ABSTRACT
Introduction There have been predictions that so-called information society development would help Russia to change and modernise (see, for example, Peterson 2005, 3). On the governmental level, the state-aided development of information technology has been one of the central questions. Russian-language internet developed relatively rapidly in the 1990s, and the first governmental programs on information society development were established in the beginning of the 2000s during Vladimir Putin’s first and second terms as president of Russia. The burst in the information society programs was experienced in the context of Dmitri Medvedev’s presidency in 2008-2012. Promoting information society, especially in the form of information technology development, was one of the cornerstones of Medvedev’s modernisation program (Medvedev 2009b).1
