Russian Village Almost Got Named after a Torrent Website in a Publicity Stunt

I know this may sound ridiculous and even unbelievable but the story has actually received huge attention in the Russian news sources and blogs – as it the story is actually true. I’ve checked, the news is not dated April 1^st no matter how appropriate it could be for the day but the entire Russian blogosphere is now discussing how Russia now supposedly has a village named after a website – and a website that works in the frequently criticized and discussed in courts field of torrent tracking and p2p sharing. The only problem is that the story has actually turned to be a fake one, probably designed specifically for PR purposes but the idea is definitely worth mentioning.

TorrentReactor.net, one of the top 10 torrent indexers in the world that is hosted in Russia has claimed to have paid about $150 thousand to obtain the right to rename a Russian village named Gar located in the Tomsk region in Siberia. This idea has been discussed with the population of the village (a total of 214 people) and the people are told to support the idea of having their short and easily pronounced name replaced with a longer one after the buying website. I guess the idea of each having their small portion of the donation could have helped reach such support immensely, especially given the poverty of people in such small villages.

The irony about the selected village is that it is located near the Seversk nuclear reactor which brings up interesting similarities in the name of the website as well. In fact, the winning village is told to have been determined randomly after they have carefully picked a number of small villages near various nuclear reactors around the world – and the number 377 happened to be lucky for the Gar village. And given that Gar can be translated from Russian as ‘burnt’, I guess the citizens should not be totally unhappy to get rid of their rather unpleasant name and get something fresh and very contemporary. The only disadvantage here is that until recently the village only had 3 PCs with only one of them having dial-up internet access so they had no chance to know such a website existed – let alone use it.

The agreement was told to be permanent so the village was supposed to retain its unusual name forever. And while it’s quite obvious that the goals here are mostly PR-related, the owners of the website claim that they also wanted to actually support one such slowly dying village (which are numerous in Russia) and pioneer a totally new movement with various internet companies supporting other real-life settlements with their inhabitants via such donations that also result in considerable PR.

The carefully designed story rapidly received immense attention among Russian internet users and visitors to TorrentReactor.net and many people actually believed the story to be true (in fact, it has even been reported by one of the most reputable internet news resources without any subsequent update as of this writing and since this was where I myself first saw the story, it was hard not to believe it was true). But some of the local reporters in Tomsk decided to go as far as contact the village authorities to confirm the story – and quickly found out that the story had nothing to do with reality. But actually a representative of such authorities mentioned that while they have not received any such offer from anyone, they would have gladly considered it if arrived as the state of the roads in the village is so poor that such an investment could really be needed.

But even if this story never turned to be real, the comments demonstrated that the number of people who were willing to buy a house and move to the village was quite significant as internet users hoped that torrents would somehow miraculously be made legal in the village. Now I would definitely suggest renaming a small (or maybe not even so small) town somewhere in Europe into The Pirate Bay – it definitely should exist and it could also quickly turn into a crowded travel destination with the right promotion and a monument to a torrent (no idea what it should look like but I guess an online competition could result in a good number of interesting projects) right on the main square of the town as a place of pilgrimage for all the active torrent users of the world. And a small hint to Google from the Russian users: you definitely should invest in buying Russian post and renaming it to Gmail – this would have been a huge PR campaign and we would have finally received a hope of actually receiving our mail.

Via (in Russian, original fake story) and via (in Russian, confirmation from the village authorities), image credit: torrentreactor.net