In January 1950 Abram Trakhtman, a thirty-two-year-old major of the Ministry of State Security, a forerunner of the KGB, faced a personal crisis that threatened his entire career in Stalin’s secret police. For days he had sat alone in his office, located in a three-story, red-brick building in the small village of Marfino, northeast of Moscow.
The building on the compound was first erected in 1884 for a Russian Orthodox Church seminary. In the early 1920s, after the Bolshevik Revolution and the rise of an officially atheist state, the seminarians were expelled. The seminary was turned into a prison for adolescents. Then, in the 1940s, it was transformed again.
At that point the village of Marfino had just one cobblestone road. Bus no. 37 from city center stopped there twice an hour. In 1947 large walls were erected around the building and the former seminary was transformed into a Soviet secret research facility. It was named Object Eight and known informally as the sharashka of Marfino. A sharashka was a prison camp that held scientists who were put to work using their expertise for the state. They could not leave, but their conditions were better than the grim prison camps of the Soviet gulag. At Marfino the rooms were filled with convicted and imprisoned engineers, mathematicians, and linguists who were working to help the secret police find ways to provide secure telephone technology for Joseph Stalin.
Down the corridor from Trakhtman’s office was a large room, a former church cupola that had been subdivided so it looked like a half-moon chamber. On the ceiling the original church paintings were still visible, but down below it was crowded with radio and telephone equipment.
Trakhtman, thin-faced, with round, owlish glasses and a head of naturally curly hair, was reluctant to go to the round room just now, even though he knew his subordinates were waiting for him.
Abram Trakhtman was the chief of the acoustic laboratory.
He wore a green uniform with gold shoulder straps and a cap with a blue crown. The blue had been embraced by Russian secret services since the days of the tsars. An engineer by training, Trakhtman had enjoyed a very successful career up until January 1950. He was born to a Jewish family in a small Ukrainian town in the Pale of Settlement. He survived the pogroms, made it to Moscow, and entered the Moscow Communications Institute, graduating just before World War II. He then joined the Central Research Institute of Communications, where he was noticed by Alexander Mints, a prominent Soviet physicist and radio engineer highly regarded by the Soviet authorities. Mints made him part of his entourage, and Trakhtman earned two Stalin Prizes during the war.[1]
When the Ministry of State Security decided to launch the Marfino project in 1947, Mints was asked to lead it, but he declined.[2] Trakhtman got the job, which he eagerly accepted. He was given his own laboratory. He always wore the gold insignia of his Stalin Prize on his uniform. Yet now Trakhtman found himself in a dangerous situation—just when he thought he was on the verge of advancement.
Only two months before, Trakhtman’s laboratory had achieved a major success. They helped catch a government official who was providing sensitive secrets to the Americans. The laboratory consisted of five people; three of them were inmates, including the writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who was later sent off to a labor camp, and his close friend Lev Kopelev. A gifted philologist, Kopelev was a big, flamboyant man with thick black hair, a black beard and mustache, and large, expressive eyes—a real firebrand. It was Kopelev who had identified a foreign ministry official who made a phone call to the US Embassy in Moscow, thereby revealing the existence of an undercover Soviet spy who was headed to New York to steal atomic bomb secrets. To accomplish this, Kopelev had analyzed the recording of an intercepted phone call and fingered one of three suspects. The suspected caller was arrested. Kopelev, excited by this success, thought he had created a new scientific discipline and gave it a name: phonoscopy.
With Kopelev by his side, Trakhtman made contact with a high-ranking general, a head of the Ministry of State Security’s Operational Equipment Department, and won permission to establish a new research institute that would work specifically on speech recognition and speaker identification. Trakhtman was thrilled and told Kopelev that they would have a promising future together and asked Kopelev to think about what kind of equipment they would need for the new institute. A location for the new sharashka was found in the center of Moscow.[3]
But January 1950 was an unfortunate time for an engineer with a name like Abram Trakhtman, even within the state security apparatus. A year before, the Communist Party newspaper Pravda had accused Jewish theater critics of unpatriotic behavior in an article edited personally by Stalin, and the Soviet press launched an orchestrated campaign against “cosmopolitanism,” which was essentially an attack on prominent Jews.[4] The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was disbanded, many of its members arrested, and Jewish newspapers and publishing houses were closed. The campaign then turned into something akin to a witch hunt, with Jewish doctors being accused of poisoning Soviet leaders. In 1950 the anti-Semitic campaign reached the ranks of state security. Just a few days after Trakhtman had secured the general’s approval, he was told that the building chosen for the new sharashka was not sufficiently secure. Then he was told that Marfino’s prisoners could not be moved to this building because it was too risky to have them in the center of Moscow. It was clear to him that his plans were being deliberately and repeatedly delayed. Days passed without any decisions being made. Trakhtman was rarely seen in his laboratory, the half-moon chamber. His subordinates concluded that he was afraid to address their questions about the fate of the new project. They were right.
Finally Trakhtman was told he would not get any convicted engineers for his new sharashka. In despair, Trakhtman tried to raise the stakes. He refused to be a director of the new institute without his prisoners and declared that the entire project was doomed without them.
That was a mistake. The general who had given him permission for the new institute proceeded to cancel it. Trakhtman was stripped of his rank of major and expelled from Marfino. In late January he went back to the compound one last time.
Anxious and unhappy, Trakhtman walked into the laboratory to deliver the news and say goodbye. Before he left, Trakhtman turned to Kopelev and said, “Now, strictly between us—it’s impossible to be a director of the institute with such a name,” meaning a Jewish name like Trakhtman. He then squeezed Kopelev’s hand, smiled sadly, and left.[5]
With his ambitious plans for a new sharashka destroyed, Trakhtman soon relocated to another top-secret facility, working on missile guidance systems, a part of the Soviet space effort. For Trakhtman, research on speech recognition—the most promising project of his life—was over.
But the general did not forget about Trakhtman’s subordinates at Marfino’s acoustic laboratory. They remained locked up at Marfino for another three years until December 1953, when eighteen prisoners were transferred from Marfino to Kuchino, another security service compound outside of Moscow. The talented Lev Kopelev followed them in January 1954. The compound was controlled by the Soviet secret police and intelligence service, which was renamed that year the Komitet gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti, or, simply, the KGB.
Kuchino, about twelve miles east of Moscow, was set on an old prerevolutionary industrialist’s estate. It became the KGB’s main research center for surveillance technologies, including the all-pervasive Soviet system of phone tapping and communications interception. From this day forward, speech recognition research and telephone wiretapping were bound together, funded and directed by the KGB.
The Soviet secret services wanted to make sure they could properly intercept any call, and identify the person who made it. They wanted to make sure that information in the Soviet Union—all kinds of information, including communications between people—was under their control. Long before the term was fashionable, they determined that they wanted to be the dictators of data.
Two years after Trakhtman said goodbye to his dream, Vladimir Fridkin graduated from the physics department at Moscow State University. A thin-faced but earnest young man, he had earned a diploma with honors but could not land a job in physics, despite months of searching. He was repeatedly turned down. Fridkin knew the reason: he was a Jew, and Stalin’s anti-Semitic campaign had erased all the advantages Fridkin might have expected with his degree.[6]
He gave up hopes of becoming a nuclear physicist and finally landed a job at the Scientific Research Institute of Polygraphic Engineering. The institute occupied a few miserable barracks in the rear of a large factory in the west of Moscow. When Fridkin first opened the door of his small office, it was almost empty—there was nothing but a table and chair. It was an inauspicious beginning: he could hardly carry out scientific research in the barren little room.
Instead, he went every day to sit for hours under a green-shaded lamp in the vast, high-ceilinged reading room of the Lenin Library near the Kremlin. The library held the largest collection of books, documents, and dissertations in the country, in hundreds of languages. One day, while there, he discovered an article written by Chester Carlson, an American physicist, about the process of electrophotography, or, more simply, photocopying.[7]
There was nothing like photocopying in the Soviet Union. Fridkin was intrigued by the possibility that he could build a Soviet copying machine. First, he went to the institute’s department of electrical equipment and asked them to get him a high-current generator. Then he went back to the physics department where he had studied at the university and obtained sulfur crystals and a photographic enlarger. In his small office he experimented. He tried to make a copy of a page, then of a photograph. One day he succeeded in duplicating an image of Mokhovaya Square, a well-known landmark in front of the Kremlin. When the director of the institute saw this he exclaimed, “You do not understand what you invented!” The director immediately ordered the institute’s designers to take what Fridkin had done and transform it into a single machine that could make photocopies. When they managed to do this, the first copying machine in the Soviet Union was born. It was box-like, more than three feet high and two feet across, with two cylinders on the top and the high-current generator attached. It was named the Electrophotography Copying Machine No. 1.
Even though the machine was primitive, nobody doubted the significance of the invention. The institute director called the ministry—in the Soviet centrally planned economy, a government ministry oversaw every such institute. Soon the minister himself came to the Institute of Polygraphic Engineering to see the machine, and he was so impressed that he ordered it into mass production. A factory in Chisinau in the Soviet republic of Moldova was selected to produce the new machines, and a special electrophotography research institute was established in Vilnius. At twenty-four years old, Fridkin was appointed deputy chief. He was featured in a television show praising the Soviet achievements in science. He was also paid a bonus for his accomplishment.
Although Fridkin felt much better, he still wanted to be a physicist. At last, in 1955 he was given a job at the Institute of Crystallography. When he moved there, his copying machine followed him. For two years his colleagues at the institute came to his room every day to use his machine to copy articles from foreign journals. Fridkin became a very popular person in the institute. Then, one day in 1957, a nice young woman from the KGB section walked into his room. Fridkin had known her. She had a pretty face, wore plain clothes, and Fridkin often spent time drinking tea and chatting with her. But she brought bad news. “I have to take away your device and destroy it,” she said. Fridkin asked whether she knew that this was the first copying machine in the Soviet Union. “I know, but people who come over to you can copy some prohibited materials,” she replied.
The first copying machine in the Soviet Union was smashed to pieces, and the parts were taken to a dump. One critical part of it, a slab of mirror, was salvaged and put up in the women’s restroom. Fridkin’s institute did not carry out secret research, so the decision to destroy his machine was not protecting anything at the institute; rather, it reflected the broader and deeper paranoia of the Communist Party. The party maintained a stranglehold on power and a chokehold on information. It could not tolerate the possibility that Fridkin’s invention might be used to freely make copies of unapproved documents for unauthorized circulation.
In a few years the factory in Chisinau ceased production. Fridkin knew that the quality of the machines produced by the Chisinau factory was not very high. But it was hardly a reason to stop making them. Later, when photocopying became routine in the West, the Soviet Union bought Western Xerox machines, but its attitude to information remained unchanged. The few photocopiers that were brought from abroad were kept under lock and key in party offices or in the Academy of Sciences. In many factories and institutes a special staffer operated the photocopier under the watchful gaze of the KGB. It happened in Fridkin’s institute too. He seethed with anger at the sight of the photocopying machines in his own institute being locked in the prison of information.
Stalin died in March 1953, and the brutal, totalitarian system of mass repression slowly began to relax. The mood in Soviet society started to change. Many gulag prisoners were released and returned home by 1955. In February 1956 Nikita Khrushchev, the new Soviet leader, made a speech at a closed session at the 20th Party Congress denouncing Stalin’s crimes. The “secret speech” lasted four hours. In a few years Khrushchev loosened state controls in a period that became known as the Thaw. Dozens of different freethinking groups blossomed in the Soviet Union, including Moscow intellectuals, artists and writers, all kinds of nationalists, and Jews who had been denied permission to emigrate, known as “refuseniks.” It was a time when many were optimistic, especially young people who yearned for better lives after the deprivations of war and Stalinism. But the Thaw did not last. In 1964 Khrushchev was ousted and replaced by Leonid Brezhnev, who effectively ended reforms. In the autumn of 1965 arrests of intellectuals and writers began in Moscow and Ukraine, and censorship tightened. The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 effectively marked the end of the Thaw.
But one feature of the period did not disappear. The circulation of uncensored information became an essential part of the dissident movement, if not its main goal. This included the circulation and copying of manuscripts, known as samizdat, or self-published, that covered a wide range of material: banned works of literature, social and political commentary, open letters, Solzhenitsyn’s novels, and, from 1968 to the early 1980s, the Chronicle of Current Events, which reported human rights violations in the Soviet Union. Soviet dissidents didn’t have Fridkin’s machine. Nor did they have a Western-made Xerox. They hammered out their works on carbon paper with a typewriter known as the Erika, made in Eastern Germany, which could produce only four copies at a time.
