IZO

The first issue of the upmarket lifestyle Snob magazine is out, retail price 500 roubles ($20); the internet portal will open soon (Open Space).

This is quite some news: Kazakhstan has blocked access to LiveJournal! There has been no official announcement, but multiple Kazakh bloggers, all of whom have accessed LiveJournal through anonymous proxy servers, are saying the same thing. All the main Kazakh servers are blocking access; Kyrgyzstan uses these same servers and thus Kyrgyz access is blocked, too. A favourite theory is that the block has been imposed to prevent access to the blog of Rakhat Aliev, former son-in-law of Nursultan Nazarbaev, the ruler of Kazakhstan. Aliev, formerly a member of the Kazakh elite, fell out with Nazarbaev and emigrated to Austria where it is claimed an attempt was made on his life. In Kazakhstan he has been sentenced in absentia to several years in jail for extortion and kidnapping. After he opened his kaztoday site on LiveJournal, Aliev is said to have taunted the Kazakh authorities that to silence him they'd need to shut down the whole of LiveJournal, which is a major news and discussion resource in the post-Soviet space; this appears to be what has happened (Open Space, in Russian)..

Rakhat Aliev (© mizinov.net)
UPDATE: Rakhat Aliev also has a personal blog on LiveJournal (rakhataliev, in Russian).

Private Correspondent (Частный корреспондент) is a new citizen journalism site developed by Ivan Zasurski and Aleksei Plutser-Sarno (Chastny Korrespondent) (via viktop, who has more on related new projects, in Russian). Give Russian intellectuals' habituation to blogging, and the degree of official control of the existing big mass-media, this project could fill a niche.

What was thought to be a done deal, the sale of Russian contextual advertising firm Begun to Google, which would give Google a much bigger base from which to challenge market-leader Yandex, has been delayed by the Kremlin (rb.ru, in Russian).

President Medvedev is said to have started some kind of "video-blog". I'm not sure if that's the right description, but it seems like a video made for internet distribution. Here he's talking about international security. (radulova, in Russian). From the comments chez radulova:
- He's got a cold.
- I hear he's gadget-addicted.
- The president's started a blog ... blimey, I'm stunned.
- How can I friend him?
UPDATE: here's the link to the Kremlin site of Medvedev's official videoblog (Kremlin.ru).

Anton Nossik, media magnate, recommends Black Books, which happens to be my 13-year-old son's favourite sitcom (dolboeb). All I'm saying is, the internet, and, too, the pirate dvd manufacturers, have effectively removed boundaries between Russian and Western pop culture.

Yandex beating Google in Russia (FT).

Cheery rapper Syava has been all over the Russian internet in recent weeks.

A look at Mikhail Prokhorov's Snob magazine (Independent):

... a close look at both the target audience and the contents of Snob show [sic] that it doesn't promote the free-spending, bling-drenched stereotype made famous across the world by rich Russians in recent years. While celebrating personal and financial success, it does so in a rather more restrained and worldly way.

Many in Moscow claim that this is part of a move away from the lavish tackiness associated with Russia's economic boom. "The full-on extravagance, the red lipstick, the diamonds, the furs – all that is passé," Vogue's [Russian editor] Ms [Alyona] Doletskaya said in a recent interview. "The Russians are getting far more sophisticated."

More Kabakov: Ekaterina Degot's video interview (Telekanal Kultura, in Russian); and the 17 September opening at Vinzavod will be streamed live on the Ministry of Culture website (Vesti, in Russian).

List of Russian-language LiveJournal communities devoted to contemporary art (LiveJournal).

Russian children's drawings about the Russia-Georgia conflict (pavel_slob, in Russian). Below, Georgian troops blow up a statue of Stalin, by Alevtina Devyatko, age 12. UPDATE: I have to admit, on my cursory glance, I didn't realise this is a satirical project (thanks for the heads-up, BD). I'll leave the post here as a monument to my own gullibility, or superficiality, or to the hazards of trusting what you find on the internet, or to the sophistication of propaganda today, or whatever. In my slight defence, I note that in the comments to pavel_slob's LJ page a number of Russians have debated the authenticity or not of these "children's drawings", although the majority view is "fake".

Oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov's media project entitled Snob, supported by businessmen such as Kommersant founder Vladimir Yakovlev, is slowly taking shape. A trial number of Snob magazine has been published; the TV channel is in preparation, due to launch next year; a flash homepage for the internet portal/club is up (Snob). Unfortunately the site has one or two orthography problems: for example, a comma has been omitted in the phrase 'журнал, который читать не вредно'. I couldn't help noticing, I'm a snob that way. Apparently one ambition of the planned club is to get each of its 'snobs', minimum income $10,000 per month, to write a blog. Good luck with that.

