Lyndon of Scraps of Moscow has been posting updates and translations of the blog, Twitter and media coverage of the situation in Moldova: in this comprehensive and insightful post, Lyndon links to some 30 different sources, and there is more relevant content to be found on his blog, tagged “Grape Revolution” (“If the protesters manage to hold out and dig in downtown, we'll be searching for a name – perhaps it could be the Grape Revolution, or the Wine Revolution, in a nod to Moldova's most famous non-human export.”).

Nosemonkey's EUtopia and Julien Frisch have more links to coverage of the protests. Here's one observation from Nosemonkey's EUtopia:

[...] But with both internet and phone networks down in Moldova itself, reliable information is hard to come by. The major Western television news networks are – so far – silent on events in this small, largely ignored country, and so (as so often) Google News is your best source for press reports. It’s all strangely reminiscent of the early stages of Ukraine’s Orange Revolution four and a half years ago, where the attention of the Western press was similarly slow to turn to the East, and information was similarly confused and confusing. [...]

Mihai Moscovici and kosmopolit are among those who have been posting regular English-language updates on Twitter; the latter also has two blog posts by a Chisinau-based guest-blogger – here and here.

While it's too early to speak of the outcome of the post-election uprising, one thing is sure: the impact of social media on facilitation and coverage of the protests in Moldova – which is known as “the poorest country in Europe” – has been outstanding.

Evgeni Morozov wrote this on Foreign Policy's net.effect blog, in a post titled “Moldova's Twitter Revolution”:

[...] Will we remember the events that are now unfolding in Chisinau not by the color of the flags but by the social-networking technology used?

If you asked me about the prospects of a Twitter-driven revolution in a low-tech country like Moldova a week ago, my answer would probably be a qualified “no”. Today, however, I am no longer as certain. If you bothered to check the most popular discussions on Twitter in the last 48 hours, you may have stumbled upon a weird threat of posts marked with a tag “#pman” (it's currently listed in Twitter's “Trending Topics” along with “Apple Store”, Eminem, and Easter).

No, “pman” is not short for “pacman”; it stands for “Piata Marii Adunari Nationale”, which is Romanian name for the biggest square in Chisinau, Moldova's capital. [...]

[...]

Ever since yesterday's announcement that Moldova's communists have won enough votes to form a government in Sunday's elections, Moldova's progressive youth took to the streets in angry protests. As behooves any political protest by young people today, they also turned to Facebook and Twitter to raise awareness about the planned protests and flashmobs. [...]

[...]

The related posts on Twitter are being posted at a record-breaking rate – I've been watching the Twitter stream for the last 20 minutes – and I see almost 200 new Twitter messages marked with “pman” (virtually all of them in Romanian, with only one or two in English). In the last few hours there have also emerged several “smart” aggregators of posts on the subject, like this one – they have to contextualize what exactly is happening — and this one for YouTube videos. Many blog posts are also being updated in real-time – minute by minute – check this one. There are also a plenty of videos on YouTube and photos, including those uploaded to Facebook. [...]

Andy of Siberian Light quoted from Morozov's post and made this comment about Twitter – “the latest darling of the Revolutionati”:

[...] Twitter is certainly how I found out about today’s protests. But I do wonder how much Twitter has really been used to generate the protests. More likely, I think, it’s been used (and used brilliantly) to get the word out to people outside of Moldova, and to make the world sit up and take notice. [...]

Rotterdam-based “networking enthusiast” Cezar Maroti believes it is somewhat misleading to label the events in Moldova as “Twitter Revolution” only. On Twitter, he wrote, here and here:

There are only 71 Twitter users in Moldova http://ow.ly/2idK This cannot have been orchestrated through twitter! [...]

***

We DON'T have a Twitter Revolution in Moldova. It's a Social Network Rev. Other SNs are also used: Y!mess Youtube Flickr Facebook [...]

Moldova: More on Twitter's Impact on the Protests

Day 3 of the post-election protests in Moldova's capital turned out to be comparatively quiet. Mihai Moscovici wrote this on Twitter on Wednesday morning:

No crowds today. Very few protesters now in the main square in Chisinau, Moldova [...]

And here is one of Moscovici's latest tweets, posted early morning Thursday:

No protesters in the main square in Chisinau. Now all is quite and calm in Chisinau, Moldova [...]

Discussion of the role of social media in organization and coverage of the events in Chisinau, which began as the initially peaceful Monday's protests grew violent on Tuesday, has continued throughout Wednesday as well.

Evgeni Morozov posted an update to his post on “Twitter Revolution” on Foreign Policy's Net Effect:

[...] 3. It really helped that even non-technology people in the U.S. and much of Western Europe are currently head over heels in love with Twitter. It's really good that the Moldovan students didn't organize this revolution via Friendster or LiveJournal (which is still a platform for choice for many users in Eastern Europe). If they did, they would never have gotten as much attention from the rest of the world. [...]

