According to a 2014 survey by Public Opinion Foundation, a Russian survey company, half of all Russians use the internet daily. Russian citizens still regard the Internet, however, with a degree of mistrust: a recent study by the Levada Center revealed that 58% of Russians ‘would, in certain circumstances, support the government if it shut the internet down’. (Half of respondents believe that there should be censorship of the net in some form.)
These two contradictory trends, a lack of trust in the web and an increasing dependence on it, have come to define how the Russian authorities are represented online, and how Russian NGOs have responded to the state’s less-than-willing transition to the internet age.
The growth of transparency
The last high profile case taken by Ivan Pavlov, a well-known human rights lawyer, involved Svetlana Davydova, a woman accused of treason for phoning the Ukrainian Embassy in Moscow in January 2015.
