the Internet requires a common linguistic link. Creating Cyrillic addresses would simply mean that only those using the same script would ever come across the sites in question. Just imagine if every country followed suit and created its very own internet domains. How different would your impressions be if you only ever navigated on-line within the boundaries of your own linguistic 3% of the global Internet? It would lead to a Balkanisation of the whole structure that would eat away at the same core value of universality which made the Internet such an historic development in the first place.
The fact that Mr. Medvedev is being advised to pursue this line at all would suggest that the Kremlin believes it will prove popular with the masses, who will interpret it as a synthesis of modernisation and patriotism, or another victory for paranoid Russian dignity against a supposedly mocking world. It is, in fact, one more example of the Kremlin’s taste for imperialistic gestures which pander to the deep-set Russian sense of detachment and isolation.
The outside world has often been physically and psychologically distant throughout Russian history, fostering a sense of otherness in Russian society that shows little sign of easing. Mr. Medvedev’s initiative plays on this sentiment and could lead to the creation of what would effectively be an independent Russian subset of the Internet. This Russian-only zone would offer an echo of the Soviet era’s enveloping isolation, where Soviet citizens used to refer to the USSR as the Bolshaya Zona, which literally translates as the “Big Zone.” Zona was the term used by inmates to refer to the infamous Soviet gulags, hence the larger Soviet world outside was referred to as an extension of this inner network of concentration camps. Perhaps the Big Zone is set for an Internet comeback, courtesy of the Kremlin.
Halting a 20-year Russian retreat
As a largely ceremonial head of state in an uncomfortable constitutional predicament, Mr. Medvedev is certainly in need of great acts to perform, and there are clearly propaganda points to be scored in the field of nationalist gesture politics. The Russian language is a great vehicle for this kind of thing, as it is an especially emotive subject for many modern Russians. Once the dominant language not just of the Soviet Union but also throughout much of eastern Europe, Russian has been forced into a twenty-year decline that has mirrored Russia’s own humiliating retreat from empire. In the early 1990s I remember meeting a Slovakian girl in London who was literally amazed that I did not speak Russian. Today things have altered drastically - few young Slovaks know any Russian, while the older generations have long since forgotten much of what they were force-fed in school.
The creation of Mr. Medvedev’s Russian –language internet world would be another small but tangible step away from the wider community of nations. It could also end up making life uncomfortable for the millions of people currently working with Russian-language, Latin-script domain names, many of whom may eventually feel politically obliged to switch.
Ultimately, the advent of a Kremlin-controlled Russian-language Internet could serve to close off one of the few remaining avenues of free-flowing information still available to ordinary Russians.
Russia is not the only country rushing to introduce non-Latin script domain names and it is no co-incidence that one of the other nations leading the charge is China. The rise of the Internet has presented both countries with a huge dilemma which recent economic growth and the expansion of the middle classes has only served to exasperate. Unable to apply their usual techniques of media manipulation and control, both Moscow and Beijing were initially caught out by the Internet and have watched its spread with mounting concern.