In the Soviet Union the state had always held the upper hand when it came to distributing information. All other sources, like independent media or the church, were outlawed. “A newspaper is not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator, it is also a collective organizer,” Lenin wrote in 1901 in the fourth issue of Iskra, the main Bolshevik newspaper. The Bolsheviks wanted newspapers to organize and mobilize the masses, not to inform them. They could not tolerate an independent press after the 1917 revolution: from their point of view it was impossible to let the enemy have such a powerful tool to mobilize the masses. Stalin repeated Lenin’s words in 1923 in an article, “The Press as Collective Organizer,” in Pravda.[8] In the 1930s all Soviet cities were filled with street loudspeakers, spreading propaganda. Just like in the Middle Ages, when the church bells defined the day, in Stalin’s Soviet Union the day started with a national anthem broadcast by a loudspeaker on the street, and it ended with the anthem. There was no way to turn the loudspeakers off. For many decades Soviet citizens had no choice in what they could listen to or read. By the end of World War II an entire generation had come of age not knowing anything else, let alone what they had lost. They lived all their lives to the echo of the words and formulas dictated by the state.
The Soviet regime rigidly controlled public space. Newspapers and television were censored by the general directorate for the Protection of State Secrets in the Press, known as Glavlit, which reported to the Council of Ministers. From March 1961 Glavlit was also put in charge of controlling the communications (telex and phone conversations) of foreign correspondents in Moscow.[9] Another government committee, known as Goskomizdat, censored fiction and poetry. Radios were jammed, and dozens of jamming transmitters were positioned along the borders. It was a fast-growing industry. In 1949 350 short-wave transmitters tried to jam the Western radio broadcasts. In 1950 there were 600 of them; in 1955, about 1,000, with 700 in the Soviet bloc countries. Their goal was to jam what amounted to no more than 70 Western transmitters. By 1986 the Soviet Union had thirteen powerful long-range jamming stations, and local city jamming stations were established in eighty-one cities, with 1,300 transmitters in total. The radio jamming was stopped only in November 1988 by the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.[10]
For most of the seven decades of Soviet rule to seek information was a risky and dangerous game for ordinary people. Soviet-produced radio sets had certain frequencies disabled. To be found in possession of a quartz with the wrong frequencies was a criminal offense. Soviet-made radios were required to be registered with the government, a rule that was canceled only in 1962. The authorities wanted to be able to track anyone who copied information; the KGB required that samples taken from all typewriters be kept on file in case one had to be identified.
The ordinary and casual exchange of news with foreigners was also restricted. Living behind closed borders, Soviet citizens needed an “exit visa” to go abroad, a long-cherished dream that could be granted only after a long talk with a KGB officer. When abroad, Soviet citizens were requested to walk in groups so to exclude any contact with locals, including informal conversations. Soviet citizens who were allowed to go on business trips were requested to present reports of their encounters with foreigners.
Not surprisingly, the Communist Party wanted to force Soviet citizens to censor themselves. And the intimidation was effective. Everybody in the Soviet Union knew the expression “this is not a phone conversation,” which expressed a wish to discuss something in person because they were afraid somebody else might be listening. The “somebody else” was the state and its vast networks of informers.
The Soviet Union was not an occupying regime; instead, the regime attempted to make everyone complicit in its goals. The peculiar structure of Soviet society helped the authorities in this. The military-industrial complex was an enormous archipelago of institutes, factories, and government ministries. By some accounts, it made up 30 to 40 percent of the Soviet economy. Within it the Soviet Union employed a vast army of engineers at secret military and security research facilities, known colloquially as “post office boxes.” These laboratories and offices were known only by a post office box number, such as NII-56. Any mail would be addressed to that box number, not to the real name of the facility. One purpose of the zip-code-style number system was to hide the secret facilities from the prying eyes of foreigners, who were prohibited from going near them. Often the state designated an entire city “closed.” Both of Irina Borogan’s parents, engineers by training, worked at the post office box in the tiny town of Electrougli: foreigners were not allowed into the town, although it is located only twelve miles from Moscow. There a certain kind of vague doublespeak took hold and became part of everyday conversations. A person might say they worked at a “post office box” developing a “device,” but their meaning was immediately clear. In this way the Soviet population was co-opted into becoming a part of the system. Even if an individual didn’t work at a “post office box” or in the military, it was likely that someone else in the family did so, and the rules covered everyone.
In such a system the government did little to encourage telephone use. Officials at the Soviet Ministry of Communications loved to recall Khrushchev’s statement that Soviet citizens did not need home phones because, unlike in the United States, there was no stock exchange in the Soviet Union, and therefore they don’t need so much information.
When dissidents tried to use telephones to exchange information and contact each other, the KGB was quick to react.
Kopelev, who left the Kuchino sharashka in December 1954, became a passionate Soviet dissident in the 1970s. He turned his two-room apartment, on the sixth floor of an apartment building in the north of Moscow, into a gathering place for dissidents. Dozens of phone calls were made from there every day. But when the KGB found out, they cut off his home phone line. After that, his son-in-law brought him a handset from a phone station he worked at, a plastic black piece with a white disk, a dial, and a cable. Every night Kopelev walked down the stairs to the first floor of his apartment building. There was a room there for a dezhurnaya, a person on duty, usually a woman, whose job was to control who came into the building. Inside the room there was a phone, but the room was locked. However, outside there was a phone socket on the wall, and when the dezhurnaya went home, Kopelev got the device connected to the socket—and spoke for hours.[11]
In 1972 the KGB requested the Soviet Council of Ministers to adopt a new rule prohibiting the use of international phone lines “in a manner contrary to the public interest and public order of the USSR.”[12] It was a typical KGB move to keep tight control. Even though the restriction was approved, it was not enough for the KGB; they wanted still more restrictions. In June 1975 Yuri Andropov, then chairman of the KGB, reported to the Central Committee about a new threat. He said that Jewish refuseniks were making international phone calls. In his letter to the Central Committee marked “Secret,” Andropov reported that in 1973–1974 more than one hundred phone customers were identified and their phone lines turned off, which, according to the KGB chairman, “caused a severe blow to the foreign Zionist organizations which consider regular telephone as the most important way to get information of interest from the Soviet Union.”[13]
Andropov warned, however, that the Russian Zionists were bypassing the KGB by actively using automated international telephone lines as well as telephone booking offices to make international calls using bogus names. The KGB lamented that the Zionists had delivered a series of appeals to the West addressed to the international community, demanding that the Soviet authorities restore their disconnected phones. Andropov’s recommendation was “to suppress the use of international communication channels for transmission abroad of biased and slanderous information.”[14]
But Andropov could not block communications completely. In spite of his best efforts, some kinds of information kept flowing.
The same month that Andropov reported his concern to the Central Committee, a samizdat book was being passed to Kharkiv, 460 miles west of Moscow. The book was essentially a stack of tissue paper, bound by coarse thread, containing a collection of articles written by Vladimir Jabotinsky, a prominent Zionist in the early years of the twentieth century.
The samizdat book was passed to Alexander Paritsky, who was then thirty-seven years old. He lived with his wife, Polya, and two daughters in a small apartment. Kharkiv was mostly known for a huge tank factory. Paritsky’s father and brother were both imprisoned under Stalin, but he was by no means a dissident. He was constantly reminded, however, that he was a Jew. He had a modestly successful career as an engineer at a local research institute.
Paritsky’s sister, Dora, brought the dog-eared samizdat manuscript to him. “As usual, we had it for only the one night and then it went further on the chain,” Paritsky recalled. This was the usual procedure for samizdat—you could read it for one night and you had to pass it on.[15] The night turned into a marathon reading session. By the next morning “Polya and I became Zionists. We decided to emigrate to Israel,” Paritsky recalled.
The next day he announced their decision to an astonished Dora. However, there was a problem: Paritsky worked on radars for the Ministry of Defense, and that made all his work top secret. Soon he left his job and became an elevator repairman. In July 1976 he applied for an exit visa for himself and his family. He also tried to find a way to contact Moscow’s community of refuseniks, hoping to make his case public. Paritsky began getting letters from Jews in Israel and soon got his first phone call from abroad. When he received his second international call, from London, the phone was turned off right in the middle of conversation.
“I was told that my phone was turned off by the order of the chief of Kharkiv’s communications center,” he recalled. “My wife and I arranged to see him, to find out the reasons.”
When the pair went to the communications center, the chief just gave the Paritskys a brochure, which turned out to be the Charter of Communications. The chief pointed to the article that had been inserted in 1972 prohibiting the use of the phone to do harm to the Soviet state. To drive the point home, a few days later Paritsky got a formal summons to the city council offices, where he was given a warning about his anti-Soviet activities. However, Paritsky didn’t stop, and after that he made his calls from special offices where citizens could book calls through telephone operators.
On August 27, 1981, Paritsky was arrested near his apartment in Kharkiv. The Chronicle of Current Events reported his case. The KGB first hinted at accusations of espionage, knowing of Paritsky’s past secret work, but then they changed tactics, indicting him instead for using international telephone lines to spread anti-Soviet information. “At the court, the prosecution presented a woman, an operator at the international telephone communications hub. She testified that during her duty her client complained about the poor quality of the line. Then she gave my name, so she identified me by my voice heard on the phone five to seven years earlier,” Paritsky recalled. “She then explained that she connected the line to check the quality and heard me defaming of the Soviet system.”
He was sentenced to three years in jail and sent to the labor camps. Only in April of 1988 were Paritsky and his family allowed to leave the Soviet Union.
At the height of the KGB’s powers, however, it turned out that the Soviet Union did indeed need international telecommunications—Moscow would host the Olympics in 1980 and the Kremlin wanted to go about things properly. In 1979 the number of international lines was significantly increased. An international telephone exchange station, located in two tall buildings on Butlerova Street in Moscow’s southwest and known as M9, was opened to deal with the expected calls.
When, on July 19, 1980, the Games opened in Moscow, Gennady Kudryavtsev, an engineer at the Department of the International and Intercity Communications of the Ministry of Communications, felt especially proud. Kudryavtsev had carried out a project to expand the international phone lines. He had delivered them on time. There were sixteen hundred new channels and a whole floor of M9 for international calls.[16] These channels provided automatic connection, without an operator, which was hitherto unheard of in the Soviet Union.
The KGB had resisted the expansion. To mollify them, the Ministry of Communications suggested that callers would have to dial not only the number they wanted to call but also their own number so no one would go unidentified. The KGB was still reluctant to allow more phone lines to contact the outside world. Then Kudryavtsev suggested adding another way for the KGB to eavesdrop on conversations. “There was a specialist who told me that there was a way to add a special programming loop to get all calls intercepted,” said Kudryavtsev. The method of intercepting all calls was introduced. Only then was the KGB finally satisfied. No matter how many more lines were opened, they could listen to any call.
The sixteen hundred channels turned out to be quite enough for the Games, which were boycotted by sixty-five countries in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. No one complained. “All the calls went through on the first attempt, because there was almost nobody to call, to be honest,” Kudryavtsev recalled.
Still, the regime did not want to let people have the option for long. A few months after the Olympics, in early 1981, Kudryavtsev, who had been appointed the first deputy minister of communications, was called to the offices of the Central Committee of the Communist Party.
He was uneasy. Just a few days before, he had learned that part of his responsibilities as first deputy minister was to oversee the system of Soviet jamming stations. He knew that the summons to the Central Committee had to do with the international lines. “I heard already that the KGB people went around complaining about international phone lines,” he said. But when he arrived, it was worse than he thought; he was given a secret decision approved by the secretariat of the Central Committee to reduce the number of automatic international lines. The lines had been his triumph, but now he was being asked to take them down.
The decision was presented as coming from the Central Committee, but in fact it was written at KGB headquarters. Kudryavtsev was put in charge, and the scale astonished him: the order was to reduce the number of overseas channels from sixteen hundred to only one hundred. For channels to some countries, the cut was even more drastic. “We had eighty-nine channels for the United States, and I was told to reduce the number to only six,” Kudryavtsev said. He was clearly upset, “Of course it hurt me—I made it, I saw that it was necessary, that it was impossible to go without it.”
In a month Kudryavtsev destroyed his own creation. The changes made automatic connection almost impossible, and customers, including foreign embassies, noticed it. On a small sheet of paper Kudryavtsev wrote out an explanation that it was due to “technical problems,” but he blushed every time he was forced to explain.
