The Wonderful Wizard of Virtual Oz

The great and magnificent Gleb Pavlovsky, kingmaker and organizer of successful presidential campaigns, has abandoned Internet resources, which became a model for imitation in the whole post-Soviet theater. Pavlovsky was one of the first to figure out that the Internet can be a means not only for sharing information and opinions but also for propaganda: his political web resources were created exactly for this purpose and were offered to the Kremlin as a new word in influencing a new society.

It did not work. The money was spent in vain. The All-Russian State Television and Radio Company (ARSTRC), to whom Pavlovsky’s websites were passed (including the model propagandist Strana.ru and Ukraine.ru, so interesting to so many in our country), states that these projects are now in a state of brain death. It does not matter whether the ARSTRC starts to pay its Internet propagandists or just quietly closes down most of its unprofitable projects. What matters is that Pavlovsky’s idea has proven the crying obsolescence of propaganda in the virtual world. If Pavlovsky did not exist, he would have had to be invented.

Propaganda works rather well in countries where people watch only two, three, or five controlled television channels and read two, three, or five controlled tabloids. However, such a situation usually takes shape in economically undeveloped societies, those of yesterday. Pavlovsky appealed to the new audience, mobile though not too numerous, to the young and active audience that reproduces the life model of the developed countries within the post-Soviet space.

It appeared that this audience would not care for propaganda even if only because it can easily compare information from numerous sources and in one mouse click be carried from state websites not even to the opposition ones but to any Western newspaper or television channel’s online version. This audience is aware that life is more diverse, complicated, and rich and does not come to Strana.Ru limits. It knows for sure that Ukraine.ru is a virtual country existing only in its editors’ imagination, and a very boring one. There are many interesting virtual countries on the Internet, and outside it lays an equally interesting reality.

It is this reality that Moscow’s political scientists must now face, when it turned out that the Internet propaganda has no future, even if it is placed on a computer’s monitor. This is as true as a fact that a colonel can never become general even if they elect him president. Magic has its limits also.