If You Don't Like It, Go To Russia

04:00 PM Jul 07, 2006

Somehow, I had made it three times before to Russia without ever setting foot in St. Petersburg, an oversight rectified in time to catch the city lancing its boils ahead of the G8 summit. (But really, were the animal lovers giving away kittens on Nevsky Prospect such a dreadful eyesore?) Pictures bottled up in a digital camera, so make do for the moment with this illustration for Dostoyevsky's White Nights, whose namesake phenomenon was underway for the visit.

There's nothing like travel for blotting the assumptions one absorbs like a tattoo under one's skin. A country like Russia reminds one just how particular and contingent are the "best practices" we daily hobble about with.

Take the Russian railways. Simply an awesome intercity network spanning every meaningful city in the former Soviet Union. But if you imagine you'll reserve your seat online and just walk up to the train, you've got another queue coming.  Better plan to attend the station early, block out an hour, and if you're foreign, put honey (or helplessness) in your voice at the window.  In summertime, there's enough competition for seats that you may need connections.

The exact opposite, in short, of the U.S.:  here, it's transparent and easy to get tickets, and the tickets can't take you anywhere outside the Boston-D.C. corridor.

Just so with communications. You'd never do e-organizing in Russia the way you do it in the States.

To begin with, shut down that PC. Here's your medium of choice:

There'll be a lot of gab at the G8 about intellectual property, and the .ru domain is a wild west of wonderous stuff you should only peruse with a robust firewall. But that's a reality for a privileged minority of actual Russians. Internet penetration has lagged badly and though it's now growing exponentially in catch-up mode, it still languishes at about a quarter of the population. It's almost all klunky dial-up, often billed per-minute, and there's a stark digital divide: young, at least moderately well-off people in urban centers are the users, period. Great news for advertisers after market segmentation, but no good for a lot of NGOs.

But mobile penetration? Huge. Rapidly approaching 100%, with more cell phones than people already in Moscow and St. Petersburg -- way, way ahead of North America. Cheap, fungible SIM cards available on every streetcorner, text messaging for kopeks.

(That's not just exotica.  That's teenagers in the U.S., too.  That's the future, or maybe your present.)

Still, no NGO could confine its organizing to "new media" channels without limiting itself to elitnie -- that's even more true there than it is here. There's just too much poverty and too many people unserved by the infrastructure. In Russia's allied (though admittedly much more backward) neighbor Belarus, an opposition hunger strike that was heavily blogged without a complement of old-school organizing ended up all but unknown among Belarussians.

As always, those ironclad rules that structure thoughts and lives turn out as mere means to an end at a particular time and place. The rules can vanish or upend overnight -- with an invention, a revolution, a stamp in the passport.

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