The Virtual Diaspora

Large Russophone Organizations Abroad Rely Heavily on the Web

In a brown flagstone single-story house in the middle of America, Olga Koutsenko is a diaspora of one.

But that doesn’t mean that she, a Russian immigrant who took a circuitous route from Moscow through Israel, New York, Oklahoma City and, finally, to this indiscriminate cul-de-sac in Norman, Okla., is cut off from the world she left behind. Although she may be alone in this house, her desktop computer makes her part of a transnational collective of Russians living their lives abroad, as if they were in a Soviet-style communal flat on the outskirts of Moscow.

On the shelf next to her television set, she has spindle after spindle of Russian TV series and movies burned on CDs. Her computer streams last night’s Russian television to her monitor the next day. Every once in a while, in the early morning or late at night, her computer will ring. The call over the Internet comes from Moscow through a voice-over IP program called Skype.

“I have pretty much everything that my mother has in Vidnoe (a suburb of Moscow), aside from the food. The sausage, pelmeni and other things I like won’t fit through the cable,” Koutsenko joked in a telephone interview.

For many first-generation immigrants like Koutsenko, the Internet provides a lifeline to their home country. For younger immigrants, who are more acclimated to their new home, the tie weakens, but for them too, the Internet is a way to connect with their heritage and maintain language exposure.

Around the world but especially in the United States, Western Europe and Israel, there is a host of Russian-language community portals, social networking groups, news sites and even dating sites shaping diaspora communities. In the last decade, as Russian-based Internet offerings to émigré communities have blossomed, the number of these sites has grown. There is now a virtual diaspora buzzing with many languages—English, Hebrew, German—but only one lingua franca binds the community together.

“Many Russian immigrants who live in Israel or elsewhere visit Internet sites, portals and forums that are truly transnational,” said Larissa Remennick, a professor at Bar-Ilan University in Israel and the author of a book titled Russian Jews on Three Continents. “Their domain name may be .ru (Russia) .il (Israel), .de (Germany) or .com, but the main bond is the language and cultural legacy despite the users and the Web sites being spread across the globe.”

From the outside in

As the Soviet Union took its last gasps in the 1990s, Internet connections were few and far between in Russia. Outside the crumbling empire, the virtual, text-based marketplace of ideas relied entirely on a character set known as ASCII that could only transmit the Latin alphabet. That quickly changed as programmers, many of whom were from Russia, helped standardize and diversify the linguistic flexibility of the Internet.

Nevertheless, the bulk of Web sites in Russian were hosted outside the former Soviet Union. Many Russian programmers living abroad laid the foundation for the Russian Internet dealing in information, amateur literature and political thought. The ideological grounding of the early Russian Internet provided a stark contrast to the largely technical and entertainment-based U.S. model. To some extent, this difference is still visible today in the popular Russian blogging platform, Livejournal.ru, which is far more politically oriented than its American counterpart according to Vlad Strukov, an assistant professor at the University of Leeds in Britain, who studies Russia’s Internet culture.

“These new digital media, symbolically, are the voice of a new generation, of a post-Soviet generation,” Strukov said. “They use the digital medium to articulate their new aspirations, new ideas.”

Leonid Delitsyn, an early contributor to the Internet’s development and an Internet consultant at present, noted that in the mid-1990s, as Russians on Russian soil gained more access to the Web, there was a backlash against the foreign-born ideological strains affecting its Russian segment. In an article about that time, he recalled an anonymous author lashing out against the émigré authors.

“He blamed us,” Delitsin said. “He said it’s time for the Russians to make the Russian Internet and kick out those guys living abroad and influencing our culture. We were not really ready to see this response of Russians living in Russia to our invasion with basically foreign values.”

The relationship between the development of Russian Internet culture and Russian literature bears a striking resemblance. Under the censors of the Soviet system, dissident authors relied on subversive distribution methods such as samizdat (self-publishing) and tamizdat (publishing of works abroad). The Internet made both of the methods possible and stoked a new fire, a digital intelligentsia both at home and abroad.

From the inside out

As the Russian Internet grew, the balance shifted. The early-adopters became pioneers and the subversive became mainstream. A largely international phenomenon became a domestic affair.

The advent of streaming video, social networking and ubiquitous broadband in Russia’s urban centers has flipped the information flow. Now émigrés are the consumers rather than the producers, turning to the Internet as a tie to their home culture, downloading movies through file-sharing programs.

One of Russia’s most prominent search sites and portals, Yandex.ru, receives 20 percent of its traffic from outside Russia, according to Dina Litvinova of Yandex’s public relations office.

Sites like Yandex are catering to those abroad “wherever they live,” she said. These portals provide the backbone of the new Russian Internet, “the only space on the Russian media market in which the government and other institutions allow people to express their opinions freely,” Strukov said. Other media have come under increasing control of the corporations or business friendly to the Kremlin.

“I generally believe that the Internet actually does smooth (the global Russian culture) up a little bit and kind of makes it more coherent,” Strukov said. “It keeps the society, including diaspora, more cohesive in the end.”

The Russian Internet is now overwhelmingly Russian-centered and even nationalistic in character. Henrike Schmidt, a literary scholar and leader of the project Russian Cyberspace.org, said that the Internet is one way the Russian officials are looking to unite the Russian-speaking diaspora under a common cultural and even nationalistic banner. To some extent, that is accomplished through this reversal of the information flow.

“In the 1990s, there was more broad content brought into the Russian Internet community from diasporic resources,” Schmidt said. “Now, of course, there is so much information coming from inside Russia that we have this shift from producer culture to consumer culture.”

Sticking together

Irina Lukina is an officer at a global association that connects Russian-speaking youth called ZARYA. Through Facebook messages, Skype conference calls and email lists, a group of college students cobbled together a community, put up a Web site and made it accessible worldwide. “None of it would have been even close to possible without the Internet,” Lukina said.

For the four waves of immigrants from the Soviet Union, the landing point was often a cohesive Russian community like Brighton Beach in New York or the Russian neighborhoods in Israel. Some of those areas now struggle to maintain their boundaries with the latest wave of largely economic-based immigration. “It’s important for young and not-so-young people of Russian descent to couple with people like themselves. This is a phenomenon which extends even to the second generation of Russian immigrants,” Remennick said.

Instead of brick-and-mortar community centers, synagogues or Russian restaurants, the émigré communities now rely on the Internet to make connections. The result is a virtual diaspora, propped up by community Web sites, social networks, online forums and even dating sites. The physical community may be lost, but the desire to connect remains the same.

Pillars of the homemade Russian Web have set up portals to connect with these communities. Rambler.ru, another major Russian portal, has opened a site specifically to cater to Russian speakers in New York City. In almost any major American city there is a forum dedicated to connecting Russian speakers.

Organizations like the recently founded Russki Mir (Russian World) Foundation may rely on these virtual connections to consolidate and promote Russian language and culture outside Russia’s borders. But if history is any guide, the Russian communities themselves will have the biggest say in the success or failure of such projects.

“I’m wholly optimistic about this,” Strukov said. “They are creating new online communities. It may be a bit frustrating because at some point you realize it’s all a bit virtual reality, but in spite of that, I think these are the most Russian places outside Russia.