Rootwork left this comment, noting that this observation by Morozov appeared “particularly misguided”:

[...] This perspective is an example of collapsing the strategy and the tool. More specifically: Getting attention from the rest of the world is not automatically the objective of any given social change movement.

Most social change organizers know this. There are moments when you want to focus on building awareness and/or getting media attention, but that's often not the primary focus of the campaign. In the case of the Moldovan students, it could be that what was most needed was a way to get organizers to identify and strategize with one another — in which case Twitter would have been a very poor (or at least fantastically blunt) tool.

Such perspective is possible only if you think of Twitter as one possible tool, perfect for use in some strategies and rather ineffective in others. A near-religious belief in Twitter (or any technology) as a strategy leads to a narrowing of the actual strategy — getting the world to pay attention becomes the goal, because, hey, that's what Twitter can be effective at doing!

In this case, organizers might have gotten attention from beyond Moldova with a few dozen Twitterers, but failed at their primary goal of making opposition to the regime visible to other Moldovans.

More thoughts on this from Rootwork – here.

Also, Daniel Bennett joined the Moldova Twitter discussion on Frontline Club's blog – here, and the New York Times’ The Lede posted an interview with Mihai Moscovici – here.

Moscovici posted this tweet a few hours ago, and it seems like a good wrap-up for this discussion:

Western media don't understand #pman isn't about Twitter. #pman is about anti-communist protest in Chisinau, Moldova to demand re-elections.

Written by Veronica Khokhlova · comments (0)
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Here is a rough translation of the comment:

I hate cops [menty], [swear word omitted]

I don't agree with the thesis that “policemen still have the mentality of a repressive stick in the hands of the powers that be.” First, they are cops [menty, not militsionery, a less respectful way to refer to police]. Second, their mentality isn't still here. It's simply ineradicable. Once a musor [a synonym for ment; non-slang meaning of the word is "trash"], always a musor, even in Africa. Those who become cops [menty] – rednecks and thugs – are the dumbest and least educated representatives of the live/animal world. Would be great if there was an oven, similar to those in Auschwitz, in the center of every Russian city, at the main square (in Syktyvkar, right in the center of Stefanovskaya, where the New Year's tree stands, so that everyone could see), and there'd be a daily ceremony – or, even better, twice a day (at noon and midnight, for example) – of burning a dishonest cop [ment] there. The people would be doing the burning. This would be the first step towards cleansing the society of the dirt that the thuggish cops are.

The court found Terentyev guilty of inciting enmity and publicly humiliating representatives of a social group (Article 282, part 1 of the Russian Federation's Criminal Code).

Here is a rough translation of a tiny part of the 12-page “guilty” verdict (RUS), posted by one of the defense witnesses, LJ user mezak, on his blog (the original of the passage below is on p. 11; the post also has photos of Terentyev, his defense team, and the judge reading the verdict; there are 376 comments to the post so far):

[...] Defendant Terentyev S.S. [Savva Sergeyevich], by means of the language, by having a negative impact on the public opinion and mood, and by aiming to incite social enmity and hatred, to escalate social conflict, to sharpen social contradictions, to awaken base instincts in people, contrasted the people and police officers, calling to [their] physical annihilation by the people. The text does not allow for ambiguous understanding and interpretation of [its] content and meaning, because it should be understandable to any average native speaker of Russian who has basic oral and written language skills. [...]

LJ user sholademi re-posted the verdict on his blog and added this note (RUS) at the end of his entry:

Hmm, it has to be noted that the court's verdict contains many orthographic mistakes. This, in addition to the legal side of the case (namely, the questionable linguistic analysis). In short, it's getting crazier and crazier.

In another post, LJ user sholademi posted a 5-question survey (RUS), explaining that Terentyev's defense team was planning to appeal the blogger's sentence and, among other things, would like to “find out how Savva Terentyev's case is going to affect the discussion environment in the Russian blogosphere.” Below are the survey's results so far:

1. Before Savva Terentyev's case, were there many LJ bloggers who allowed themselves to speak harshly of law enforcement and other state institutions and officials?

a. Many bloggers made such statements – 842 (75.4%)

b. Only some bloggers made such statements – 233 (20.9%)

c. I've never encountered such statements on blogs – 41 (3.7%)

2. Before the verdict on Savva Terentyev's case, how often did you encounter harsh statements about law enforcement and other state institutions and officials on your friends feed?

