»Do you have a žž, too?« This question about a živoi žurnal (»live journal«) on the Internet, a personal weblog on http://www.livejournal.com, has been heard conspicuously often lately in the Russian-speaking world. Especially popular amongst the Russians is the weblog portal livejournal.com, based in San Francisco, California. Russia is the number two country represented there, although it still lags far behind the USA. According to official statistics, 400,000 Russian-speaking users from Russia, the Ukraine and Belarus today have their own žž – as many as in all 25 EU member states put together. This exceptionally widespread use of blogging in comparison with Europe must be seen against the cultural context. Apart from traditional Russian graphomania, an important role is also played here by the potential for collective text production and reception. This is made possible by a unique »friends« feature of livejournal.com: žž users are not only able to comment on entries made by other bloggers; they can also display with a mouse click all of the discussions carried out within the circle of individually defined »friends.« This feature is evidently particularly in demand in Russia since it creates individual communication networks reminiscent of the popular concept of »tusovka.« »Tusovka,« one of the key social buzzwords of the 1990s, describes a social group in which people communicate about their shared interests, situated somewhere between the scene as a whole and one’s private circle of friends.

An insider tip for a long time, the evident success of the new medium has now attracted the attention of the mainstream media. This can be attributed on the one hand to the fact that – as in other countries – journalists of the younger generation, such as Oleg Kašin (username: another_kashin) write much-read žž. On the other hand, as the Russian financial press recently pointed out, weblogs harbor great marketing and PR potential. In the corporate ratrace, the žž will soon be used as »weapons of mass destruction,« warns the financial newspaper »Delovoi Peterburg,« with businesses using blogs to deliberately spread rumors about their rivals.1

Things look less brutal on the arts scene. Here as well, however, the increasing power of the žž to influence public opinion can be felt ever since entries by prominent figures in Moscow’s art world have become required reading for those in the know. Marat Gel’man (username: galerist), for example, owner of the eponymous gallery and »political technologist« – at times serving Putin – has published 2,158 entries in his žž within the space of just two years. »What makes for the quality of žž is that you are a whole person in them,« explains Gel’man. »I’m not only an art activist, but also a man with his own problems, a citizen. The žž is the only place where all of my hypostases come together.« Others, such as Kiev art activist and art critic Anatoli Luk’ianov (username: dadakinder), instead see žž as primarily a publicity tool. At first, he underestimated weblogs as not particularly useful online diaries, says Luk’ianov, but the žž have meanwhile proven to be an excellent marketing tool for his culture portal http://www.proza.com.ua, with announcements on his žž leading to a drastic increase in visitor numbers.

From the perspective of the Moscow arts scene, the živoi žurnal fulfills yet another function: as substitute for a communications situation prevailing from the late 1980s to the mid to late 1990s that was felt to be very productive. In contrast to the Soviet period, when contemporary art was discussed behind doors in private or communal apartments, Perestroika and political liberalization at the end of the 1980s and early 1990s led to a shifting of the art discourse out into the public space. Newly founded galleries and contemporary art centers were the focal points for communication at that time. In a period when many values and the unclear meanings associated with them were being reconsidered, even the mass media were open to the contemporary art discourse. A new generation of art critics published articles in the liberal daily paper »Segodnia,« some of them very theoretical tracts that one would hardly expect to find in the newspaper. Moreover, a club scene emerged in the mid-1990s that, particularly in the early years, took on the function of central discourse platform. Societal instabilities prompted intellectuals and artists to look outward, weaving new social networks to compensate for the instability of the times. One of the first prominent clubs, probably the most important meeting place for Moscow intellectuals and artists at the time, was located in the apartment of the grandparents of the young journalist Dmitri Ol’šanski, who is today a well-known žž figure (username: olshansky). It developed into an entire chain called »OGI,« which stands for »United Humanities Publisher.« Club founder Dimitrii Ickovi? had previously studied the work of Soviet semiotics expert Yuri Lotman. Club and discourse made up a cohesive whole, even if only for a short time.

By now, these clubs have largely lost their cultural significance. The economic and social stabilization that has taken place, together with the impact of the increasingly authoritarian regime of President Putin, led to a withdrawal from public space – with slight Biedermeieresque tendencies, which did not fail to have their effect on Moscow’s arts scene. Harsh critics such as former television journalist Leonid Parfenov have even ventured to compare the Putin era to the age of Brežnev. Just as in those days, television toes the political party line. And today, by contrast with the 1990s, discussions have once again been relegated to the kitchen. For the Moscow arts scene as a whole, this is a communicative step backward, which is partially compensated for by the žž.

Noticeable here is that artists who made major contributions to contemporary art in the break-out days of the1990s have advanced again into the limelight in past months as active žž authors: painter Dmitri Vrubel’ (username: dmitrivrubel) publishes collages and Photoshop montages on current events several times a day, while painter and art critic Vladimir Sal’nikov (username: salnikov-vova) propagates a neo-Soviet »cultural revolution,« and action artist and political refugee Avdei Ter-Oganian (username: teroganian), who has lived in exile in Prague and Berlin since 2000, is once again present in Moscow’s art discourse thanks to his žž. And he is joined – particularly in the political arena – by numerous prominent fellow critics of Putin’s Russia, for whom there was no longer any room in the Russian electronic mass media. Nevertheless, žž can on the whole hardly be regarded as the organ of a critical (counter-)public. When President Putin was recently asked to answer some questions on the Internet, the four posed most often were basically joke questions from žž folklore. It was not until question five that political issues were broached. And even this was encoded in as right-wing extremism: »When will discrimination against Russians finally stop?«

 

Translated by Jennifer Taylor-Gaida

 

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