Georgia, Russia: Cyber Attacks on Blogger 'Cyxymu'

Global Voices Online
Sunday, August 9, 2009

A year ago, the Russo-Georgian war coincided with the 2008 Beijing Olympics, diverting some of the public attention from the peaceful sporting event. This week, cyber attacks on LiveJournal, Twitter and Facebook, targeting Tbilisi-based LJ/Twitter/Facebook user cyxymu, have added an extra dimension to the coverage of the first anniversary of the war - and even re-focused it to some extent.

Initially, the Russo-Georgian connection was not evident. On Aug. 6, LJ user mhwest posted this note (ENG) in the lj_maintenance LJ community, announcing that the blogging platform was "under attack":

Wonderful World of DDoS

As some of you may know, LiveJournal has been under attack this morning from 6:00am PST until ??? We have taken steps to mitigate the DDoS but some users may still experience site connectivity problems. [...]

This post has received over 250 comments, but there is only a handful of mentions of the geopolitical cause for the outages. Here is a sampling:

lavvyan - Aug. 6:

The Russians are coming!

No, wait...

[...]

nysidra - Aug. 7:

I remembered seeing this comment yesterday.

Just so you know, you were right. ^_^

Twitter's Meltdown: Blame the Russians

Also on Aug. 7, Eternal Remont quoted from a BBC piece (ENG), explaining the situation:

Yesterday, as blood poured down from the heavens, the seas boiled and the Earth was ripped apart because of the Denial of Service attack against Google, Twitter and Facebook (“OMG, I can’t tweet about the fact that Twitter is down!) we pondered one alluring possibility: is Russia involved?

Maybe. We do know that the disruption of all social networking on the planet was directed at one person:

BBC: "The massively co-ordinated attack on websites including Google, Facebook and Twitter was directed at one individual, a pro-Georgian blogger known as Cyxymu… Specifically, the person is an activist blogger and a botnet was directed to request his pages at such a rate that it impacted service for other users." [...]

And so, on the eve of the first anniversary of the war, LJ user cyxymu - whose nickname is a latinized version of the Russian spelling of Sukhumi, the capital of Abkhazia - became a celebrity of sorts.

Cyrillic LJ users - diana-ledi, taki-net, markgrigorian and many others - reported (RUS) not being able to publish posts and comments containing cyxymu's nickname.

His primary LJ blog and two backups - cyxymu1 and cyxymu2 - are currently inaccessible (some of his recollections, however, were translated by Global Voices' author Lyndon in Oct. 2007 and July 2008: The War in Abkhazia - ‘Cyxymu' Remembers, and Abkhazia, Georgia: "Home.”)

Cyxymu also has a Blogger blog, Twitter account, a public Facebook page, and a Facebook group with more than 750 members, created by someone else to support his cause.

Evgeny Morozov of the Foreign Policy's Net.Effect blog wrote (ENG) that he'd been "calling attention to CYXYMU's problems for months now, and this brought no results." Here is Evgeny's take on the recent cyber attacks:

[...] In short, I think that the current wave of attacks had one objective: to flesh attackers' cyber-muscles by revealing the kind of leverage that CYXYMU's detractors have on the Internet's most popular sites. Make no mistake: these attacks on Twitter and Facebook were NOT about silencing him down or thwarting the distribution of information that would Kremlin feel uncomfortable. [...]

If you carefully look at CYXYMU's Twitter account (most of it in Russian), you will see that there is really no information of ANY political significance there. He's been tweeting since late December 2008, produced 41 updates, and most of them had nothing to do with politics (here are some typical updates: "Summer is good!", "Life is great! I am recalling all the jokes about mothers-in-law", "Oh those bureaucrats").

This is definitely not the kind of stuff that threatens Kremlin. [...] His blog is also somewhat of a news hub: he has done an amazing job of keeping his followers in the loop as to what happens in Abkhazia and Georgia, the two regions that are not exactly in the center of media attention (even in Russia). He's definitely NOT the blogosphere's version of Anna Politkovskaia; it is his opinions and visibility - rather than his revelations - that have made him an important target.

