What kind of difference does the internet make in Russia?

Online petitions, web campaigns, virtual elections and bloggers exposing official misconduct: Russia has seen them all in the past year or two. But what difference have they made to people's lives and the way they are governed?

Partly prompted by a debate on the issue in the US, experts in Russia have been assessing the impact of online activism in a country where about 38% of the adult population now has some sort of access to the internet. Most conclude that, while it may not have made huge strides in the political sphere, it has proved effective in dealing with some important practical problems. As one commentator put it, the internet is "changing from a megaphone into a shovel".

Writing for elite social networking site Snob on 11 October, Anton Nosik, who many regard as Russia's most eminent internet pioneer, responded to US press articles pouring cold water on claims that the internet is helping to spread transparency and improve democratic standards.

In an article in the New Yorker on 4 October, Canadian journalist Malcolm Gladwell attacked the pretensions of the advocates of social networks as vehicles of meaningful political and social action. A few days later, New York Times journalist Frank Rich exposed what he called the difference between the "romance and reality of the internet" during the US mid-term elections. Politicians, he said, had used the internet to cynically manipulate public opinion rather than encourage constructive debate.

None of this came as a surprise to Nosik. He explained how, in 2009, Western journalists had tended to dismiss his warnings about the political limitations of the internet and had "gone on writing about the so-called Twitter revolution" in the Moldovan capital Chisinau and the threat it posed to the Kremlin.

"Slowly but surely," Nosik commented wryly, "they have stopped writing - first about Chisinau and then about the Kremlin. I would share the disillusionment of my Western colleagues, but, unfortunately, I did not share their illusions in the first place."

Journalist Aleksandr Plyushchev, one of Russia's most prominent internet enthusiasts, admitted to having succumbed to some of the illusions debunked by Nosik. "We really expected miraculous things from the internet," he told an audience of journalists and bloggers in Novosibirsk on 25 October.

In fact, as Plyushchev noted, many of the things he had hoped for - broadband in the regions, blogging officials and an internet-savvy president - had come to pass, but no political transformation had followed. The problem was that "the mass of users who came to the internet thanks to my efforts at popularization" are principally interested in music and video downloads and think "freedom of speech and civil society can go hang". This is "my personal disappointment", Plyushchev confessed.

As Plyushchev was speaking in Novosibirsk, his colleague at Ekho Moskvy radio, Matvey Ganapolskiy, was having a cynical dig at internet activism in the popular broadsheet Moskovskiy Komsomolets. Far from fearing the power of the internet, Ganapolskiy argued, the authorities actually welcome it as a distraction from more meaningful political action. "Life is decided not in blogs, but in the Kremlin, in the White House [government building], in the courts and on the streets," Ganapolskiy said. "Thus," he concluded, "the mountain of the internet has given birth to a mouse of influence."

Internet activism in Russia has, nonetheless, had some successes. In an interview with the Osobaya Bukva website in July, opposition blogger and activist Marina Litvinovich pointed to the online petition that arguably contributed to the decision in April 2009 to release Svetlana Bakhmina, a lawyer for the Yukos oil company who was convicted of embezzlement and became pregnant with her third child half-way through a six and-a-half year prison sentence.

She also pointed to the little blue buckets movement, a campaign against officials and other members of the elite who regularly flout traffic laws, thus endangering the lives of other road-users. The movement gets its name from the way protesters put buckets on their cars to parody the misuse of blue lights.

Members of the little blue buckets movement have used online communities to organise protests and to name and shame officials guilty of traffic offences. It remains to be seen, though, whether they can really influence the behaviour of officials or change the system that allows them to flout the law.

Another advocate of internet activism is Russian blogger Aleksey Sidorenko, who is also a regular contributor to the US-based online community Global Voices. In a recent Global Voices article, Sidorenko listed a number of "online activism success stories". These included a murder in Vladivostok that was solved with the help of online crowdsourcing, bloggers' role in the arrest of a gang that had been terrorising motorists in the Urals, and an official in Bashkortostan who was sacked after he was shown on YouTube forcing schoolboys to kiss his shoes during a gym lesson.

Sidorenko also noted the recent success of bloggers in highlighting suspicions about a contract put out to tender by the Russian Health and Social Development Ministry for the construction of a departmental social networking site. The tender for the contract, which was worth some $1.8 million, specified the work should be completed in 16 days, which struck many bloggers, including anti-corruption campaigner Aleksey Navalnyy, as suspiciously unfeasible. Navalnyy immediately started an online campaign appealing for internet users with knowledge of IT projects and government departments to scrutinise the tender and report their findings. His suspicions appear to have been justified. Within a few days the tender had been cancelled and the official responsible for it sacked.

Navalnyy's tireless online onslaught against corruption has made him something of a cult figure in internet circles. In the recent virtual Moscow mayor elections organised by the business daily Kommersant, he won a landslide victory, outstripping his nearest challenger by more than 30%.

Most of his efforts are targeted at exposing malpractice in state-owned corporations, such as Vneshtorgbank, Rosneft and Gazprom, in which he has very small shareholdings. So far none of the cases pursued by Navalnyy has resulted in a conviction. He claims, though, that the scrutiny from bloggers has at least made corruption "more subtle and more complicated".

Navalnyy has also put his weight behind more mundane causes. Earlier this year, he joined in online efforts to tackle the problem of potholes on Russia's roads. As he explained in his blog, this is more than a question of filling in craters. It is about making sure officials live up to their legal obligations and do not siphon off funds earmarked for road repairs. The next stage in the project, he says, will be to use the Ushahidi software which recently demonstrated its effectiveness in targeting volunteer action during this summer's wildfire crisis.

In many ways, the wildfire crisis was the Russian internet's finest hour. Users on regional forums, blogging communities and the Ushahidi-based Help Map site organised fire-fighting and relief operations in places where the response of the emergency services was inadequate or non-existent.

Aleksandr Plyushchev said the strength of the phenomenon was the fact that it was non-political: "This was not a campaign for influence, it was not even an appeal to the authorities or citizens to act, collect money, do something, change the laws and so on. It was the coordination of efforts and a statement of fact: well, guys, we are doing something and if you want to help, then come and join in."

"Thus," Plyushchev concluded, "the internet is gradually changing from a megaphone into a shovel."

Scepticism about the social impact of the internet in the United States was discussed in this blog here.