Finally Kudryavtsev found a way to take control of a telephone station on Leninsky Prospect. He redirected the lines of those who were allowed to use automatic international connection to this single station. In a year the chosen organizations, approved by the authorities, found that automatic international connection was restored.
For the rest of the country it was not—and remained that way for many years.
Kudryavtsev was angry because the KGB was given everything they demanded for the Olympics, but after the games were over, they forced everything to go back to the way it was before. As a Soviet official, Kudryavtsev completely accepted that the KGB needed to possess the means for intercepting calls, but he didn’t understand why they needed to cut the lines. It was against his engineer’s nature, and it tortured him for years. His usual sad joke was to tell his friends that he got his first government award for increasing international communications capacities, and his second award came for cutting them off.
For many years after 1981 Kudryavtsev tried to talk some sense into the KGB, but the generals would not listen. They believed he was behind the expansion of the phone lines before the Olympics—and in this they were right—and they told him only one thing: “Gennady Georgievich, you had f—ed us when you were leading to the Olympics. Now shut up.”
Kudryavtsev took that rather seriously. He knew how intimate the relationship between the Ministry of Communications and the Soviet secret services was. In the massive building of the Ministry of Communications on Tverskaya Street, known as the Central Telegraph, he was given an office once used by Genrikh Yagoda, a chief of Stalin’s secret police, the NKVD, who was also a commissar of communications. “All the furniture was from Yagoda’s times—his table, his safe—only his lift was blocked, which used to lead to the basement and then to the metro. But I checked—the lift shaft was still there.”
In 1988 Kudryavtsev went to the Politburo to explain a minor issue of international connection between a factory in Ivanovo, not far from Moscow, and its Bulgarian partners, and Mikhail Gorbachev was present. When Gorbachev asked him what should be done to improve the line, Kudryavtsev replied, “Cancel the decision of the secretariat of the Central Committee on restrictions of international communications.” Gorbachev said, “But what should be done specifically for Ivanovo?” And thus the question was postponed again.[17]
A year after Kudryavtsev was forced to destroy his greatest achievement, Ed Fredkin, a leading computer authority at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a jovial and energetic former Air Force fighter pilot, went to Moscow. Fredkin had worked for years developing contacts inside the Soviet research community. He was fond of big ideas and flew to Moscow to attend a physics conference with the notion, as he recalled it, to “infect the Soviet Union with personal computers.”
“Since we arrived a few days prior to the start of the meeting, I immediately went to the Academy of Sciences Computation Center to reconnect with old friends and explain what I wanted to do,” he told us. “My friends told me that I had to talk to Yevgeny Velikhov. I called him, and he came over to the Computation Center.”[18]
Velikhov, then forty-seven years old, was an open-minded and ambitious nuclear physicist and a deputy director of the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy. Velikhov had recently been elected a vice president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, the youngest ever. Fredkin had known Velikhov for years, and he spoke openly with him, arguing that the widespread adoption of computer technologies was vital to the future of the Soviet Union and that better times could be realized only if the authorities gave up rigid control of information. Fredkin suggested that personal computers could fit with socialism even better than with capitalism, and Velikhov, an enthusiast of personal computers since the late 1970s—when he had bought for himself one of the first Apple models—arranged for Fredkin to speak before Soviet scholars at the presidium of the Academy of Sciences. “We needed this talk at the presidium to overcome the resistance,” recalled Velikhov.[19] The goal was to change the Soviet government’s position, which was then geared toward developing information technologies by using a rigid hierarchical scheme with massive, central computers, and terminals, not personal computers.
Two days before the talk Fredkin was in his room in the Academy of Sciences Hotel when he got a phone call from someone. The person spoke English and didn’t introduce himself:
“I understand that you have been told by Velikhov that you will be allowed to give a talk at the next meeting of the presidium.”
“Yes, that is correct.”
“Well, we have looked into the matter, and to this date, no foreign person has ever made a presentation at a meeting of the presidium. It’s true that Vice President Velikhov is an important man, but he is not important enough to overcome such a lack of precedence.”
Fredkin was speechless.
“So, you will not address the meeting of the presidium.”
Not knowing how to reply, Fredkin simply said, “Thank you.”
But the next day Fredkin got another call from the same person, who now told him that the talk was approved. Still, it was not easy. “When I arrived to give my talk, the acting president of the Academy of Sciences, someone whom I knew well and considered to be a friend, pointedly stood up, put his papers into his briefcase, slammed it shut, and stormed out, just as Gromyko had done, on occasion, at the United Nations.”
Fredkin made every effort to break the ice. He told the audience about his family ties to Russia; his parents had been suppliers of wood for the imperial palace in St. Petersburg. He spoke of the large technology gap between the Soviet Union and the United States. He said computers were different: the performance-to-cost ratio improved by more than a factor of two every two years, making it uniquely different from any other kind of technology. But the suspicious audience first asked him why he cared about Soviet technological problems. Fredkin had a ready response, “My wife and I would feel safer back in Boston if the world remains relatively balanced.”
Fredkin impressed the audience. Next Velikhov went to Staraya Ploshad, a city square where the headquarters of the party’s Central Committee is located. He headed to a building right on the square, a big six-story neoclassical edifice with giant windows, built in 1914 for an insurance company. The top officials of the Central Committee had their offices there, and Velikhov had an appointment on the fourth floor to see Yuri Andropov. At the time Andropov, the KGB chief, had been elevated to become a secretary of the Central Committee, responsible for ideology; he was also sitting in for Brezhnev temporarily while the ailing general secretary was on holiday in Crimea. Velikhov asked for the meeting, an effort to overcome the resistance he faced to introducing personal computers into the Soviet Union.
The meeting with Andropov lasted an hour. “He was well prepared for the meeting, and he had his information from the foreign intelligence; it was obvious I didn’t need to explain to him things from scratch,” said Velikhov. He persuaded Andropov to form a new branch inside the Academy of Sciences, a section of information technologies and computation systems.
It was the same Andropov whose subordinates, a year before, had Kudryavtsev cut international phone lines. At that time nobody—and least of all Andropov—thought personal computers should be made available to ordinary Soviet citizens.
Back home Fredkin worked on lifting the US export controls on sending personal computers to the Soviet Union. He argued that personal computers would force the authorities to give up control over information, that they would jailbreak the prison. “I realized that nothing would happen until someone ‘broke the ice.’ I created ‘Computerland USSR,’ called Velikhov, and told him that if he would produce a purchase order for a small number of IBM PCs, I would arrange for them to be delivered and that that would open the floodgates,” Fredkin recalled.
Velikhov immediately produced the purchase order. “Computerland USSR” ordered about sixty computers from IBM in Europe, and Fredkin got friends at the Academy of Sciences Computation Center to make sets of chips that would allow the computers to display Cyrillic characters on the screen (as they had already done for one PC smuggled earlier into the Computation Center). Fredkin’s company took delivery in Europe, modified the keyboards and displays, got official clearance from the US Commerce Department, and delivered them to the Academy of Sciences. “The dam was broken,” Fredkin recalled. “Computerland USSR may be the only computer company in history that received and delivered one single order… then went out of business!”
For almost the whole of its history the Soviet Union had been a prison of information. But the prison, like so many other edifices of the Soviet state, was finally breeched in August 1991.
In the far north of Moscow the Kurchatov Institute sprawls over nearly 250 acres. Once an artillery range, the institute was founded by Igor Kurchatov, who developed the first Soviet atomic bomb within its walls. For decades since, the institute has served as a preeminent nuclear research facility. The compound is dotted with dozens of buildings, including a collection of impressive two-story mansions built for Kurchatov and his fellow researchers in the late 1940s. A small and unobtrusive barracks-like building houses the first Soviet nuclear reactor, still operating. The institute has always been a closed, heavily guarded facility and to this day is protected by armed guards at the heavily fortified gates. When a visitor arrives, documents are checked and the car trunk is inspected by a sentry carrying a Kalashnikov assault rifle. A second gate opens only when a first one is closed.[1]
The Kurchatov Institute held an exalted and exceptional status in the Soviet Union. In addition to work on the atomic bomb, scientists were involved in many crucial defense projects, ranging from Soviet nuclear submarines to laser weapons. The KGB not only supervised the institute but, in a broad sense, was “one of the shareholders,” as Yevgeny Velikhov, who served as director from 1988 to 2008, recalled it.[2] At the same time, the institute enjoyed a degree of freedom unthinkable for others at facilities far less important. Contacts with foreigners were allowed, including trips abroad, and the institute’s leaders took advantage of the fact that the Soviet state desperately needed their work—they demanded special treatment and got it.
The institute exploited this elite status to the full. In November 1966 more than six hundred people, mostly young physicists, gathered at Kurchatov’s House of Culture, the institute’s club, to listen to Solzhenitsyn, a writer of growing prominence. His first published work, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, had caused a sensation for its frank depiction of Stalin’s prison camps when it appeared in the literary journal Novy Mir in 1962. Velikhov, who was then a deputy head of the institute as well as a broad-minded scientist who had traveled across the United States a few years before, invited Solzhenitsyn to the Kurchatov Institute. The institute was the very first venue that invited Solzhenitsyn to speak publicly. “Everything went well,” he recalled.[3] “He told his story. How he found himself in the camp.” Solzhenitsyn also read aloud from a still-unpublished novel, Cancer Ward, which he hoped still had some chance to get approved by the Soviet censors. (In the end it was not.) Then he read the excerpts from The First Circle, his novel about the sharashka at Marfino, where he tells the story of a foreign ministry official who made a call to the US embassy and got caught. The novel had also not been published. The KGB had confiscated the manuscript, and reading it aloud at Kurchatov was a brave act for both Solzhenitsyn and his hosts. “The collective liked him very much,” Velikhov said. Later, in 1970, Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize for literature; four years after that he was stripped of citizenship and expelled from the Soviet Union. But the Kurchatov Institute did not change course and kept inviting dissident writers.
It was in this elite environment of relative freedom that programmers and physicists first connected the Soviet Union to the Internet.
By the mid-1980s the computer revolution in the West was racing ahead, and the Soviet Union lagged behind. The country struggled with the manufacturing challenge of computer chips, and Soviet personal computers were bad imitations of Western models. The Cold War persisted, and the astounding leaps in computer technology in the West were catching the attention of younger Soviet scientists, including Velikhov, but older party leaders and industrialists—Brezhnev and Andropov’s generation—were frustratingly indifferent. The technology gap between East and West continued to widen. In 1985 Alexey Soldatov, then thirty-four years old, was named head of the Computation Center at the Kurchatov Institute. He got the job because the director, Anatoly Alexandrov, wanted someone who could explain to computer programmers what the Kurchatov Institute needed from them.[4] Soldatov, Andrei’s father, was a serious, heavily built scientist, who spoke slowly because he stuttered badly. To overcome it, he had developed a method to think in advance what he wanted to say, which left his speech very precise, if rather colorless.
Soldatov had a promising career in nuclear physics. He had graduated from a prominent Moscow institute in 1975, defended his doctoral thesis in 1979, then held an internship at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen. He was known at the Kurchatov Institute for using more computer time on his work than anyone else.
The Kurchatov Institute had, by that time, assembled a team of skilled programmers working to adapt the Unix operating system to the Soviet Union, a copy of which had been smuggled to Moscow two years earlier. Unix is machine-independent, so it could be used on any of the computers at Kurchatov, including Elbrus, the first Soviet super-computer, and the ES, a Soviet-made replica of the IBM mainframe. But what made Unix significant was that it made networks possible. In the autumn of 1984 the Soviet programmers demonstrated at a seminar the first version of a modified Unix.
The visionary behind the programming team was Valery Bardin, thirty-one years old, who was frequently overwhelmed by great and sometimes odd ideas, some of them truly brilliant.[5] When Soldatov heard about the adaptation of Unix and Bardin’s band of programmers, he recalled how a network connected computers at the Niels Bohr Institute. Soldatov then proposed building a computer network, based on Unix, at the Kurchatov Institute.[6]
Over the next four years programmers from Kurchatov built a Russian version of Unix and applied it to a network.[7] It was named Demos, an acronym for the Russian words meaning “dialogue united mobile operating system,” and the team was rewarded with a prize from the Soviet Council of Ministers. The prize, however, was classified as secret. The local Kurchatov network was created on some of the same protocols the Internet is built on today. While Bardin’s programmers brought their brains to the project, Soldatov contributed his substantial administrative skills to persuade the institute’s leaders to buy equipment they needed for the network. The Kurchatov Institute was so vast that it was easy to explain why it would be better to have computers in different buildings connected through a network than to install all the machines at the Computation Center. However, networks were rare then in the Soviet Union, which favored large, mainframe computers that were easier to control than a network of smaller, spread-out machines.
