The story
For one night in August 2015 the Russian-language Wikipedia was on the state’s list of banned websites. The cause was a single entry about charas, a form of hashish made from the resin of the cannabis plant, and a ruling by a court in a village on the lower Volga.
A village court
Chyorny Yar lies in the Astrakhan region and has about 8,000 inhabitants. In the summer of 2015 its court ruled that the Wikipedia entry on charas contained banned information about a drug. The reports differ on the month, June or July. The effect of the ruling was not local: it applied to the whole country.
Why one page meant the whole site
Under a law in force since 2012, a page that a court finds unlawful is entered in a unified register of prohibited sites, and when a site is added on a court order it is blocked as a whole, even if only one page offends. More than 25 articles of the Russian Wikipedia, mostly about drugs and suicide, had entered the register within three years of the law taking effect; most were later removed.
On Friday 21 August the media regulator, Roskomnadzor, said Wikipedia had not complied and warned that “the whole resource will be blocked”.
One night
| Date | What happened |
|---|---|
| Summer 2015 | The Chyorny Yar court rules against the charas entry |
| Friday 21 August | Roskomnadzor warns that all of Wikipedia will be blocked |
| Monday 24 August | The site is added to the register; the block begins overnight |
| Tuesday 25 August | The entry is removed from the register and access returns |
On the Monday the Russian Wikipedia’s account wrote: “Good morning, country! Possibly this is our last morning.” The encyclopedia published a guide to getting around the block.
The entry was edited. Roskomnadzor then announced that, on an expert opinion from the federal drug control service, the text no longer broke the law, and took it off the register. The director of Wikimedia Russia, Stanislav Kozlovsky, wrote that the confirmation had arrived “unexpectedly”. A news site later put the stakes plainly: the encyclopedia had nearly become unavailable to more than 140 million people.
Why the index did not move
The block changed no rule on possessing, growing or using cannabis, so none of Russia’s six scores moved. It belongs in the history because it shows a part of the law the scores do not measure: in Russia information about drugs is itself regulated, and “propaganda” of drugs is an offence.[1][2][3]
Listed for context. No score change is recorded for Russia here.
References
Checked. The date and the event were compared with a source that was read.