Thus, I think that the attackers' real goal was humiliation, not censorship (however, more on the censorship part at the very end). A secondary goal was to generate awe-inducing headlines about Russia's cyberpower all over the Web; there is no better way to do it these days than to make Twitter inaccessible for a few hours. [...]

Ostap Karmodi wrote (RUS, link via LJ user drugoi) that "the attackers" would have probably thought twice before doing what they did if only they had been capable of foreseeing the outcome of their attacks:

[...] The result of yesterday's attack is that cyxymu, so disliked by some hackers, has become known to the whole world. The Spanish El Pais has written about him, and the French Liberation, and the German Spiegel, and the British Guardian, and the American Washington Post, and the Japanese Yomiuri. In short, all the main papers of the world. Some of them have even done short interviews with cyxymu. From now on, if a conflict between Russia and Georgia breaks out again, the world media will know who to talk to.

From now on, cyxymu's opinion on Russian politics will be interesting to the whole world - the opinion of a person who caused a crash of a hundred million accounts is always interesting.

The day before yesterday cyxymu was known to no more than ten thousand people. Today he is known to - what's the audience of the world media? 500 million? A billion? And most of these people sympathize with him - people do tend to sympathize with victims of mass persecution. [...]

Here is one of Evgeny Morozov's theories on who might be behind the attacks:

[...] The amateurization of cyberwarfare has been one permanent feature of virtually all recent cyber-attacks that somehow implicated Russia; it may be part of a broader Kremlin effort to "crowdsource" its defenses and offenses to groups of nationalistic vigilantes, not just in cyberspace. Thus, recent news reports suggest that Nashi, Kremlin's youth arm, will soon be recruiting up to 100,000 problematic teenagers to form ARMED militia units that would patrol the streets. It would make some sense if they also invest into units of "cyber-vigilantes" who would be patrolling cyberspace, particularly given the rising importance of the Internet in Russia's public life. [...]

And LJ user dolboeb felt, too, that "the recent initiative to create street 'militia units' in Russia" and the idea to attack cyxymu's blogs could have originated from the same source. He wrote (RUS):

[...] Indeed, why would the regime torture itself, trying to come up with some general anti-internet laws, the way the naive Kazakhs and the old-fashioned Chinese did, when a pack of patriotically-minded thugs is close at hand, ready to crash any service or resource [as soon as they are ordered to (or even without being ordered to)]. [...]

LJ user drugoi pointed in a slightly different direction in this very short and sarcastic post (RUS):

A request

Comrade [officer], I've written a post about The Beatles. Will you allow me to publish it? There's not a single word about Georgia in it. Will you please turn off your hurdy-gurdy for five minutes?

(The Beatles post (RUS) is here, by the way - it commemorates the 40th anniversary of the famous Abbey Road photo.)

Uzbekistan, Ukraine: Tashkent Blacksmith and His Children

Global Voices Online
Monday, April 21, 2008

On April 13, Oleg Panfilov - LJ user oleg_panfilov, director of the Center for Journalism in Extreme Situations - reposted an item (RUS) from a Central Asian news agency Ferghana.ru on the dismantling of the International Friendship Monument in downtown Tashkent. The news got many people upset: there are 162 comments on Panfilov's post (RUS), and 128 comments on Ferghana.ru's Russian-language article.

Below is part of the article's translation, posted on Ferghana.ru on April 16:

The Tashkent authorities had the International Friendship monument in front of the Friendship of Peoples Palace dismantled on April 12 night. The monument had been erected in memory of the Shamakhmudovs who adopted 15 orphans in the Great Patriotic War and became a symbol of generosity and humanism of the Uzbek people.

[...]

The Shamakhmudovs' story is known to absolutely everyone in Uzbekistan. When Tashkent women appealed to the women of Uzbekistan to adopt children evacuated from all over the Soviet Union in the first months of the Great Patriotic War, smith Shaakhmed Shamakhmudov and his wife Bakhri Akhmedova adopted 15 orphans - Russians, Belarussians, a Moldovan, Ukrainian, Latvian, Kazakh, Tatar, and others.

The Shamakhmudovs gave the children what they lacked - a genuine home and family. [...]

It is clear that not even the head of the city administration could made this decision entirely on his own. The monument must have failed to fit Islam Karimov's concept of the Uzbek state.

