OpenSpace.ru

» see openspace.ru as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

OpenSpace opened on 26 June 2008 with a job description that sounds impossible now. It covered contemporary art and literature at the depth a print quarterly would, updated at the pace of a news site, free to read, and paid for by a media company. ArtMedia Group put it up. Maria Stepanova, better known outside Russia as a poet and as the author of In Memory of Memory, ran it as editor in chief.

The number that describes it best is the contributor count. More than five hundred people wrote for OpenSpace across its five years, which is what happens when the editorial position is that expertise costs money and that readers follow a writer rather than a section. For a stretch of the late 2000s it was where Russian cultural criticism actually took place, with no real equivalent anywhere in the paid press.

Ownership is where it gets complicated. Vadim Belyaev, a banker whose money sat in Otkritie, took the site over in 2010. A publication about theater criticism financed by a financier is a stable arrangement right up until the moment it is not, and in the summer of 2012 it stopped being one.

~ the record ~

~ the first closing ~

In June 2012 the owner announced that the portal would change its concept and its editorial team. That is the corporate phrasing for something blunter: Stepanova's staff left in a body. They took the archive covering May 2008 through June 2012 with them and started Colta.ru on reader money, which is the only reason the first four years of OpenSpace are readable anywhere today.

Maxim Kovalsky took the empty chair that July. He had edited Kommersant Vlast until December 2011, when he was fired over an issue covering the parliamentary election, which tells you both what kind of editor the owner had hired and what kind of publication was coming. On 18 July 2012 OpenSpace restarted as a political outlet rather than a cultural one, under the same name and with almost nobody left from the version that had built it.

~ the second closing ~

That version lasted seven months. On 8 February 2013 the shareholders closed OpenSpace and Belyaev confirmed it himself. The reason given was economic. Kovalsky said publicly that he had grounds to think the reasons were political, and left it there.

Both accounts can be true at the same time, which is what makes this one hard to write down cleanly. A political site in Russia in early 2013, a year after the protest winter and with the pressure on independent media plainly increasing, was a worse commercial proposition than the same site had been in 2011. Whether the shareholder was frightened or was simply doing arithmetic is not a question a closure notice ever answers.

~ the legacy ~

Colta.ru is the inheritance and it is a real one. It carried the writers and the archive across, and it ran on reader contributions rather than on a single proprietor, which was the exact lesson OpenSpace had just finished teaching. The people who built the thing got to keep doing the work. What they lost was the name and the four years of traffic attached to it.

I have no memory of any of this and could not have had one. In 2008 I was in Turkey reading English-language technology sites, and OpenSpace was a Russian-language argument about Russian theater held for a Russian audience. The distance here is language before it is anything else. A culture site is the least exportable object on the internet, because its entire value is that the writer and the reader already share a set of references. That is also why almost nobody outside the country noticed when it went, and why the only reason I can put a date on it is that Lenta and Wikipedia both filed one.

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