Over time the Kurchatov computer team split into two separate groups. Programmers wanted to seize the opportunity Gorbachev had provided when he agreed to launch “cooperatives,” the first private businesses. They wanted to sell the Demos operation system, and for that they needed to be outside the heavily guarded Kurchatov compound. This group moved out of the institute and set up their computers on the second floor of a spacious two-story mansion on the Ovchinnovskaya Embankment along the Moscow River. In 1989 the group founded a cooperative, naming it Demos.
The second group remained at the Computation Center at the Kurchatov Institute, led by Soldatov. Despite the split, the two teams were closely interconnected—including by a network connection—as people moved constantly back and forth between the mansion and the institute.
In 1990 Soldatov and his team began to think about how they could connect the institute with other research centers in the country. When they needed a name for this network, they asked a young programmer, Vadim Antonov, to run a random word-selection program in English. He came up with Relcom. When Antonov suggested this could signify “reliable communications,” the name stuck.
In August of that year the Relcom network became a reality, making a connection between the Kurchatov Institute in Moscow and the Institute of Informatics and Automation in Leningrad, 460 miles away. After that, connections were established with research centers in Dubna, Serpukhov, and Novosibirsk. The network used ordinary telephone lines, and the bandwidth was extremely narrow—the network was capable only of exchanging simple e-mails. Nevertheless the Relcom team dreamed of connecting with the world. Soon after the first connections were made, Soldatov went to Velikhov, who had become director of Kurchatov in 1988. He told Velikhov that he needed his personal help for a nationwide network that would connect the most important research centers in the country and beyond. Velikhov was skeptical at first. He recalled clearly how such initiatives had failed in the past. Nonetheless, when Soldatov told Velikhov he wanted to appropriate his personal phone line for the network, as it was the only direct line from the institute capable of making international calls, Velikhov agreed, along with helping them acquire modems.[8]
On August 28, 1990, the very first Soviet connection to the global Internet was made when the Kurchatov programmers exchanged e-mails with a university in Helsinki, Finland. Soon they were given access to EUnet, a European network. Finland was chosen for a reason: Finland was the only country after the Moscow Olympics in 1980 whose automatic international telephone connection remained. Then, on September 19, Antonov registered the domain .su on behalf of the Soviet association of Unix users, and a new frontier on the Internet was born.
At the end of 1990 Relcom connected thirty research organizations in the country. By the summer of 1991 it had a leased line to Helsinki, and the internal Soviet network had reached seventy cities, with over four hundred organizations using it, including universities, research institutes, stock and commodity exchanges, high schools, and government agencies. Relcom got its first client in the news media too: the independent wire agency Interfax.
Technically Relcom still had two headquarters. There were a few rooms on the third floor at the Computation Center at the Kurchatov Institute, which housed the main server, built on the IBM 386 personal computer. Modems at 9,600 bits per second—the baud rate—were permanently connected to the international phone line. The other headquarters was located in the nondescript mansion on the Moscow River embankment, with the second floor housing the team of fourteen Demos programmers, working night and day repairing and improving software and maintaining the network. They also had a backup server and a 9,600-baud modem.[9]
Early in the morning on August 19, 1991, a phone call woke Bardin at home. A journalist friend said he had heard from Japanese contacts of an attempted coup against President Gorbachev. The news about the putsch broke first in the Far East, then rolled westward across the time zones before hitting Moscow. Hours after the announcement was first broadcast in the Far East it aired on television in Moscow.
Bardin’s first reaction was to check the group’s server from home. There was no connection. He went out to buy cigarettes.
On his way he met a friend from Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), Dmitry Burkov, a programmer and cofounder of Demos. Together they rushed to the Demos building, knowing there was always someone sitting there, day and night. They saw tanks on the streets of Moscow. Around 7 a.m., on the orders of the defense minister, Dmitry Yazov, who had joined the coup plotters, both tank units began moving into the city along parachute regiments in armored troop carriers. Strict censorship was imposed on the news media.
State television introduced Gennady Yanayev, a Soviet vice president and gray, unremarkable figure, as the new leader of the country. In fact, Yanayev was given this role only to make the ousting of Gorbachev look more legitimate. The real mastermind was Vladimir Kryuchkov, the chairman of the KGB, and the KGB had a prime role in orchestrating the coup. KGB special operations forces were dispatched to Crimea, where Gorbachev was on vacation. The KGB cut off Gorbachev’s personal phone line from his vacation compound, then the local phone lines. He was totally isolated.
At the corner of Bolshaya Lubyanka Street and Varsonofyevsky Lane stands a six-story, gray building. It was built in the 1970s in the Soviet architectural style of that period for important government offices—monumental and gloomy, with the first floor in cold granite. Local residents knew that the building belonged to the secret services. After all, KGB buildings dotted the district of Lubyanka—just across the street there is a two-story mansion that housed the very first headquarters of Lenin’s secret police, and in Stalin’s times it was the location of a much-feared toxic laboratory tasked with developing poisons. Nobody dared ask what was going on inside the building at Varsonofyevsky Lane, assuming it could house one of the departments of the KGB.
But it was not a just any department; it was the KGB’s telephone eavesdropping center. Underground cables ran from there to a neogothic, red-brick building two hundred meters away on Milutinsky Lane, Moscow’s central and oldest phone station.[10]
In mid-August 1991 the building saw feverish activity. Similar frantic movements were also happening at the central phone station, where the Twelfth Department [eavesdropping] occupied a few rooms.
On August 15 Kryuchkov urgently summoned Yevgeny Kalgin, head of the Twelfth Department, from his summer vacation. Kalgin was promoted through the ranks of the KGB primarily for his personal loyalty to the chairman. Initially he had been Andropov’s driver and later was made his personal assistant. When Kryuchkov, a close pupil of Andropov, had been appointed chairman of the KGB, he entrusted Kalgin, now a major-general, with running the Twelfth Department.[11] Kalgin went to KGB headquarters and received classified instructions from Kryuchkov to listen in on the phone conversations of people around Boris Yeltsin, who in June had been elected president of the Russian Federation, then still one of the internal republics of the Soviet Union, thrusting him into the forefront of the reform movement and into competition with Gorbachev for leadership. The KGB instructions were to eavesdrop on members of Yeltsin’s government and friendly members of the parliament—both their offices and home lines. Kalgin was told to learn how Yeltsin’s people reacted to events and to control their contacts. This eavesdropping was illegal even by Soviet standards: the KGB could not spy on high-ranking officials. However, in late July the KGB had overheard Gorbachev speaking with Yeltsin, and they had agreed to dump the head of the KGB. Kryuchkov intended to get rid of Gorbachev first.
Kalgin agreed to make preparations. That would require a lot of work for the sixth bureau of the Twelfth Department—the “controllers” in KGB slang—mostly women in headphones whose work was to listen to and record telephone conversations. The next day, on August 16, Kalgin briefed the female colonel in charge of the bureau, and she in turn recalled her subordinates from summer leave.
On August 17 Kryuchkov personally called Kalgin and ordered him to put Yanayev’s phone line “under control” to make sure he stayed loyal to the cause. On August 18 Yeltsin returned to Moscow from Kazakhstan, and Kalgin was then told to put all of Yeltsin’s phone lines “under control.”[12] The bureau chief explained to the hand-picked controllers that information from intercepted calls was to be reported via the internal phone line personally to Kalgin. They were given 169 phone numbers. The fifth bureau of the Twelfth Department, in charge of listening to foreigners, were given 74 numbers.[13] With that, the eavesdropping operation had begun.[14] The same day Gorbachev was locked away in Crimea.
On August 19 the plotters declared emergency rule and took charge of the country, but Yeltsin and his supporters slipped through KGB security cordons and made it to an enormous white government building on the Moscow River, where they barricaded themselves inside. The building, which became known as the Russian White House, housed the Yeltsin government.
Andrei Soldatov, then fifteen years old, was in his last year of school before university when he heard the news of the coup. Ever since he was young Andrei had been interested in political history. His grandfather had been a Soviet Army colonel and a deputy commandant in Moscow whose duty was to march before the gun carriage bearing the body of a Politburo member during a state funeral, leading the procession to the Kremlin wall. Andrei remembered seeing his grandfather in full uniform on state television broadcasting the funerals of Brezhnev and Andropov. The advent of Gorbachev’s perestroika—reform movement—had provoked vigorous arguments and debates in Andrei’s family. His uncle was an Air Force colonel who had served in Afghanistan and was outraged by dissident physicist Andrei Sakharov’s opposition to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Soldatov’s father, Alexey, the nuclear physicist, was a prime but cautious source of information about the Chernobyl nuclear accident, as the Kurchatov Institute remained the leading atomic research center of the Soviet Union. Andrei and his mother, a physician, were always the most liberal voices at the table.
On hearing news of the putsch, Andrei rushed to Manezhnaya Square, a traditional place for rallies by democrats and the reform movement. Tanks were lined up on the square, facing the Hotel Moskva. On the opposite side, close to the old Moscow State University building, students had gathered, shouting, “To Presnya, to Presnya”—the district where Yeltsin’s supporters had taken their stand. Andrei and his schoolmate walked over to the tanks, trying to engage the soldiers in conversation. The soldiers, surrounded by civilians, were obviously confused. Their officers, also confused, did not interfere.
The last thing Andrei Soldatov was thinking about was calling his father, Alexey Soldatov; his parents had divorced when he was eight, and his relationship with his father was strained. Andrei decided to collect every piece of evidence he could. He saved issues of the newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets, the most popular liberal daily in town. He grabbed a cover from a smoke-grenade discharger on the turret of the tank and took it home. He collected one of Yeltsin’s leaflets.
“The country is in mortal danger!” it declared. “A group of Communist criminals has carried out a coup d’état. If today citizens of Russia do not counter the activities of the putschists with conscience, determination and courage, then the dark days of Stalinism will return!”
If you do not resist the state criminals—
—you betray FREEDOM!
—you betray RUSSIA!
—you betray YOURSELF!
At home Soldatov’s mother had the radio tuned day and night to Echo Moskvy, the radio station founded by democrats on the Moscow city council and a primary source of information about the events unfolding.
Irina Borogan also rushed to the square on her way home from taking her university entrance examinations.
For Irina, perestroika had been a time of personal excitement. She had been only eleven years old when it began, but it felt like a breeze of fresh air. In her school rules were relaxed, making it possible to voice personal opinions and have discussions about politics and Soviet history with teachers. One day Irina, emboldened by the new atmosphere, began a fierce dispute with a deputy principal in charge of ideology, a woman with strong communist views. Irina felt the new mood everywhere—in a bus, on a commuter train, in the metro. For the first time in their lives, she noticed, many people were talking openly and freely not only about their private lives but about everything, from the misery of living standards to Stalin’s repressions and modern music. Western movies, books, and music that for years had been prohibited now flowed to the country. For Irina, newspapers and magazines became more breathtaking than crime novels. At the age of thirteen she made a decision to become a journalist. She felt Gorbachev’s glasnost—policy of openness and transparency—was a great gift to her generation.
When she learned of the putsch, she feared that the coup leaders might destroy all the good things Gorbachev had done over the last five years. Her father, who worked at a closed facility in the military-industrial complex, said, “If they ban us from getting Western investments, our economy will die.” Irina didn’t care a lot about the investments, but she felt angry with the coup leaders who threatened to turn back the clock and suffocate her generation. During the coup attempt she was out and about among Moscow’s squares, where people gathered and talked. On the second day she took her university entry exam on history, and the question posed to her concerned Stalin’s repressions. The teachers were liberal and talked angrily about the putschists. So Irina asked, with a smile, “Do you want me to answer in the old way or in the new one?”
They all laughed, and she passed the exam.
By coincidence, the putsch began on the opening day of a Moscow computer expo. The nascent business of Relcom/Demos had a stand at the show, and some programmers were milling about there. The first thing Bardin did when he arrived at the Demos two-story building was to call the expo and order everyone to return to the office as quickly as possible with their equipment. The network connection had been off because of technical problems, but it was soon restored. As chief of the team based at the Demos building, Bardin took over.
That day Alexey Soldatov, head of the Kurchatov office, was out of town, in Vladikavkaz in the North Caucasus. When he heard of the putsch, he called Bardin at once to find out what was going on.