The growth in internet usage in Russia is the highest in Europe: up 27% in a year (Kommersant, in Russian).

A look at the Russian-Georgian propaganda war on the internet (Media Channel).

The role of nerds in wartime: all detail apart from some lakes has been removed from Google maps of Amenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia, including South Ossetia.

More Russian hackers (Gainesville Sun).

Getting to know A-Z, a Moscow hacker (USA Today).

A-Z perfected ZeuS — a customizable botnet creation and management program that readily slips through computer firewalls and sidesteps detection by anti-virus filters. He began hawking ZeuS for $3,000 on Internet forums, where hackers and scammers congregate ... ZeuS was also deployed to swipe 1.6 million sensitive records from job seekers at Monster.com and several other online job sites.

Appropriately-named (in Russian) "flesh-mob" on Pushkin Square, Saturday (Komsomolskaya Pravda, video).

Latvian photographer Arnis Balcus has started a photo blog (balcus).

herr_und_knecht offers a lacanian analysis of the Gordon-Sobchak conflict (herr_und_knecht, in Russian):

The symbolic order represented by Katya Gordon, the moral values, the education, the very capacity to classify and differentiate, clashes traumatically with the Real - Ksyusha Sobchak, a force which it is impossible to "put in its place"...

Full transcript of the discussion plus audio file (Radio Mayak).

A week ago an on-air argument between TV presenter Katya Gordon and ubiquitous It-Girl Kseniya Sobchak, followed by further recriminations on Gordon's blog, ended, it seems, with Gordon being fired from her job (Anna Malpas/Moscow Times). It's still the biggest discussion item on the Russian internet: here's a round-up of comments (Argumenty i Fakty, in Russian).

Savva Terentev has received a one-year suspended sentence (New Statesman).

The power of symbols: after this, a cyber-attack (Washington Post).

Oligarch publisher Mikhail Prokhorov's new magazine/TV channel/internet portal/club venture called Snob (the word has pretty much the same negative connotations in Russian as in English) has launched at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London (Kommersant, in Russian).

An office clerk loses his rag in a Moscow office. Apparently he'd just been told that he wouldn't be receiving his expected bonus: the exact words of the man who speaks to him before his outburst are reported to have been: "So, you were looking forward to a holiday in Thailand, but now it's the Crimea." Surveillance cam and mobile phone footage (Komsomolskaya Pravda, in Russian).

UPDATE: apparently it's not merely a fake but a viral promo by Timur Bekmambetov!!! (Wired); designed to promote Wanted.

Now, having flown back from Spain (Easyjet air ticket London-Malaga-London: £40; taxi London-Stansted airport, one way: £65), I've had time to explore the new Open Space Russian culture magazine, I see that it keeps the market-focused Art Times site as a discrete section but adds a further section called simply Art, which includes an occasional blog by Ekaterina Degot. There are tabs devoted to cinema, theatre, literature and music, but the double dose of visual art sets the tone; it's plainly the best art-oriented publication on the Russian-language internet.

OpenSpace.ru, the new culture portal and successor to Art Times, appears to be open to visitors.

At time of writing, freelance.ru has 14,319 Design/art blogs put up by professional illustrators etc. This is work by glooh; he is pretty lurid and may well not be to your taste, but the site is a good resource.

The perils of Google keyword-based blog-alerts: Russian Art, Painting, Woman In Field With Sickle.

An IZO reader writes, apropos the Markin-Kabakov bust-up:

These Russians should stop writing blogs - the diary is a tricky genre and very rarely shows the best part of the person.

That's true, and, what's more, conceivably even applies to some non-Russians. IZO isn't really a diary, but my old attempts to write a diary always foundered because of the attendant confusions: questions such as: what is my point-of-view? what is the tone I seek? AND WHO AM I, ANYWAY?

Hard to imagine how this could be successfully implemented: the compulsory registration of all wi-fi equipment in Russia (Techworld).

Russian jailbroken iPhone frenzy (Bloomberg).

A snapshot of the Google Trends result for search-term "russian art" today (click to enlarge). It's not all explicable to me: why, for example, the huge drop-out of search volume in 2004 (maybe data not available?)? But some things are pronounced. Russia is way out ahead as the location of the biggest number of searches (also, these are only English-language searches), and the Languages list tells us that the biggest number of searches is entered on the Russian Google site; the USA and UK are almost neck-and-neck (a reflection of the London art-market?); and Australia and Canada are not far behind. Considering the long relationship between Russian art and Paris, I'm surprised France isn't in the top-ten searching countries. But when we come to cities searched from, Minneapolis, home of the Museum of Russian Art and the dealing activities of Ray Johnson, beats even Moscow! Fourth place for Brentford, a suburb of London, is inexplicable to me: maybe there's a BT internet HQ there? Or - who? The biggest news-spike is for the Rostropovich collection sale; and overall - this is surprising - the volume of searches for "russian art" seems to be declining.