LJ user diana-ledi - Diana Makarova, a Kyiv-based journalist - read about the dismantling of the Tashkent monument on Panfilov's blog. She responded by blogging about one of Shamakhmudov's adopted children, Fyodor Kulchanovsky, and the role her own father played in helping the war orphan find his biological family. Below is a partial translation of this very moving story (RUS) - which has received 187 comments:

It happened someplace else. An outrageous, unpleasant thing, but far away, not where we are. Why am I crying then?

[...]

... The boy's name was Fyodor. He was 4 at the time when they were [in a hurry to evacuate the kids of Ukraine]. There was little time - the Germans were conquering Ukraine [very quickly]. There were not enough trains - the children were leaving without their families. No room for adults - [saving the kids was a priority]. Their IDs were getting lost, or copied by hand...

Fyodor arrived in Tashkent with [...] a notebook that stored his personal info, entered in someone's handwriting. At the orphanage, the contents of the notebook were copied when they created [Fyodor's] personal file. But they misread the handwriting. Fyodor was Kulchanovsky - but was turned into Kulchakovsky. And then blacksmith Shamakhmudov came to the orphanage and took Fyodor in. There were 16 adopted kids living in the blacksmith's house, I guess. Though they now say there were 15 of them.

But this doesn't matter. What matters is that the blacksmith and his wife brought them all up. Provided them with education and living quarters. Impressive, isn't it? Fyodor was the most difficult of the kids. He often quarreled with his father. But his adoptive mother, following the father's death, spent the rest of her life at Fyodor's house - and this says a lot about Fyodor.

[...] Fyodor didn't remember any of his blood relatives, but dreamed of finding them. And he devoted his whole life to this dream.

Just one tiny letter misread in a last name! And all the investigations that Fyodor led since childhood kept getting nowhere. And he grew up in the meantime, got married, was raising three kids of his own already. He buried his adoptive father and had his mother move in with him.

They kept telling him to stop searching. It was clear that it was impossible to trace a family about which it was only known that it had stayed back in Ukraine. That was it. No other initial data, except for the last name. Which, as it turned out later, was not accurate.

But the piles of documents, letters, inquiries were getting heavier. Fyodor kept looking. He became a grandfather himself, but continued his search.

... My papa lived in [Ukraine's Zaporizhzhya] region, worked as a journalist. [...]

His favorite occupation [...] was searching for people who had disappeared during the war. These were quiet investigations that lasted years. Piles of documents, letters, responses to inquiries.

Once, papa got an assignment to write about an old woman from [Ukraine's Dnipropetrovsk] region, who had managed to survive till 104 years of age, keeping clarity of mind [...].

[...]

- [...] Do you know why she's managed to survive till 104 years of age?
- Well, I don't. Perhaps, she was a good girl, didn't drink, didn't smoke?
- That too, of course. - My papa smiled. - But here's what has shocked me. She lost her grandson during the war. A 4-year-old boy left to her by her deceased daughter. And this old woman swore not to die until she found the grandson. She said - "How will I look my daughter in the eye in that world?" And she keeps on living, still keeps on searching.
- And then what?
- Nothing. A dead end. The boy either died along the way, or in evacuation. Or someone adopted him, and changed his last name. I think it's impossible to find him.

This was what my kind papa said. And began looking for a boy who was impossible to find.

Two thin threads existed for a few years - one from Tashkent, the other from Zaporizhzhya. Papa decided to check the possible interpretations of the last name Kulchanovsky. He counted on bad handwriting and the factor of a misspelled last name.

Papa had a surgery and was diagnosed with cancer in its final stage. According to the doctors, he couldn't last longer than two weeks. But he lived another year. He worked so hard in that last year! When he was not losing conscience from pain...

Every morning, we were sending out letters with texts that he was working on at night, and, of course, the inquiries. [...]

Two weeks before his death, he asked to be taken to the hospital. Mama explained to me later that he didn't want me to see his death. My tiny [daughter] was a month and a half then. I couldn't worry THAT much, my papa believed. [...] Papa was being taken away to die, he was hugging me and kissing my children [...]. He was saying farewell. And me, I wasn't, I was thinking, it's okay, dear papa, I'll rush to your hospital tomorrow. I didn't know that he had ordered not to let me in to see him. Dinochka shouldn't worry, because she can lose her milk for the baby...