“The network is running like clockwork,” Bardin replied.
“Look, you do understand that we all could go to jail, don’t you?”
“Sure. We are working as always,” Bardin said.
“Great,” said Soldatov. They understood each other. Then Soldatov called his people at the Kurchatov Computation Center. To both teams he insisted on one thing and one thing only: keep the line open! Someone at the Computation Center suggested they attempt to print up Yeltsin’s proclamations, but Soldatov was adamant: focus on maintaining the connection—this was vital. Velikhov, the Kurchatov director, was on trip to a physics conference in Sicily, and there was no way to get in touch with him.
A few hours later Bardin received a call from a friend in Vienna who had sold computers to their business. “Look, Valery, I don’t think they can really make the coup stick,” the friend asserted.
“Why?” Bardin asked.
“Because we are talking on the phone,” the friend said. “And all coups begin with cutting off telephone lines.”
Within an hour a guest knocked on the door of the office at the Demos building and said he was a representative of the Yeltsin team. He said he was looking for the commercial offices that had Xerox machines to help them disseminate Yeltsin’s appeals. The man had no idea what kind of office he had just entered.
“Forget about Xerox,” Bardin told him. “We are connected with all big cities, plus with the West.”
The Yeltsin man slipped away, without another word. Then another Yeltsin envoy appeared at the building and declared authoritatively that they were now all under the command of Konstantin Kobets, who had been deputy chief of the Soviet general staff for communications, a Yeltsin supporter, now appointed to lead the resistance. However, Bardin had no idea who Kobets was, and it was the first and last time Bardin heard of Kobets during the three days of the putsch attempt. This second envoy also brought with him some copies of Yeltsin’s statements and asked Bardin to distribute them through the Relcom channels. Simultaneously a direct line was opened with the St. Petersburg government, which supported Yeltsin.
The Internet connection to cities outside of Moscow and beyond the borders of the Soviet Union proved extremely important, circulating proclamations from Yeltsin and other democrats around the world. The main channel was a user group, talk.politics.soviet, available on UseNet, one of the first worldwide collections of Internet newsgroups, built on many different servers and thus not reliant on just one. It was full of angry and worried messages posted by Westerners. From Moscow, at around 5 p.m. on August 19, Vadim Antonov, the bespectacled twenty-six-year-old senior programmer who had helped Relcom find a name, posted a message: “I’ve seen the tanks with my own eyes. I hope we’ll be able to communicate during the next few days. Communists cannot rape Mother Russia once again!”[15]
Westerners sent messages of support to Yeltsin, and by that night in Moscow, or mid-day in the United States, American support was surging onto the network as more participants from the United States took part. The network soon became overloaded, causing the connection to drop momentarily. Alexey Soldatov, worried and obsessed, was hanging on the phone with Bardin and kept demanding that he must do anything to keep the connection alive. Antonov posted another message: “Please stop flooding the only narrow channel with bogus messages with silly questions. Note that it’s neither a toy nor a means to reach your relatives or friends. We need the bandwidth to help organize the resistance. Please, do not (even unintentionally) help these fascists!”
By then Relcom was busy disseminating news releases from the independent Soviet news agency Interfax along with news from Echo Moskvy radio, the Russian Information Agency, Northwest Information Agency (Leningrad), and Baltfax, all outlawed by the putschists.
On the morning of August 20 CNN carried a report that shocked Relcom’s team. A CNN correspondent declared that despite censorship, a large amount of uncensored information was flowing out of the Soviet capital and then showed a computer screen along with the address of the Relcom news group. Bardin and Soldatov believed it was later pulled off the air only because someone in the United States explained to CNN that broadcasting their address could endanger the source of information.
The next morning Polina, Vadim Antonov’s wife, also a Demos programmer, wrote to a worried friend, Larry Press, who was professor of computer information systems at California State University.
Dear Larry,
Don’t worry, we’re OK, though frightened and angry. Moscow is full of tanks and military machines—I hate them. They try to close all mass media, they stopped CNN an hour ago, and Soviet TV transmits opera and old movies. But, thank Heaven, they don’t consider RELCOM mass media or they simply forgot about it. Now we transmit information enough to put us in prison for the rest of our life.
Polina at first intended to go to the center of the action—the White House—with her laptop to report from there, but decided against it because phone connections were unreliable. Instead, she began to translate into Russian the news from the West about the coup that Larry was constantly updating.[16]
Around this time state television announced Decree No. 3 from the coup plotters, restricting information exchanged with the West. The decree called for all Russian television and radio suspended, including the new democratic radio station Echo Moskvy, which had been essential to the resistance. The coup plotters declared that radio and television broadcasts were “not conducive to the process of stabilizing the situation in the country.” The decree was broad, intending to shut down all channels of communication in the country, and gave the KGB a role in enforcing it.
Despite the threat, at Demos there was no debate about Decree No. 3: they were determined to keep the line open, knowing they were taking great personal risks. “We were already on the losing side,” Bardin recalled, “just because information exchange is what Relcom was all about. We would be the enemies of the regime anyway, no matter what we did.”
Bardin, Soldatov, and their programmers, all in their late twenties and thirties, had accomplished significant career breakthroughs in the years of Gorbachev’s revolutionary changes. Each of them knew they owed much of their success to Gorbachev’s glasnost. They were furious that it could all be ruined by a bunch of backward-thinking generals and sclerotic bureaucrats who had locked up Gorbachev in Crimea and were trying to dispose of Yeltsin in Moscow.
At the same time, Yeltsin’s people desperately exploited every opportunity to spread the word about resistance to Russian citizens. Vladimir Bulgak served under Yeltsin as the minister of communications for Russia. He had spent his career in radio, starting as a mechanic, and had risen to become chief of the Moscow radio network. In the 1980s he was put in charge of the finances of the Ministry of Communications and, as a result, saw the underside of the centrally planned economy. Bulgak despised Soviet methods of managing the communications industry. In 1990 he joined Yeltsin’s team.
On the day before the coup attempt, Bulgak went on holiday to Yalta, in Crimea. When he saw the coup plotters’ announcement on television, he called Ivan Silaev, Yeltsin’s prime minister, asking what he should do.[17]
“Where you think the minister should be at such a moment?” replied Silaev. “In Moscow!”
On August 20 Bulgak was on the first plane to the capital. When he landed, his driver took him from the airport to Yeltsin’s headquarters at the White House, bypassing the main roads filled with tanks and troops. There, Bulgak was told that his main objective must be to turn on radio transmitters and broadcast Yeltsin’s proclamation of defiance. “Yeltsin told me to turn on all medium-wave radio transmitters on the European part of Russia,” Bulgak said. These medium-wave transmitters were the main broadcast option in the Soviet Union and, with coverage of 370 miles each, were installed all over the country.
It was a difficult task, as the radio transmitters were not under the control of Yeltsin’s government but rather under the control of the Soviet Ministry of Communications, a higher level. “Only three people in the Union’s Ministry knew the passwords, and without a password, a chief of a transmitter never turns on his station,” Bulgak said. He was able to get the passwords from a personal friend.
Then, through his own contacts, Bulgak managed to get a mobile radio transmitter on a truck to be driven from Noginsk, thirty-seven miles from Moscow, right to the courtyard of the White House where Yeltsin was holed up. It was immediately turned on; in case all else failed, they could at least broadcast Yeltsin’s appeal to the center of the Russian capital. However, the electronic warfare’s detachments were urgently deployed in the southwestern district of Moscow to jam the broadcast of Bulgak’s mobile station. Another military station, in Podolsk, was tasked to intercept broadcasts from Yeltsin’s station and report them to the coup commanders.[18]
Bulgak worked feverishly through the night, using his personal contacts inside the union’s ministry. By the morning of August 21 the transmitters were turned on. When Yeltsin walked down the steps of the White House, he spoke into a microphone that was directly connected to Bulgak’s activated transmitters. The people at the Soviet Union Ministry of Communications were stunned—Bulgak had triumphed.[19]
On the afternoon of August 21 Kryuchkov told Kalgin to stop the eavesdropping on Yeltsin and his people and destroy all the records.[20]
As Bulgak got Yeltsin his transmitters, Relcom went further. On the first day of the coup someone in Bardin’s team came up with an idea they called “Regime N1”: to ask all subscribers of Relcom to look out the window and write back exactly what they saw—just the facts, no emotions. Soon Relcom received a kaleidoscopic picture of what was happening throughout the country, disseminating the eyewitness reports from subscribers along with news reports. It became clear that the tanks and troops were present only in two cities—Moscow and Leningrad—and the coup would not succeed.
The coup attempt collapsed on August 21. Overall, during the three days, Relcom transmitted forty-six thousand “news units” throughout the Soviet Union and around the world. Regime No. 1 was a revolutionary idea, although not everyone realized it. Radio transmitters spread information in one direction, outward. But Relcom worked in both directions, spreading and collecting information. It was a horizontal structure, a network, a powerful new concept in a country that had been ruled by a rigid, controlling clique. In the 1950s, the first Soviet photocopy machine had been wrecked because it threatened to spread information beyond the control of those who ruled. Now the power of those rulers was being smashed—by a network they could not control.
Another principle was also demonstrated during the coup: the programmers did what they thought was right and did not ask permission. Antonov didn’t wait for Bardin to post his messages, Bardin didn’t ask Soldatov what he should do, and Soldatov didn’t seek Velikhov’s authorization. The idea that they were “under the command” of Kobets was laughable to them. They were freethinking and spirited, and they never wanted to return to the stultifying command of party hierarchies in which everything required permission from above.
Bulgak, a member of Yeltsin’s group, certainly played the game the old way. He used his position, his connections, and his power to support his leader. But Bardin, Soldatov, and Antonov were too far from the Kremlin to believe they were part of any power game. They acted because the free flow of information—their core conviction—was threatened. They also knew that they had the support of thousands of subscribers making the network stronger.
From the first day of the coup Bardin worried about the KGB. He was certain they had put the Demos building under surveillance days before the coup attempt began. He even saw a lone man standing out in front of the mansion. But the KGB never bothered once to interfere with Russia’s first connection to the Internet, neither at Demos nor at the Computation Center of the Kurchatov Institute. But at that moment and in years to come the KGB never went away. They were always keeping an eye on this strange and powerful new method for spreading information—but had great difficulty understanding it.
The collapse of the August putsch freed Soviet citizens from Communist Party control. By December the Soviet Union dissolved. In the suddenness of the moment the old Soviet rules had become obsolete and new democratic rules were not yet established. At one point the KGB organized guided tours through its headquarters for foreign tourists, as if showing off a relic from another era. Foreigners flooded into Moscow and other big cities, private businesses emerged everywhere, and for a while new “joint ventures” were being established at every turn with foreign investors.
Yet it was also evident in these turbulent times that freedom brought something to Russia not very familiar to its citizens from all the years of Soviet paternalism: the freedom to make choices. Few were prepared, including those engaged in the most Westernized area of business, the rapidly evolving technology of computers, networks, and communications.
The Russian minister of communications, Vladimir Bulgak, who had brought the radio transmitter to the courtyard of the White House during the coup, confronted a monumental set of problems. He had taken over the Soviet ministry of communications, moving in to the same headquarters office used by Kudryavtsev at the Central Telegraph building. Bulgak soon faced the same cursed legacy of international communications that had vexed Kudryavtsev for so many years.[1] New Russian business enterprises were desperate for more communications lines and connectivity, and their demands far outstripped the existing analog infrastructure. The Soviet Union earlier and, now, Russia, simply did not have enough lines to the outside world. In 1991 Russia had only two thousand international lines for the whole country, and all of these lines were analog, copper cables.
Bulgak’s first big headache was to acquire long-distance fiber-optic cable. Bulgak realized that his only option was to build fiber-optic lines with foreign money and foreign partners. He moved quickly and secured from President Yeltsin the right to sign off on government guarantees for foreign credits. Almost immediately Bulgak got Japan and Denmark involved. The partners built a fiber-optic cable from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok and from Moscow to Dzhubga near the Black Sea, and then the cables were laid to connection points of international telecommunications traffic: from St. Petersburg to Copenhagen, from Dzhubga under the Black Sea to Istanbul, and then to Palermo, Italy, and from Vladivostok through Nakhodka to Tokyo and Seoul. The whole project took three years and cost $520 million. Of the total, $500 million came from Japan and the rest from Denmark.
