On ‘island’ in Russian Arctic, arrival of fast internet shakes political calm
NORILSK, Russia — On a screen, the California sun beams through palm fronds and the Walk of Fame gleams underfoot. This island of mines and smokestacks in the tundra has high-speed internet now, so Andrei Kurchukov watches videos about America.
Videos by one of his favorite YouTube personalities, Marina Mogilko, feature interviews with fellow Russian expatriates in the United States. “Los Angeles,” she tells her 1 million followers, is “where Russian dreams come true.”
“I watch her and think, alas,” Kurchukov said. “So what we’re showing about the rotting West is false.”
Closed to foreigners, unreachable by road and shrouded in darkness for 45 days a year, Norilsk, an Arctic nickel-mining hub of 180,000, is Russia’s most isolated major city. Lacking reliable digital communication with the rest of the country — “the continent,” they call it — residents used to fly home with external hard drives full of downloaded books and movies after their trips out.
Then, two years ago, the city’s mining giant, Norilsk Nickel, strung a fiber-optic cable across 600 miles of tundra and under the vast, icy Yenisey River. Amid fireworks and a rock concert in the central square, cheaper, faster internet suddenly replaced a slow and shaky satellite link as the city’s main data connection to the rest of the planet.
That turned Norilsk into a petri dish for a slow-motion but radical change pushing ever deeper into Russia’s hinterlands. The relatively uncensored internet is replacing Kremlin-controlled TV as the public’s main window onto the world. And as it does so, the carefully crafted image of a resurgent Russia and a decadent, devious West is becoming more difficult for Moscow’s spin doctors to maintain.
“When the internet was slow, I knew less about this bad stuff happening on the continent,” said Anastasia Oleynikova, a 49-yearold housewife, walking her three dogs on a muddy lakefront track flanked by huge, rusting pipes. Now, “It’s becoming sad and depressing to think: What has our country come to?”
An Instagram account called Norilsk Today that often posts pictures of dirty tap water and uncollected trash along with snide commentary — “At least they tell us on television that our lives are wonderful” — has amassed 54,000 followers, nearly one-third of the city’s population. With the complaints out in the open, authorities are sometimes forced to respond.
“At the direction of the acting prosecutor,” a typical announcement in the municipal newspaper reads, “an examination has been conducted based on information posted on the social network known as ‘Instagram’ on the network known as ‘the internet.’ ”
After President Vladimir Putin took power in 2000, he quickly grabbed control of all of Russia’s main TV channels. Drubbed into obedience, they piped an increasingly strident narrative of a newly assertive leader facing down the West into nearly every household across the country’s 11 time zones. Critical viewpoints remained accessible online, but that mattered little from the Kremlin’s perspective: In 2014, when Putin annexed Crimea, 90 percent of Russians told independent pollster Levada that television was their primary source of news.
Over the last few years, public opinion researchers have seen a shift. This year, only 72 percent of Russians told Levada that TV was their main source of news.