Iwas born in 1984, in the Minsk region of Belarus, in a new mining town called Soligorsk, founded in the late fifties. More or less the whole labour force was brought in from outside, and there’s little sense of national belonging. My father’s family came from the north of Russia; my mother, who was born near Moscow, arrived in the seventies with a degree in mining from Ukraine. The town is dominated by one huge state-owned enterprise that mines potassium and produces fertilizers which sell very well on the world market: it’s still the most profitable company in Belarus. My entire family worked for it, from grandparents to uncles and aunts. The ussr dissolved when I was seven, and while there may have been all sorts of problems with living in a small city like Soligorsk, they were not linked to the ussr’s disappearance. Under Lukashenko, who came to power when I was ten, Belarus was officially bilingual, but Russian was the dominant language, and growing up in Soligorsk felt just like being in a province of Russia. We were much more connected to events in Moscow than in Minsk. Initially there was no Belarusian television; the national media were not very strong, so the newspapers we got, and most of the tv programmes we watched at home, were Russian. People in Kaliningrad probably felt more cut off than I did in Soligorsk. Later, Lukashenko realized that if he didn’t control the flow of media in the country, he could lose the ability to make a case for Belarus to exist as an independent state, however pro-Russian. So he started limiting Russian programming to three or four hours a day, and mixing in some local news and Belarusian programming. But then people like my parents bought satellite dishes and continued watching Russian tv, not particularly because they mistrusted Lukashenko’s politics, but because the local stuff was so boring.

My cousin was lucky enough to have studied for her bachelor’s degree in St Petersburg, before moving to Holland. So there was an expectation in my family that I might be able to do something outside the country. I wanted to spend a year in a high school in the us, but that didn’t work out. The next best thing was to go to the American University in Bulgaria, which had been set up in the early nineties with Soros and usaid—and maybe some State Department—money, in a former school for communist leaders in a small town called Blagoevgrad, near the border with Macedonia and Greece. Like Soligorsk it’s a small town, of 70,000 people; an odd, poor place, where a lot of the students came from the former Soviet bloc or adjacent countries: Bulgaria, Romania, Yugoslavia, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Mongolia. Many, like myself, were on scholarships. There was a lot of ethnic tension on the campus when I arrived, in 2001, soon after the Kosovo conflict. I spent four years there, and learnt far more about the former Soviet Union than I ever did in Belarus.

The mission statement of the university was to educate the future leaders of the region, its alumni set for political careers in government or civil society. Some did that, but its graduates mostly found themselves working in business—in consulting, auditing or accounting firms. I ended up double-majoring in business administration and economics. My initial ambition was to work in an investment bank. What saved me from that was a ten-week internship at JP Morgan in Bournemouth, of all places, making sure all the trades went through; so if any of the traders mistyped ‘0’ as ‘1’, you would have to catch it. I never understood why they couldn’t just automate the process. I realized investment banking was probably not for me.

I decided to take a year out at the European College of Liberal Arts, a small outfit, now part of Bard College, that was also set up with American money—in this case by a private us philanthropist obsessed with liberal arts education. It wasn’t a degree programme, but you could do a proper humanities course there for a year, with all expenses paid. The programme I ended up on focused on three thinkers: Freud, Marx and Foucault, in succession. For nine months we read very widely; Lukács on the novel, Jameson, Norbert Elias, a lot of secondary literature. It was a very intellectually stimulating programme. But while I knew I didn’t want to do investment banking, I also didn’t want to be an academic. So I thought most of this study was useless. In retrospect, of course, I’m glad I did it.

A key influence on me was an Anglo-Dutch war reporter, Aernout Van Lynden, who lectured in Blagoevgrad because he was married to the Dutch ambassador to Bulgaria. The cultural standards on campus were low, but he was a genuine intellectual, who encouraged us to read the New York Review of Books and the ft every day. Living in Blagoevgrad—in the middle of nowhere, essentially—those were not at all the kinds of things people read. Most students were just focused on their careers. It was due to him that I started reading long-form journalism and experimenting seriously with writing in English. At the same time, in the last year or so of college I noticed that there was a sudden flow of articles dedicated to blogging—not just blogging as a phenomenon in itself, but as a political tool. This was during the 2004 us presidential election, when Howard Dean was running for the nomination of the Democratic Party. His campaign was marked by the horizontal deployment of micro-fundraising and blogging, and an emancipatory rhetoric—‘finally we can bypass the entrenched institutions that fund elections, and the mainstream media that sway them’. At roughly the same time, in late 2004, I saw the same wave of excitement about the use of these tools in the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, where LiveJournal—a blogging platform that was very popular in the Russian-speaking world—played a significant role.

So I felt there was something interesting here. In America you had this discourse about the democratization of access to the media and to fundraising, and you could already see results of these changes in Ukraine, and earlier in Georgia and Serbia. Activists in Otpor!, the American-sponsored opposition in Serbia, were reporting that they had learnt how to organize protests by playing computer games. To me, this clicked: the computer games, the text messaging, the blogging . . . My interest in these technologies intensified. The following year, I picked up a book written by leading analysts of the Howard Dean moment, an edited collection called Blog!. I was perhaps a bit ahead of my cohort in Europe in understanding that a major transformation was under way.

No, that came earlier. Around 2003, when I was at a summer school in Berlin, I met a Russian student of journalism who was freelancing for Akzia, a paper I’d never heard of, and she introduced me to the editor. Akzia was distributed free in Russian cafés and places where hipsters and intellectuals hung out, and had a quite active online presence. It wasn’t just an entertainment and culture publication: it featured political pieces about Russian youth and other movements, some more radical than others. They offered me a column, which is how I started in journalism—I was writing in Russian long before English. But not about Russia: the column was called Kosmopolit and covered a global beat—American elections, citizen journalism and mobile technology in Brazil, online publishing and copyright, architecture, you name it. Back in those days I wasn’t much preoccupied with Russian politics. Had I been, given that I was coming out of the American University in Bulgaria, where we were fed the gospel of neoliberalism on a daily basis, I would have probably inclined toward a Khodorkovsky-like alternative to Putin. On foreign policy issues, I identified with smaller states like Moldova or Georgia in their various squabbles with Russia, in part because of my background—I was still naive enough to believe that Belarus could one day join the eu.