“The demand was huge. We thought these lines will be loaded in fifteen years, and that happened in five years,” Bulgak recalled.[2] Sometime later, when Bulgak met Nikolai Ryzhkov, who had served as prime minister under Gorbachev, Bulgak underscored how he had done what the Soviet Union had not. “Look, you know, what did it cost me? $520 million. That’s for everything. And you were the prime minister of the entire Soviet Union, and what was $520 million to you? It was nothing! Why could you not do it?” Ryzhkov did not have an answer.[3]
In three years, during a period of intense upheaval, Bulgak managed to increase the number of international lines in the country to sixty-six thousand, all of them digital.
An even more trying problem was to install modern telephone exchanges all over the country. “Our industry then lagged behind the West by twenty to twenty-five years in producing the local phone exchanges, both international and intercity,” said Bulgak. “We came to think that our industry would never catch up, and that meant we had to go and buy.” In three or four years over 70 percent of all Russian intercity phone exchanges were replaced by modern digital ones, made in the West.
By 1995 Russia had established modern, national communications.
Meanwhile, at the Kurchatov Institute, scientists faced their own obstacles. The phone bills for the open line to Finland were costing around 20,000 rubles a month—an ordinary Soviet-made car could be bought then for 45,000 rubles. Where could engineers and physicists go to find money to keep the connection open? These scientists were products of the Soviet Union, shaped by it, even though they recognized its failures and shortcomings. Private entrepreneurship had been outlawed in Soviet times, and the scientists had no concept of how to run a business. The two teams, one at Kurchatov Institute and the other at Demos, clashed constantly over the way to make the network profitable. Vadim and Polina Antonov, who were among the early participants at the Demos building, soon decided to move to Berkeley, California, leaving in December 1991, the month the Soviet flag came down over the Kremlin.[4]
Finally the two teams divorced. The group on the embankment, which had started the cooperative Demos, transformed it into an Internet service provider (ISP) of the same name. Demos had a special department in charge of selling personal computers, a very profitable business in the early 1990s, and the profits were used to fund the ISP.
The other team, headed by Alexey Soldatov at the institute, registered Relcom as a joint stock company—a company owned by its shareholders—in July 1992. The Kurchatov Institute was listed among the founders, and Velikhov was made chairman of the board. Soldatov, who kept his position as chief of the Institute’s Computation Center, was elected president, and Valery Bardin became his deputy and a development director. The idea was to launch the company to provide access to the Internet as a nationwide service.
But in 1992 no one knew much about launching a private enterprise.
There was one person, however, who seemed to know. Anatoly Levenchuk, a flamboyant engineer from Rostov, was a libertarian, obsessed with the idea of a free market. Levenchuk was a sparkplug of a man—short, energetic, driven by ideas. He favored extravagant outfits and spoke in a high-pitched, rapid-fire voice.
Levenchuk was the most agile and informed expert in the nascent Russian stock market. He got connected to the Internet early, in the winter of 1990–1991. Because of his indomitable energy, many enthusiasts went to him with business ideas, often involving establishing computer networks. To all of them Levenchuk put two questions. First, could he subscribe immediately? Second, did the network have access to the IBM network VNET? (At the time the Internet was still a collection of smaller networks, and VNET, which was based on IBM technology, was one of them.)[5] Usually the response was that the network was to be started in a few months, access to VNET was impossible, and then the enthusiasts disappeared. Finally someone referred Levenchuk to a contact who could say “yes” to both questions and gave him the home phone number of Valery Bardin of Relcom—Levenchuk called that evening. Bardin said Relcom had access to VNET, but he didn’t know how to sell to Levenchuk access to the network. It was a very basic business transaction, but the physicists simply did not have the know-how. Levenchuk subsequently helped write the contracts for Relcom to sell Internet access, and in the winter of 1991 he got an e-mail address provided by Relcom, one of the first 150 e-mail accounts in the country.
Levenchuk also showed up at the Relcom offices. Soldatov had wisely opened the office just outside the walls of the Kurchatov Institute, on the next street. Levenchuk told Soldatov how to write a development plan for the new company. The project attracted some investment—actually several tens of thousands of dollars—from Rinako, a large Russian investment firm, which, in return, got a share of ownership in Relcom, and Levenchuk was given a seat on the board of directors. Soldatov also asked Levenchuk to serve as a consultant. The first thing Levenchuk advised him to do was to look for serious Western investors—foreign investment could give the company a real chance to expand in the nascent Internet market.
But Soldatov was cautious. The unresolved question hung over them: Where to get money? Everyone sensed that the market for the Internet would be huge, but they weren’t sure how to go about it. In 1992 a third ISP, Sovam-Teleport, entered the scene, backed by the billionaire George Soros and the British telecom company Cable & Wireless. Almost immediately the new provider captured a third of the market. Meanwhile Demos was churning profits by selling personal computers. Soldatov faced a question he didn’t know how to answer: How could he turn Relcom into an expanding business?
Bulgak solved the problem of connecting Russia with the outside world, but there was something else Internet users in Russia urgently needed. The horizontal structure of the Internet meant that the networks needed common points to exchange traffic. Also, the users needed more sustainable connections with the West, as most traffic in those days went back and forth to Western countries. Although Bulgak had established the sixty-six thousand digital lines, connecting to them from inside the country was still cumbersome and not always reliable. In 1995 Relcom, Demos, and the Moscow State University’s network went to M9, the very first Moscow station that provided automatic international connections for the 1980 Olympics. The ISPs asked for help.
Mikhail Elistratov, the main engineer of the Moscow Internet exchange point, who has worked in the M9 building since 1995, explained, “There is the ring of intercity phone cables around Moscow, and M9 sits on that ring—along with a few other hubs, like M10 or M5. Out of them there are rays of cables laid to the west, east and so on. These cables, then copper, were very thick underground cables and provided connection in the particular direction, so if you need Novosibirsk, which is on the East, you get to the M10, and if you need the West, you get to the M9. And the M9 could always be connected with M10 and so on.” The fact that M9 was pointing toward the West and relatively new made it the logical choice to be the exchange point for the Internet in Russia.[6]
Relcom already had some modems at the station providing a direct connection to the Kurchatov Institute via copper cable, and the M9’s main engineer, Vladimir Gromov, agreed to give the Internet networks space on the twelfth floor at the top of the building. “It all started on the twelfth floor, even the first Moscow mobile operator got a space there because everyone wanted to be close to each other to get interconnected,” Elistratov recalled.
The gathering on the twelfth floor became Russia’s first Internet exchange point, named MSK-IX. It was manned by a bunch of engineers who were given tables surrounded by telecommunications racks in a corner of the same floor. They were working for an organization, affiliated with Kurchatov, that was in charge of registering domain names in the .su and .ru zones of the Internet.
The MSK-IX was to become the main Internet exchange point in Russia for years to come.
Speed was everything for Bulgak. In the hurry to modernize, he bought equipment from abroad, bypassing old Soviet factories, which were forced to close. Bulgak didn’t worry about their fate, but there was one organization that did concern him: the successor to the KGB, known in the early 1990s as the Ministry of Security. The ministry inherited the antiquated, analog systems of phone tapping from the Soviet KGB. The first time Bulgak went to the headquarters—located at the Lubyanka, the old KGB building—he pressed them for answers about modernizing the telephone lines. “I told them we are destroying analog lines and replacing them with digital lines. Understand? They said they understood,” Bulgak recalled. Next he asked whether the ministry was ready to install digital interception equipment. The ministry responded by asking him to buy Western-made telephone stations that would have the intercept option built in, the kind available in the West for use by police departments. “We bought the stations, and the security service took them,” Bulgak said. “What they did with them, I don’t know.” At a meeting with the minister of security Bulgak said he intended to keep modernization running at a fast pace. “Are you keeping up with our pace?” he asked. “If not, tell me and I will slow down.”
The minister replied, “We will not slow you down. We can keep up with you.”
The Ministry of Security got the job of phone and postal interception under a secret decree that was issued on June 22, 1992. Two days later Bulgak signed the paperwork giving the Ministry of Security access to communications cables and places where they could work to intercept calls.[7] When Bulgak went to Lubyanka again, he asked the same question: “Are you keeping up with us? Is there any direction where we need to slow down?” The answer was the same: “No, we are keeping up.”
In fact, the security services were lagging way behind.
In the aftermath of the Soviet collapse Yeltsin wanted to establish something like the West’s intelligence community rather than just a purged version of the old KGB, which had been responsible for everything from counterintelligence to foreign espionage to government communications to guarding borders. In 1991 the KGB was split into a handful of independent security agencies. The largest, initially called the Ministry of Security, then the Federal Service of Counter-Intelligence, or FSK, would be responsible for counterespionage and counterterrorism. In 1995 it was renamed into the Federal Security Service, or FSB. Then the KGB’s former foreign intelligence directorate was transformed into a new espionage agency called the Foreign Intelligence Service, or SVR. The division of the KGB responsible for electronic eavesdropping and cryptography became the Committee of Government Communication, later called the Federal Agency for Government Communications and Information, or FAPSI. Directorates that had once been in charge of guarding secret underground facilities and protecting Soviet leaders as well as a branch responsible for borders were made into independent agencies.
The names changed, but as we wrote in The New Nobility in 2010, the shift from “K” to “B” at the end of the acronym of the FSB was more than symbolic. The renamed service was given a broad mandate to become the guardian of “security” for the new Russia.[8] The FSB regained its investigative directorate, which it had lost after the Soviet collapse, and would function both as a secret service and a law enforcement agency. On July 5, 1995, Yeltsin signed an act into law giving the FSB even more powers to conduct surveillance and interception. The only external control over the security services was the General Prosecutor’s Office, a special body responsible for overseeing all the secret services. But the prosecutor’s jurisdiction was limited.[9]
The multiple security services that arose out of the Soviet KGB were, at first, in a state of uncertainty. No one had given them a real sense of mission. The job of protecting the Soviet party-state, so central to the KGB, was obviously gone, leaving only a vacuum of ideology and a clear loss of focus. By 1995, however, the agencies began to regain their footing. They also began to struggle fiercely with each other, provoked by the fractured, competitive system Yeltsin created to keep the services under control. After obtaining a report from the FSB director, Yeltsin often compared it with reports from other security services. The process was a far cry from the concept of intelligence oversight in democracies and more like the competition of viziers in the medieval Middle East or Napoleon’s France, where several secret police agencies spied on each other.
As the 1996 elections approached, in which Yeltsin was running for another term against a Communist Party leader, Gennady Zyuganov, the security services competed with each other to keep Yeltsin in power, and their proposals were hardly democratic. The FSB and Alexander Korzhakov’s service proposed that the election simply be canceled, which was not accepted. FAPSI, in turn, held a very strong card: the agency controlled the information system the Central Election Commission used to accumulate data from polling stations during national elections, built in 1995.
At Relcom Soldatov and Bardin were constantly arguing about the company’s future, prompting Bardin to leave for a new, online project called the National News Service. It was to be a combination of a news agency and the first electronic archive of news media, launched by the daily newspaper Kommersant.
Soldatov had to figure out Relcom’s future alone. Then, at a birthday party for Velikhov at the Kurchatov Institute on February 2, 1995, a new and unexpected overture appeared. The fifty-five-year-old director of FAPSI, Alexander Starovoitov, suggested in Velikhov’s presence that Soldatov become his adviser, with the specific goal of creating a large new business network. Relcom would use FAPSI encryption equipment as well as hardware and software to protect information so to create a secure channel for business communications in the country. Soldatov immediately accepted the offer.
Yeltsin had signed a decree that declared illegal any encryption software or hardware device that did not bear FAPSI’s seal of approval, therefore giving significant control of the market to FAPSI, which also offered its own encryption systems for sale. Such a two-faced approach—a government agency leveraging its power for profit—was hardly unusual in the new Russia at a time when it seemed there were few rules about such behavior and even fewer rules that were enforced. But behind the offer to Soldatov were unseen motives: the agency wanted to create its own network and make big money by using Relcom’s expertise.
Soldatov had been a member of the independent-minded group at Kurchatov that had created the first networks and had been somewhat disdainful of the old guard in the last days of the Soviet Union. But now a different government and a different system were rising. He wholeheartedly supported Yeltsin and believed that the new regime legitimately needed security services. As long as FAPSI served Yeltsin loyally, he did not see them as a threat. Moreover, the language used by the generals who ran the security services seemed to have changed with the times—they were suddenly fluent in the vocabulary of contracts and business deals. Besides, Soldatov was confident he could outsmart the security services. He remembered a few years earlier, when they had demanded that he print out everything that came through Relcom’s network, he simply said, “Okay, but first, please give me a few hundred printers and huge barracks to keep the stuff.” They went away and never returned.