And this was when they brought that crazy telegram:

"Come urgently! The meeting of grandmother with her grandson! Grateful, happy!" [...]

Papa read it and smiled. He knew already that the two tiny threads had met - Fyodor's thread and the thread of papa's new search. And it was a matter of time before Fyodor arrived to meet his grandmother, who had sworn not to die until she found him. And to meet his aunts, brothers, sisters, cousins.

[Pravda] later wrote about this meeting, and next to this piece, there was my papa's obituary.

[...]

Three months later, Fyodor came to our house. He asked us to take him to papa's grave. When he came to this freshly laid clay hill, he knelt and kissed the ground. We don't do it here, right? But Fyodor had had [an Oriental] upbringing. He was not afraid to speak in beautiful words. He valued beautiful feelings. He said:

- Your family is my family now.

And he came for a visit every year since then - to see his grandmother, then to papa's grave.
Then - to his grandmother's grave, and to papa's grave.

Then we moved. Fyodor also moved from Tashkent to Rostov. Difficulties of the post-Soviet period began, and we lost each other...

Two years ago [...] Fyodor found us. It hadn't been difficult for him to - he was used to searching. He came to ask about our lives, whether we were healthy. Whether we needed any help.

We were drinking tea. I was again asking him about his life in the renowned family of the Tashkent blacksmith. And he was telling me about the construction of that monument in Tashkent - a monument to their family. With his [...] finger, he was pointing at the stone figures of the children on the photograph, explaining which of them was devoted to him.

... On April 12, they destroyed the monument to the Shamakhmudovs family in Tashkent. [...] I'm crying. I always cry when someone hurts children.

And I'm also crying because my papa is dead. It's as if he died the second time today. [...] My kind papa - journalist KONSTANTIN SALNICHENKO.

[...]

Ukraine: Holodomor

Global Voices Online
Sunday, November 25, 2007


Last year's Holodomor memorial at Sofiyivska Sq. in Kyiv (Nov. 25, 2006) - by Veronica Khokhlova

This year, Nov. 24 was the day to remember the victims of the 1932-33 famine in Ukraine - Holodomor - and here is a selection of posts by Ukrainian bloggers.

LJ user diana-ledi (UKR):

[...] Shall I tell you about my grandfather, the first one in the village to join [Komsomol] - and the first head of the first [collective farm]? When it became clear that the famine was inevitable, here is what he did! One evening, he locked himself in with the agronomist and spent a long time calculating something. They discovered that sowing winter crop grain not as thickly could be the way out. No one would notice, and the grain that remained would help people survive winter. And that was what they did. But they did not distribute what remained among the houses, the way people were expecting. Because my grandfather knew that not every mother would tear a piece of bread from herself and give it to her children. Some [mothers] would hide [bread] even from their kids - my wise grandfather knew this.

And he came up with a dining hall, where every villager could get just one plate of that [soup] a day, with a few drops of oil floating in it and, sometimes, a few tiny bits of fried lard. And one piece of bread made of [seed coverings and small pieces of stem or leaves that have been separated from the seeds] - black bread of the hungry year. But thanks to that dining hall not a single person in the village died that winter. Think of it - not a single person! While whole villages were dying out all around, no one did in ours! They were swelling from hunger, yes, but they weren't dying. And every day, my grandfather would ride around the village [...], entering each house, checking whether they were alive, whether they were strong enough to survive - or perhaps they needed to be rescued by then. The weakest ones were given a little bag with "additional food allowance." Others were saying: "Move on, Anriyovych. We are holding on." When I was listening to this stories, I couldn't believe people were saying that. "They were," my grandmother would reply. "Because they knew that the family of the head [of the collective farm] was the hungriest of all at that time. My children and I swelled the most then."

And when spring came, someone from the rescued villagers reported my grandfather [to the regime] - for the thinned out winter crops. This is how my grandfather ended up in Siberia for the first time. Had he known that this would be how it would all end? Of course.

