Abstract
At the time when the world became attracted to the new technologies, and especially to the Internet, Russia did not consider it immediately. But the introduction of Microsoft 95, which included the Cyrillic encoding, was the predominant element for Russian to equip themselves with computers at home, or in the offices. Foremost, the first users of Internet were qualified as "elite", because they had the financial means to the access, and sufficient knowledge to use it. As they were rather intelligent, they started using the Internet for serious purposes. In this way, Internet could live a little revolution with the apparition of web pages in Russian, country which was rather laid aside up to then.
The widespread of the Internet access in Russia took some time before being generalized. In 2005, 8.3% of the population were Internet users. But from 2002 to 2010, this rate increased by sixfold, reaching 35% of the population. The two capitals, Moscow and Saint-Petersburg, were first concerned, but the spread to other regions is in the pipeline. The president of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Poutin, conveyed a dynamic image of himself and its country from 2000, having already some Internet knowledge (during the G-20, he surprised everybody proposing to contact each other by e-mail).
Even if the television is still considered as the best means to get information and to hold the society together, it is mainly the non-user of Internet who think it so: almost 80% of the Internet users prefer Internet to find an information, whereas 2% of the non-user find it useless. Internet allows its users to discuss among Russian citizens, to share their opinions.
