Russian authorities briefly banned the entire Wikipedia site over a page relating to drug use which the site had refused to edit or delete.

The ban was quickly lifted on Tuesday, before it had even gone into effect for most Russian internet users but not before the news had created a wave of panic in the country’s online community. There is increasing concern in Russia about a crackdown on internet freedom.

A court in a small town in southern Russia ordered that a Wikipedia page about charas, an Indian form of hashish, be banned as it contained harmful information. Because Wikipedia uses secure https protocol, some internet providers would have to ban the entire website. Late on Monday night, some Moscow internet users found Russian-language Wikipedia banned entirely, while for others it was still working, with a message from the website explaining how to circumvent a ban if it did come into place.

In a statement on Tuesday, online watchdog Roskomnadzor said the decision to rescind the banning order came because the forbidden information about charas had been redacted. Wikipedia editors said the page remained the same.



“This is an important case because it’s part of the general offensive against https. Roskomnadzor and the FSB [security services] don’t know what to do with it,” said Andrei Soldatov, a journalist and author of Red Web, a book about the Russian internet. Soldatov said SORM, the system Russia uses for internet surveillance, does not work with the more secure https protocol, also used by sites such as Facebook and Gmail.

On 1 September, a rule comes into effect which requires internet servers like Facebook and Twitter to store the data of all Russian users onshore. While Roskomnadzor has said it will not check compliance of major sites such as Facebook until next year, it is part of a drive to put pressure on the companies to keep servers in Russia, where data would be accessible by Russian authorities.



Soldatov speculated that the move against Wikipedia could be part of a test of another strategy: by threatening the site with bans over single pages, the site could be forced off https to ensure that the whole site is not affected when only one page is banned.

Soldatov said: “There are two options for https: the first is to have access to the data before encryption, which explains the demand to store servers in Russia. The second is to try to force services to give up on https, which is what is happening with Wikipedia.”

Russian authorities have become increasingly suspicious of the subversive powers of the internet in the three years since Vladimir Putin returned to the Kremlin for a third term as president in 2012. Protests in the run-up to his inauguration were largely organised on social media, and within a few months of his return to office he had signed a bill providing a list of banned sites.

Earlier this year, Russia, China and a number of central Asian dictatorships submitted a proposal to the UN, clearly aimed at the US, calling for countries not to use the internet “to interfere in the internal affairs of other states or with the aim of undermining their political, economic and social stability”.