Or, perhaps, shall I tell you about my other grandfather? That one was a [kulak], the rich one. He escaped the purges miraculously, giving away his wealth to the [collective farm] in time and promptly joining the ranks of the Communist Party. And when the most horrible winter of the 1930s began, he left his family and went to his relatives at the rich farmsteads. My grandmother, surrounded by a crowd of hungry children, was sentenced "for a wheat spike," as they used to say then. For some grains in her pocket that she had collected from the road. Five kids were left on their own. One was 14, the oldest - 16. The aunts didn't desert them, came over and took them in ... the oldest two. Because these ones had grown up already and would be able to work around the household. "What about the younger ones?" I'd ask, horrified. "The younger ones were left behind - because the aunts had small kids of their own," they'd explain to me calmly. [...]

My father (aged 12) spent that whole winter feeding his little brother and sister (aged 4 and 6). What was he giving them? Here, listen: frozen vegetables found miraculously in other people's gardens; cats who were so trusting at first that they would jump into your arms; crusts of bread that he earned or asked people to give him. And as spring grew closer and there was no more of that "food" left, he discovered a hiding place inside the house. My grandfather was wild and ruthless - but in love with agronomy, and he had hidden some [high quality grains]. They were cooking it and eating - and survived thanks to that. When they were almost done with it, grandfather showed up at the house. He beat the children to near death, especially the oldest one, my father. Battered, my father ran to the train station, jumped into the freight train - and off he was to Tashkent. [...]

[...]

In 500 days (from April 1932 to November 1933), nearly 10 million people died of starvation in Ukraine. In spring 1933, 17 people were dying every minute, and 25,000 were dying every day...

... The regions that were hit the hardest are today's Poltava, Sumy, Kharkiv, Cherkasy, Zhytomyr and Kyiv oblasts. Here, death rates were 8-9 times the average... [...]

LJ user otets-lisiy (UKR):

What do I know about Holodomor? I myself am from Cherkasy region, and it was my grandmother and grandfather who told me about this horror.

My grandmother told me how from her family of nine children only five survived. She told me how they ate [ocheret - reed] and rotten potatoes. How the Commies were taking away all wheat and farm animals, and how at night they gathered wheat spikes at the field and some of them survived thanks to that. She told me about the village cannibals and one person who ate her own child. She told me about the man who had lost his mind and was chasing them around with an ax, and how she had barely managed to escape...

It's a sad date today. Eternal memory...

LJ user alenka14 (RUS):

I talked to my grandmother about Holodomor today. She was 7 in 1932-33. She remembers a lot from that time. Even 75 years later she can't think about that time without tears. When I was little and refused to behave, refused to eat, she would tell me stories from that time, when there was no food and it was called 'holodomor.' I thought of her stories as some kind of a fairy tale then. My grandmother has also survived the war, was captured, but she can't talk about Holodomor without tears in her eyes. [...]

LJ user fantasma_ (UKR):

My great-grandmother used to call the famine of 1933 "holodovka" [starvation, hunger strike], when I was still 4 or 5 years old. I only remember bits from those stories, as I didn't really undestand what she was tlling me about... "the man lying just off the road was dead" ... "the post-war holodovka wasn't as terrible as the one in the 1930s." I only understood what she meant by this when I accidentally recalled these story bits in the 11th grade when we were studying the 20th century... [...]

LJ user essy-aka-tigra (RUS):

I've written about Holodomor before, more than once. I'm okay with having opposing views on politics with [the people I know online and offline] - it's not something that would keep me from staying in touch with them. But I can never remain calm when I think of Holodomor.

There's such a thing as ethnographic expeditions. Ordinary stuff for history students. A gang of young students arrives in a village and walks around the houses with tape recorders.

Old men and women spoke calmly about [raskulachivaniye - persecution of kulaks, collectivization], about the war, about DneproGES [Dnipro Hydroelectric Station] construction. No big deal, they were saying, it was tough, but it was a long time ago, and tears and grief tend to get erased from memory.

But as soon as you asked them a question about the Holodomor of 1932-33, these ancient men and women, who had seen lots of horrors, began to cry. Just cry. Some refused to talk - they had no energy to tell anything about it.

I've seen it. I grew up in a village, my ancestors are village people, too. I've read and heard about it since childhood.

I don't give a damn about bills and resolutions. I just know what the truth is. [...]