Internet Sleuths a Real Threat to Lawmakers

During the 2011 State Duma elections, a graduate student observed the voting in the Russian Embassy in Stockholm. According to the student, voters clearly preferred the liberal Yabloko party to United Russia, the ruling party then headed by Vladimir Putin. The vote went “strictly in accordance with the rules,” but some voters objected that the observer was Russian, he said in e-mailed comments at the time. “One demanded that I should be a Swede because there are no independent Russians,” he said. Fourteen months later, that very student, Andrei Zayakin, shook the Duma by prompting the resign…

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