Paul
Goble
Staunton, May 28 – Protests in ever
more predominantly ethnic Russian regions, losses by United Russia candidates
in primaries there, and upcoming elections in others have prompted the Kremlin to
step up its campaign against regionalist Internet portals lest they mobilize
and channel this anger in even more overtly anti-Moscow and anti-Putin
directions.
Yesterday, two of the most important
regionalist portals, Free Urals (freeural.org)
and Free Ingria (freeingria.org) long
blocked in Russia, ceased to work at all. Andrey Romanov, now in emigration,
says his Free Urals site is hosted in Germany and he suspects the FSB had put
pressure on that firm to drop his site (region.expert/attack/).
Pavel Mezerin, also in emigration,
says his Free Ingria site was taken down by its host after complaints that it
was disseminating spam. Those complaints are untrue but standard operating
procedure for Russian trolls who want to see a site taken down. He hopes that
after the hosting company does a check, the site will be accessible by the end
of the week.
Russian pressure against these two
sites and others, like Free Idel Ural which has tried to maintain a page on
Facebook despite repeated Russian attacks, have been intensifying over the last
few months (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2019/01/moscow-steps-up-campaign-against.html,
windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2019/05/tatar-leaders-in-exile-appeal-to-west.html
and windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2019/03/moscows-actions-highlight-its-growing.html).
Regionalism
may not be as strong as its activists and this author – see my “Regionalism as the
Nationalism of the Next Russian Revolution” (afterempire.info/2016/12/28/regionalism/)
– believe; but by its actions, the Kremlin is clearly worried that it already
is or could be – and are devoting ever more effort and resources to prevent it
from gaining new adherents.
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