Lookin' for some Yoshkar-Ola lovin'? (Daily Mail).

Russian bloggers protest the introduction of advertising on LiveJournal pages (Lenta.ru, in Russian).

MYARTINFO will be presented in its Russian version in Moscow on 18 April at Vinzavod. Russian artists are invited to sign up to share their work: visit the site, click on the small Russian flag (top right), then further click on Подписка, and then fill in your info.

Russian spammers circumventing Google captchas (websense.com).

The Terentev case moves ahead. Possibly a storm in a teacup, hard to tell.

Igor Markin has announced he is going to close his very entertaining LiveJournal.

Russia! magazine on the Russian Youtube. We've already done Nalitch on this blog. Below: Nambavan's gay-sarcastic So Many Men (And So Little Time):

The State Duma will soon be considering a draft law to regulate sexual material in the media, devised by the Ministry of Culture. This law has been awaited with some apprehension by artists. It proposes a distinction between pornography ("the detailed, naturalistic depiction, the literal description or the demonstration of the sexual act or of the sex organs, intended to bring about sexual arousal") and erotica ("the demonstration of sexual relations between people without elements of pornography"). It allows pornography to be sold only in sex-shops and erotic or pornographic material to be broadcast only between 1 and 5 am. It forbids any kind of pornographic websites. The author of this article seems to think that artistic value will be a defence against the charge of pornography, but doesn't adduce in support hard quotes (Lenta.ru, in Russian). It remains to be seen what the government will do with the law: previous attempts to introduce regulation have failed.

Internet crime and semantics (or something): a young rock musician, Savva Terentev, is charged with "stirring up social discord" on the basis of a web-site posting attacking the police. But in order to convict him of the crime, it has to be demonstrated that the police are, in fact, a discrete social group. To which end, several scholars have been set to work. Their conclusions are somewhat ambiguous and Terentev's lawyer is demanding his client be set free (Zyryanskaya Zhizn, in Russian; via dmitrivrubel).

LTB Group, Chief Executive Louise T. Blouin, is expanding into Russia with a Russian-language version of its artinfo.com website. The press conference/launch, probably to be held at Vinzavod. is planned for April (presumably to coincide with the photobiennale, run by Olga Sviblova).

Minister of Culture Alexander Sokolov recently gave a speech in defence of the Russian language. The object of his concern was the so called "weed language" (сорный язык): that is to say the informalities that grow up in the interstices of the established language. Sokolov's fear is that the weeds will take over the garden (Izvestiya, in Russian). Some of this is mobile phone jargon, some internet slang (popularised on udaff.com and many other sites); and much of it is so-called Runglish, the mixing of English vocabulary and constructions into Russian. It's all the tide of cultural integration and Sokolov is unlikely to be able to stem it, of course. The movie Borat is an icon of this  meltdown; it was not given distribution in Russia, but it is a cult there nonetheless. Its influence may be seen in the songs of Peter Nalitch and the youtube performances of Cool Russian Actor (thanks, MK):

It is proposed to adjust existing legislation so that websites receiving more than 1,000 visitors a day will need to be registered under mass-media regulations (Kommersant, in Russian).

The consequences of the introduction of a mooted autonomous cyrillic-script internet space which connects by a controlled 'bridge' to the WWW are considered on Inopressa.ru (in Russian) (via Russophobe, where English translation).

News round-up

A survey of work by Evgeni Dybsky, curated by Maria Engels, opens at the Landeseinrichtung Kunst aus NRW, Aaachen, Germany, on 19 January.

Cyrillic-zone LiveJournal owner Alexander Mamut says he doesn't intend to introduce censorship controls (Telegraph).

New legislation may allow the effective privatisation of historic buildings (Lenta.ru, in Russian). The first Moscow Architecture Biennale, focussed on plans for development of the city, will open in May (Russia-IC).

A complete restored version of Battleship Potemkin will be available at the end of January (Russia-IC).

LJ sold

Yahoo reports that the media firm Sup owned by oligarch Alexander Mamut and American Andrew Paulson has bought outright the blogging service LiveJournal (thanks, MK). Sup has been running the cyrillic section of LJ since last year. Cnews (in Russian) gives details of the user base: 1.35 million registered Russian-language users, of which just over half a million active. The price has not been revealed. Below: Mamut and Paulson (left).

News round-up

Irina Kulik (in Russian) on the Kandinsky Prize exhibition; there's a little 5-image slideshow.

RBN offline. Will my spam decrease?

And LJ user viketz reminisces about her job at the Markin Museum (in Russian).