In the first half of the 1990s Bulgak’s Ministry of Communications seemed preoccupied with laying cables and replacing phone stations, not with the promise of the Internet. FAPSI was the only government agency interested in the Internet, and that also had a big influence on Soldatov’s decision to do business with them. Relcom had found its backer: a government security service.
Anatoly Levenchuk, however, wasn’t happy. “I still think it was one of my biggest failures,” he said. “I failed to explain to them that money should not come from the state.”
In April 1995 Sergei Parkhomenko, a thirty-one-year old reporter for the daily newspaper Segodnya, had a very hot story. He was a well-known political journalist who frequently appeared on television. In a biting column that appeared on April 8, he called the lower house of parliament, the State Duma, a circus of clowns, a “crowd of buffoons,” and parliament fired back on April 15 with a reprimand, making Parkhomenko even more popular among readers.[10] His career was on the rise. The owner of Segodnya was Vladimir Gusinsky, the media tycoon and one of the first Russian oligarchs. Shortly before this, Gusinsky had made an offer to underwrite a new weekly newsmagazine with Parkhomenko as the editor.
A tall, large man with thick dark hair and a beard, Parkhomenko could not be ignored for long anywhere; his loud voice and expressive manner always attracted attention. But he was hardly a muckraker. In April he found himself in a very tricky situation he was not accustomed to: the story he had reported was a startling exposé of the growing influence of the presidential security service led by Yeltsin’s sidekick, Korzhakov. The article pulled away the curtain on the ways in which the security service was interfering in political decisions at the highest levels and, when published, would probably cause a stir. Parkhomenko tried to get it printed in Segodnya, but the deputy editor, without explanation, delayed publication.
At the time, Yeltsin was enmeshed in the first Chechen war, and Korzhakov had threatened Gusinsky when his television station, NTV, broadcast vivid coverage of the war. After Korzhakov’s men raided his offices the previous December, Gusinsky fled to London. With Gusinsky out of the country, the editorial office was now hesitant.
Korzhakov was a dark figure, a general with narrow views but vaulting ambitions. He had started his career as an officer in the KGB’s Ninth Department, charged with protecting highly placed Soviet officials, and had been assigned to Yeltsin. He remained loyal to Yeltsin for years and kept guarding him, even after Yeltsin quit the Communist Party and Korzhakov was fired from the KGB. In the days of the August coup in 1991 Korzhakov was among those in Yeltsin’s entourage whose phones were tapped by Kalgin’s KGB department. In turn, Yeltsin rewarded Korzhakov by naming him chief of the presidential security service. Korzhakov was certain that KGB methods could be applied to everything, from the economy to politics. He wanted to turn his agency into a powerful structure on its own, one that could sway politics, control government ministers, and pressure the new Russian oligarchs. From his Kremlin office Korzhakov had his subordinates interfere in business disputes and had the power to conduct all kinds of surveillance.
Parkhomenko had spent months researching his story, and he didn’t want it to die. Frustrated by the silence at Segodnya, he went to the newspaper Izvestia, a popular democratic daily. “I offered them the story, and they agreed to publish it,” Parkhomenko recalled. “They even made the layout of a double-page spread.” But Parkhomenko soon realized that Izvestia was also holding it up. At home he stashed away two page proofs of his story—one from Segodnya and one from Izvestia—but he still had nothing in print.
The story was so sensitive and the climate so uncertain that Parkhomenko thought it was time to hide some of his research so the security services could not seize it if they attempted to target him. He was also contributing to Agence France-Press, so one day he went to the Moscow office of AFP with all the documentation and his records. There was a tiny room occupied by the bookkeeping office, and contributors’ files were stored there. Parkhomenko said he needed to examine his files and then hid all his records there for safekeeping. “I thought it very unlikely for someone to look for the documentation about the Presidential Security Service in the bookkeeping office of the AFP,” Parkhomenko sighed.[11]
In late April 1995 Parkhomenko, increasingly frustrated, decided to approach the newspaper Moskovskie Novosti. It was located on Pushkin Square in the center of Moscow, with the newspaper’s title proudly emblazoned on the roof. The Russian-language weekly was launched as part of the propaganda effort around the Moscow Olympics in 1980, but during Gorbachev’s perestroika period, under editor Yegor Yakovlev, the weekly became an independent and vocal alternative to the official Soviet press. In the late 1980s Muscovites crowded every Wednesday around the stands by the entrance to the offices of Moskovskie Novosti, where pages of the weekly were displayed to read and discuss the latest edition. In the mid-1990s its predominance faded, but the paper remained a respected voice, with strong democratic traditions.
Parkhomenko went directly to the second floor, to the office of the editor Viktor Loshak, and brought his story with him.[12] Loshak read the story and at once summoned his deputies.[13] They, in turn, read the story, and the paper didn’t hesitate: Parkhomenko’s story was made up in pages, now of Moskovskie Novosti design, and this time it was published. But because it was huge, the investigation came out as a two-part series, called “Merlin’s Tower.”[14]
Parkhomenko’s investigation exposed—in a way the public had never seen before—the fearsome atmosphere in the offices where power was held in Russia, including the White House, the Kremlin, and Staraya Ploshad, where the presidential administration was headquartered. In his story Parkhomenko described how presidential advisers conducted sensitive conversations by exchanging notes on scraps of paper, which they quickly burned, fearful that their offices were bugged by the Presidential Security Service. Parkhomenko described how he was forced to keep walking briskly with his highly placed contacts when in these corridors of power because the officials were certain the Korzhakov service could not switch the microphones so quickly. Only a few years since the death of the KGB and the Soviet police state, paranoia was rampant among high-placed bureaucrats. “When one official showed me to his office he took two pencils and put them in a keyhole of a big safe in the corner. He appeared to be certain there was a video camera inside,” Parkhomenko wrote.
The publication of “Merlin’s Tower” marked an important turning point, revealing the extent to which Yeltsin had begun to rely on people and organizations of the security services. Memories of the Soviet Union were still fresh, and the idea that surveillance and eavesdropping was again being deployed in the new, more democratic environment was deeply unsettling.
Korzhakov met the articles with silence, Parkhomenko went back to the bookkeeping offices of AFP and retrieved his research files, and after his reelection triumph in 1996, Yeltsin fired Korzhakov. Although this removed one figure from the palace intrigues, the jockeying for power never ceased. Yeltsin, struggling with health issues and alcoholism, was still surrounded by family, staff, oligarchs, and politicians who pulled him in every direction. Nonetheless, Yeltsin’s 1996 reelection victory seemed to bar a return to the totalitarian Soviet past. A period of optimism prevailed.
These were the months when we first walked through the doors of the newspaper Segodnya as reporters. Andrei was twenty years old, Irina twenty-one. We thought it was the best thing that ever happened in our lives. We knew that Gusinsky, the powerful media magnate, owned Segodnya and modeled it after the New York Times, bringing in very influential political journalists, including Parkhomenko, Mikhail Leontiev, Tatyana Malkina, and Olga Romanova. Romanova, in her late twenties then, amazed everybody with her speed and precision; she rushed in the room, had all stories for the economics page edited in two hours, wrote her own story, made a dozen calls, and then rushed out to meetings.
The newspaper had the best culture department in town. The offices on Leningradsky Highway occupied part of the building of the Moscow Aviation Institute. We saw it as a gateway to the new, modern, and Westernized world. The walls were painted white, and the tables were black with sleek Macintosh computers on them, a striking contrast to Soviet-style offices of other Moscow newspapers, which had faded, wood-paneled walls, slamming metal doors, and pneumatic tubes for delivering typewritten articles. Irina joined the paper three months before Andrei, and by the time Andrei arrived, she had already written critically about municipal policy under Moscow’s powerful mayor, Yuri Luzhkov.
Many of the journalists were young like us. The head of Andrei’s department was Andrei Grigoriev, who, at twenty-six years old, was considered an experienced journalist. He exposed the vulnerability of prominent banks and was sent for a few months to Europe because the editors thought his life was in danger. Both of us felt the excitement—and a sense that we almost missed the last train—about reading courageous dispatches from the Chechen war by Masha Eismont, who was then twenty-one years old.
Rossiyskaya Gazeta, a newspaper owned by the government, had also approached Andrei. He decided to talk to them. A stiff and officious deputy editor, a woman in her fifties, told him about what kind of future he could expect at there, that after three years he could expect to be given a special press card with the words “Administration of the President” on it, which, she said, would make him very proud. She didn’t mention the topic he would be reporting on, saying he would be attached to the city news section. It was such a striking contrast to Segodnya, where Andrei immediately was given a topic for reporting—information technology—and told he was to cover it alone. Andrei felt excited: it basically meant he could define the policy of such an influential daily newspaper on this burgeoning subject. (Though his father was not particularly thrilled and told him “to leave his field” after reading a critical article Andrei wrote on FAPSI. After that they didn’t talk to each other for a few months.)
Being a journalist in the mid-nineties not only offered the thrill of the work but also changed one’s social status. In a few months our monthly salaries reached $600, way higher than Irina’s parents’ at that time. Young and with no family obligations, journalists filled just-opened bars in Moscow, drinking and talking only about their profession. One day someone brought the Reuters guidelines for journalism to Jack Rabbit Slim’s pub—conveniently located next door to the offices of a competing daily Kommersant—and provoked all-night talk about Western versus Russian rules of journalism.
In six months Andrei wrote his first lengthy feature. The story was about how Oracle databases were acquired at Lubyanka, the FSB headquarters. Andrei’s contacts told him that Oracle technologies, which were subject to export restrictions in the United States (Oracle’s CEO, Larry Ellison, once famously said that the Russians would take Oracle only in missile warheads), were sold to the FSB to build a huge database on terrorists. An outraged FSB officer called the newspaper before the publication, trying to kill the story. But nobody paid attention to his threats, and the story made the front page.
One day Irina went to the editor-in-chief and asked to be transferred to the crime department of the paper. The astonished editor tried to talk her out of it: the crime department was not the most prestigious unit in the newspaper. He suggested instead that she move to the political department, but Irina persisted; she thought it was the best place to get journalistic experience. Indeed it was.
On the fifth floor of the offices of Segodnya there was a large room with a radio scanner on the windowsill, always turned on to listen to a police frequency. A dozen people hung around day and night, among them a former KGB officer, an ex-policeman, and a pair of sixteen-year-olds. One of them was brought to the newspaper by his father, a policeman, who was troubled by his son’s criminal mindset. The boy turned out to have a talent for crime reporting. Parkhomenko’s son also landed briefly in the room. Some of the reporters often signed their stories by pseudonyms, and several people shared some of the pseudonyms to make the identification more difficult: the department received calls from angry policemen and “businessmen” with clear criminal connections almost on a daily basis.
In the 1990s these reporters not only wrote about crime but also did the work of the investigative departments: they covered the high-profile assassinations of businessmen and politicians, wrote about secret services, and were sent to the North Caucasus to cover hostage dramas. Within a year Andrei followed Irina to the crime department, where the reporters had developed a camaraderie and helped each other in sometimes very tough circumstances.
In these years journalists had power, and we felt it in our work. But journalism also suffered from a lack of restraint and established ethical standards. The nascent public relations industry often attempted to bribe journalists, promising money for publishing false or sometimes genuinely compromising information about high-placed officials and prominent businessmen. A mix of intercepted phone calls and analytical profiles prepared by the oligarchs’ shadowy security branches or the government security services became known as kompromat, or compromising materials. What made it all even more confusing was that sometimes journalists willingly acted as mercenaries for various interests or loyal members of the oligarchic business structures. Russian security services carried out surveillance and intercepted phone calls, selling their findings as part of kompromat. The resulting articles effectively influenced the public.
