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The founder of Russia's leading social media network, a wunderkind often described as Russia's Mark Zuckerberg, has left his post as CEO and fled the country as cronies of President Vladimir Putin have made steady inroads into the company's ownership.
The slow-motion ouster of Pavel Durov from the network known as VKontakte, or "In Contact," is the latest sign that independent media outlets in Russia have become increasingly imperiled.
Although months in the making, the loss of Durov's leadership in VKontakte means that the space for free speech on the Russian web could shrink even further.
Users on VKontakte were even spreading jokes this week that the new nickname for the "In Contact" website should be "In Censorship."
As one of his final acts of defiance, Durov posted online last week what he said were documents from the security services, demanding personal details from 39 Ukraine-linked groups on VKontakte, also known as VK.
Kremlin pressure on VK has been accompanied by increasing enforcement of Russia's law against extremism, which took some prominent opposition and pro-Ukraine sites off the web in March.
On Tuesday, the Russian parliament passed a law requiring social media websites to keep their servers in Russia and save all information about their users for at least half a year.
The same law, which will go into effect in August if signed by Putin, gave bloggers the same legal status and responsibilities as media outlets, making them more vulnerable to accusations of libel or extremism.
Since the protests began in Ukraine, Putin and much of Russian media have amplified the patriotic rhetoric, proclaiming the need to secure Russia from enemies both foreign and domestic.
In a televised call-in show last week, Putin equated those critical of Kremlin policy in Ukraine with Bolshevik revolutionaries who rooted for Russia's defeat in World War I, and discussions about the country's traitorous Fifth Column have become the fare of state television.
VK, which largely resembles an older version of Facebook, attracts about 60 million users daily, primarily from countries in the former Soviet Union, vastly outstripping Facebook's reach in the region.
It played an instrumental role in bringing hundreds of thousands of protesters into the streets in late 2011 in the wake of widely manipulated parliamentary elections, and it has played a part in drawing crowds to the Kiev protest movement that helped oust Ukraine's pro-Russian president in February.
"There's been a trend that started with the protests of December 2011, when the authorities started fearing the crowd and especially the online crowd," said Anton Nossik, Russia's leading Internet entrepreneur.
