MOSCOW — Margarita Simonyan, the editor in chief of the Kremlin-controlled RT television network, recently called on the government to block access to Western social media.
She wrote: “Foreign platforms in Russia must be shut down.”
Her choice of social network for sending that message: Twitter.
While the Kremlin fears an open internet shaped by American companies, it just can’t quit it.
Russia’s winter of discontent, waves of nationwide protests set off by the return of the opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny, has been enabled by the country’s free and open internet. The state controls the television airwaves, but online Mr. Navalny’s dramatic arrest upon arrival in Moscow, his investigation into President Vladimir V. Putin’s purported secret palace and his supporters’ calls for protest were all broadcast to an audience of many millions.
For years, the Russian government has been putting in place the technological and legal infrastructure to clamp down on freedom of speech online, leading to frequent predictions that the country could be heading toward internet censorship akin to China’s great firewall.
But even as Mr. Putin faced the biggest protests in years last month, his government appeared unwilling — and, to some degree, unable — to block websites or take other drastic measures to limit the spread of digital dissent.
The hesitation has underscored the challenge Mr. Putin faces as he tries to blunt the political implications of cheap high-speed internet access reaching into the remote corners of the vast country while avoiding angering a populace that has fallen in love with Instagram, YouTube, Twitter and TikTok.
“They’re afraid,” Dmitri Galushko, a Moscow telecommunications consultant, said of why the Kremlin hasn’t clamped down harder. “They’ve got all these weapons, but they don’t know how to use them.”
More broadly, the question of how to deal with the internet lays bare a dilemma for Mr. Putin’s Russia: whether to raise state repression to new heights and risk a public backlash or continue trying to manage public discontent by maintaining some semblance of an open society.
In China, government control went hand in hand with the internet’s early development. But in Russia, home to a Soviet legacy of an enormous pool of engineering talent, digital entrepreneurship bloomed freely for two decades, until Mr. Putin started trying to restrain online speech after the antigovernment protests of 2011 and 2012.
At that point, the open internet was so entrenched in business and society — and its architecture so decentralized — that it was too late to radically change course. But efforts to censor the web, as well as requirements that internet providers install equipment for government surveillance and control, gained pace in bill after bill passed by Parliament. At the same time, internet access continues to expand, thanks in part to government support.
Russian officials now say that they have the technology in place to allow for a “sovereign RuNet” — a network that would continue to give Russians access to Russian websites even if the country were cut off from the World Wide Web. The official line is that this expensive infrastructure offers protection in case nefarious Western forces try to cut Russia’s communications links. But activists say it is actually meant to give the Kremlin the option to cut some or all of Russia off from the world.
“In principle, it will be possible to restore or enable the autonomous functioning of the Russian segment of the web,” Dmitri A. Medvedev, the vice chairman of Mr. Putin’s Security Council and a former prime minister, told reporters recently. “Technologically, everything is ready for this.”
Amid this year’s domestic unrest, Russia’s saber-rattling directed at Silicon Valley has reached a new intensity. Mr. Navalny has made expert use of Google’s YouTube, Facebook’s Instagram and Twitter to reach tens of millions…
Read More: China Censors the Internet. So Why Doesn’t Russia?