а. Such statements were pretty frequent on my friends feed – 664 (59.7%)

b. Such statements were pretty rare on my friends feed – 347 (31.2%)

c. Such statements were never present on my friends feed – 102 (9.2%)

3. If the verdict on Savva Terentyev's case comes into force, how will it affect the number of bloggers who would allow themselves to make harsh statements about law enforcement and other state institutions and officials in open posts and comments?

a. Their numbers will grow significantly – 193 (17.4%)

b. Their numbers will grow, but not significantly – 239 (21.6%)

c. Their numbers will decrease, but not significantly – 550 (49.6%)

d. Their numbers will decrease significantly – 126 (11.4%)

4. If the verdict on Savva Terentyev's case comes into force, how will it affect the number of bloggers who would allow themselves to make harsh statements about law enforcement and other state institutions and officials in locked (friends-only) posts?

a. Their numbers will grow significantly – 386 (34.9%)

b. Their numbers will grow, but not significantly – 470 (42.5%)

c. Their numbers will decrease, but not significantly – 219 (19.8%)

d. Their numbers will decrease significantly – 31 (2.8%)

5. Do you consider Savva Terentyev's sentence fair?

a. I consider it fair – 73 (6.5%)

b. I consider it unfair, as it is too soft – 12 (1.1%)

c. I consider it unfair, as it is too harsh – 71 (6.3%)

d. I consider it unfair in principle, because, in my opinion, Savva did not commit a crime – 963 (86.1%)

On July 14, Savva Terentyev and his lawyer held a press conference in Moscow (see photo of Terentyev at LJ user mezak‘s blog). LJ user dolboeb – Anton Nossik, the self-described “Social Media Evangelist at SUP,” the online media company that owns LiveJournal.com – announced the event on his blog and added this note (RUS) at the end of his post:

[...] Each month, 10-12 million comments appear in the Cyrillic LJ (10.5 million in June, 130.5 million in the past 12 months). On the average, every post gets 3.7 comments. [The police unit that initiated Savva Terentyev's case] has plenty of work ahead (unless, of course, they've got nothing else to busy themselves with).

At the press conference, LJ user dolboeb reiterated his point (RUS, link to an article in Novaya Gazeta, the newspaper for which Anna Politkovskaya used to write):

[...] Of course, spending 15 minutes on the web and finding a criminal is a lot more convenient than running around the dark, narrow streets with a gun. As a taxpayer, I'm not satisfied with this situation. [...]

Written by Veronica Khokhlova · comments (5)
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Following the bombing, police interrogated a number of Belarusian opposition members and human rights activists and searched their homes and offices. On July 9, four people were detained: Sergei Chislov, Igor Korsak, Viktor Leshchinsky and Miroslav Lozovsky, all members of the White Legion, the youth wing of the Belarusian Union of Military Personnel, banned in 1996.

Andrei Khrapavitsky of the recently re-launched Belarusan American Blog has written (ENG) about the blast and the subsequent arrests – as well as about the Belarusian bloggers’ response:

[...] I guess there’s hardly a blogger in Belarus who hasn’t commented on the bomb blast. People are guessing what happened and what consequences it would have. There are lots of different versions, but I doubt there is much sense to recapitulate them here. One is for sure. This is the first major terror act in Belarus. Even if the regime itself is not involved (and most probably, it isn’t as many prominent analysts, like Silitski and Feduta, think), there’s a damn good pretense to use this bomb blast for intimidation of the opposition. The blast is especially handy for this matter, as it happened a few days after the parliamentary race had officially started in Belarus.

LJ user kabierac posted Martin Niemöller's poem “First they came…” on his blog and called Belarusian fellow-bloggers to use the emblem of the White Legion as their userpic image, to express solidarity with the four individuals detained in connection with July 4 blast. His post (BEL, RUS) has made it into the Top 30 of the Yandex Blogs portal.

Many Belarusian bloggers have supported the initiative. LJ user coipish is one of them; according to some reports (BEL), he has also been detained by the police. He wrote this (BEL, RUS):

What you see on my userpic now is the emblem of what used to be the White Legion, whose former members are now being blamed for the recent blast. I join the initiative to support them by at least changing my userpic. I really sympathize with all the victims of the terrorist act, but, unfortunately, the real perpetrators are not likely to be ever held responsible for it :((

LJ user z_hunter chose to use an alternative userpic image – with the same symbol but a different color scheme:

Here is why (a discussion in the comments section on LJ user coipish‘s post):

z_hunter:

A good emblem, but the colors are bad. Not our colors – black and red. I like the white-red-white variation better.

kostas14:

Traditional for the Belarusian culture and art. [...]

z_hunter:

That's right. But red flag is also associated with some not very good periods in the history of the USSR and Germany. And all this had a very destructive and sad effect on our Belarus.

As for the reactions of the relatively apolitical Minsk residents, Kartina Mira (“Picture of the World”) blog, run by a Belarus-based Russian citizen, has this sketch (RUS), featuring a conversation overheard at one of the city's hairdressing salons:

[...]

- Oh, have you heard about the blast? A real terrorist act…
- Yes. Chechnya is way over there, and we are here. They are totally getting out of control.

That is, these events are so unnatural for Belarus that ordinary people come up with only one direct association for the blast: “terrorist act – Chechnya.”

The realities of the country I live in. Quiet, peaceful, nice, stable. Sometimes even boring. But it's so much better than what the neighbors have.

Written by Veronica Khokhlova · comments (1)
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