The editorial offices battled frantically with this corrupt journalism. Kommersant installed a special department called “rewrite” (in English), tasked to edit heavily—that is, rewrite—every piece submitted by staff journalists for publication to filter out any zakaz, or information that had been paid for by a special interest. Segodnya had a former officer of the Fifth Directorate of the KGB who in Soviet times was in charge of persecuting dissidents; now he checked suspicious articles after publication. If he concluded a story was unfair, the journalist was fired.[15]
In the mid-1990s the flow of information in media was free but could also be confusing for readers. The oligarchs used their news media outlets as weapons to fight for control of the nation’s vast resources. Around the same time, by 1996, the Russian Internet was undergoing explosive growth. The first search engine, Rambler.ru, appeared, and the first political party website was established for Yabloko, and Interfax news agency launched its own website. Internet advertising became a paying business, drawing real revenue. It was a new, fashionable business that caught the Russian oligarchs’ attention. Boris Berezovsky, one of those who helped secure Yeltsin’s victory in the presidential elections, underwrote a new Internet service provider, Cityline, whose managers were the first to grasp that people came to the Internet because of the actual content they could find there. Cityline helped launch a handful of online media and content projects, ranging from magazines to blogs.
In December a thirty-year-old Internet activist, Anton Nossik, started a new project, a daily online column called Vecherny Internet, or the Evening Internet, which was hosted on Cityline. The project was launched from Israel, as Nossik, born to a prominent Moscow intelligentsia family, had emigrated to Israel in 1990 and became prominent in the Russian and Israeli Internet communities.
Nossik soon realized that the new Internet media could trump the traditional journalism. He believed people would embrace information presented on the Internet, as it would be available sooner, more accessible, and brief. Less concerned about gathering the information, his sought to emphasize the form, not the substance. He wanted to repackage news from traditional print media and deliver it to Internet users quickly. It was an early kernel of what became the news aggregator, and it would define the Russian Internet for the next decade. Riding the wave of the Evening Internet’s success, Nossik returned to Moscow in March 1997.
The Evening Internet became the very first blog in Russia.
In the vast apparatus of the Russian government one group of officials began to pay close attention to this new online activity. The security services were among the first to conclude that it should be controlled.
In 1998 the diminutive Vika Egorova was a twenty-six-year-old editor at an obscure magazine. She had studied at the Moscow Engineering and Physics Institute, a preeminent school for training nuclear scientists, and had an interest in mathematics. After graduating, she worked at a risk management company run by former KGB people, then was hired as an editor at Mir Kartochek, or World of Credit Cards. The circulation was tiny, but Egorova’s interests ranged beyond credit cards; she began learning about secret codes and developed contacts in the world of cryptology, the science of creating and deciphering clandestine messages.
In June she received a call from one of her contacts, who worked for a small information security company. Egorova sensed the small company was related, somehow, to FAPSI, the Russian electronic intelligence agency modeled after the US National Security Agency.
Egorova knew that FAPSI was fighting the more powerful FSB, the main successor to the KGB. The intelligence services jostled with each other in a competition for power and money and especially fought for control over profitable businesses, such as encryption technology that the banks were required to buy from the secret services.
Egorova’s contact offered some information about credit card technology that might interest her magazine, so on June 10 she went to meet with him. He handed her several pages of documents, which she quickly realized had nothing to do with credit cards. It was an official document of some kind, a draft with places for signatures—still blank. But at the very top of the draft was the word soglasovano, or “approved.”[1]
The draft document described a government policy that would require all of Russia’s ISPs to install a device on their lines, a black box, that would connect them directly to the FSB. It would allow the FSB to silently and effortlessly eavesdrop on e-mails, which by 1998 had become the main method of communication on the Internet. The device was called SORM, an acronym in Russian for Systema Operativno-Rozysknikh Meropriatiy, or the System of Operative Search Measures. The document said that SORM was “a system of technical means for providing investigative procedures on electronic networks.”
More simply, eavesdropping on the Internet.
“Do what you want with that,” her contact said of the papers, suggesting she might pass them along to her editor at the magazine or give them to an editor at Computerra, another computer weekly popular among Russian programmers. Egorova realized the documents were a leak—a leak probably from FAPSI, intended to unmask the FSB’s plans to monitor all of the Russian Internet.
As she left the meeting, Egorova was uncertain what to do. But she knew she had to do something—and quickly. She called her editor, who was out of town. She called her contact at Computerra, who was also out of town. She knew she had been given the documents in a leak—it was pure politics—but wasn’t sure how to use them. Then she remembered Anatoly Levenchuk. She had met him only a few months beforehand, and his combative debating style had impressed her. Maybe he would know what to do with the information.
Levenchuk, then forty years old, had become something of a legend in the early days of the Russian Internet and was a well-respected expert in the stock market. But his real passion was ideas. He had become a devoted follower of libertarianism, and he firmly believed in the smallest possible government intrusion into the economy. He attempted to launch a libertarian political party in 1992, but it flopped and never got on the ballot. The ideas of libertarianism and freedom from government control were not widely or immediately grasped, and Levenchuk felt it needed to be explained to the Russian audience. With the arrival of the web, Levenchuk found the answer. In 1994 he established Libertarium.ru, a website that grew into an important source of libertarian ideas, a place for debate about freedom, and a launching pad for various public campaigns for change.[2] He was often invited to speak at conferences, and when he gave a talk, he would immediately stand up, walk onto a stage, and wave his arms for emphasis, with his sentences laden with an evocative Rostov accent, which was much more emotional than Moscow’s everyday idiom.
Egorova called Levenchuk at home and said she needed to have a “serious talk” with him. He picked up her worried tone and suggested they meet. There, she showed him the papers. “Look,” she said. “It seems I’ve got a leak, and I don’t know what to do with it. But I think you should know what to do with that piece of paper.” She had a hard time persuading him at first; Levenchuk’s mind was wrapped up in a battle over the rules of the stock market—fighting with FAPSI, which wanted to make all stock market details as secret as possible. Levenchuk insisted that openness was essential in capital markets—it was the pillar of how a free market worked.
When Egorova said, insistently, that it was a leak—from FAPSI!—she finally got his attention.
Levenchuk read the document and decided immediately. His experience with the Internet made him particularly sensitive to what appeared to be almost unlimited powers granted to the FSB in the document. Although they would have to get an eavesdropping warrant from the court, the FSB was not obliged to show it to anyone, not even the Internet company they were tapping. The ISPs had no right to demand the FSB show it to them either, as they had no security clearance. Making matters worse, the ISPs would have to pay for the black boxes, the SORM equipment, and the installation, but they would have no access to it.
Pure and simple, the SORM box was a backdoor to Russia’s Internet, and the security service was about to open it.
Levenchuk and Egorova walked back to his residence, a cramped, three-room apartment in southeast Moscow, in the shabby district of Kuzminki. In the kitchen was a laptop and a scanner. They scanned the document, and she helped him create hyperlinks. The next day, on June 11, 1998, Levenchuk posted the SORM document online for the first time.[3]
This was probably not what the leakers envisioned. Egorova thought they wanted it passed to an editor, maybe written up as a small magazine item. Perhaps FAPSI intended it as nothing more than a shot across the bow of the FSB, a message that we know what you are doing. But the document had come into the hands of the flamboyant and outspoken Levenchuk, who had long been struggling for more openness, and now he had a chance to do something about it. By posting the document, he thought he might force the FSB to at least adhere to their own requirement to seek a warrant before they tapped the Internet. “I always understood these were the security services, and if they say they do it, it’s impossible to stop them,” he recalled. “I was interested in only one thing, whether they would tell the truth, whether they would comply with the rule about a warrant.”[4]
Levenchuk didn’t stop there. He launched a public campaign to call attention to the draft and, in a larger sense, to push back against SORM. He called all his contacts in the news media, started collecting signatures in protest, and contacted the major telecom operators, where he had high-level contacts. He collected and posted on his website a list of questions that an ISP could ask the FSB when the security agents came to install the SORM equipment. He also solicited—and received—feedback from some of the ISPs. Levenchuk gleefully posted some of their feedback, maintaining the ISPs’ anonymity. The Internet service providers were furious with the FSB less because of the principle of eavesdropping but because they were being asked to pay for it.
“Full, primitive caveman savagery,” one service provider wrote. “Give them all, and more. And all at our own expense.” The provider added bitterly, “We will soon shoot each other on their orders, and bury—at our own expense.”
Levenchuk gave interviews and wrote articles, and the story of the Internet black boxes was reported domestically and internationally. A few service providers used Levenchuk’s suggested questions to push back when the FSB agents called to install the black boxes. But Levenchuk encountered something he never expected: the industry, in the end, did not resist. “It ended bitterly,” Levenchuk told us. “I won only a year. But it didn’t bring happiness to anyone. The providers, instead of resisting, they all gave up.”[5] Among those that installed the black boxes were the Internet pioneers Demos and Relcom.
Friends passed to Levenchuk warning messages from the FSB that he should be careful, but the security service never contacted him directly. In public the government and the security services stayed out of the debate about the SORM.
In 1998 there were no social networks in Russia; the Internet was mostly e-mail, some early e-commerce, and websites. But the Internet had already changed the rules for public debate. Unlike traditional media—newspapers, radio, television—it was not a one-directional flow of information. The Internet was filled with chats and discussion boards, and Levenchuk’s site posted dozens of comments and questions about the black boxes.
Many years earlier the first generation of SORM had begun when the Soviet KGB had tapped telephones. Then it was known as SORM-1. When it moved to the Internet in the 1990s—capable of intercepting e-mail, Internet traffic, mobile calls and voice-over Internet such as Skype, that was SORM-2. In the end the security services developed a third generation—SORM-3—which encompassed all telecommunications. All Russian operators and ISPs were required to install the black boxes, about the size of an old video tape recorder, which would fit on a rack of equipment, and permit connection to the regional departments of the FSB. The result: the FSB could intercept whenever anyone on Russian soil made a phone call or checked an e-mail.
The surveillance system enhanced the power of the security services, which lacked any kind of oversight. They didn’t hesitate to interfere with politics by using the tools of surveillance and interception. Levenchuk grasped this danger almost immediately and realized that the FSB intercepts of phone lines—and then the Internet—would further feed kompromat. It could include all kinds of misdeeds, from a target’s supposed connections with criminals to nasty details about bribery or prostitutes. At times kompromat was aimed at business rivals, prominent journalists, and politicians. But now the FSB was harvesting the raw material—intercepts from phone calls and e-mail messages—to manufacture kompromat.
For more than a decade, as investigative reporters for newspapers, we covered the Russian secret services. Andrei wrote his first article about SORM in July 1998. Then in 2000 we set up a website Agentura.ru, which we intended to be a watchdog of the Russian secret services. We’ve had a section on SORM issues ever since.
We were curious about many aspects of the story that had never been fully explained. First, we wondered why the communications industry, in the years of relative freedom in the 1990s, had been so willing to comply fully with the security services and put the black boxes on their lines? We knew there were open debates in the United States and elsewhere about electronic surveillance, such as the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, which required telecommunications providers to make their lines available for law enforcement purposes. Why was it different in Russia? Did SORM signal a return to the Soviet totalitarian practice of surveillance, or was it a legitimate method of law enforcement wiretapping in the digital age?
Second, how did SORM really begin? Was it an outgrowth of the old KGB or something new?
To answer the questions, we first looked at the document leaked to Egorova and posted by Levenchuk. We noticed that it included the identity of a special research institute in charge of the technical aspects of SORM, the Central Research Institute of the Communications Ministry. We found it had a whole section dealing with SORM, and the chief of the section was listed as Vyacheslav Gusev.
When Andrei called him, Gusev was less than helpful. He told Andrei that all work on SORM started in 1994 because that was when Russian communications switched over from analog lines to digital cables. Then he said, “I’ve been doing SORM for thirty years. I looked at your articles, our views are different, and I do not want to help you write your book.” Later the same day he sent an angry e-mail. “There are plenty of problems in this area, and your publication will not solve anything and only cause various squabbles. People who are engaged in SORM do not deserve” this critical attention.[6]
That avenue was obviously a dead end. But he exposed a serious contradiction: Gusev said that all work started in 1994 and that he had been working on it for thirty years. If SORM started in 1994, then it was a relatively recent invention, created after the Soviet collapse. But if he had been working on it for thirty years, then perhaps it originated in the KGB.
We searched through documents of the Ministry of Communications under Yeltsin and found that the first time SORM was mentioned was in a decree of November 11, 1994. The decree was about phone eavesdropping and said the SORM system would be established on Russia’s communications lines.[7] But the document also contained another clue: not only was the research institute in Moscow working on SORM, but there was mention of a branch in St. Petersburg as well. We knew of a scientist who was one of the most prominent Russian technical experts on SORM, Boris Goldstein, who had provided us with comments and explanations for our investigations in the past, and it turned out he had worked at the St. Petersburg branch for decades. Irina went to see him at the University of Telecommunications on the outskirts of St. Petersburg, where he teaches. When Goldstein opened the door to his study on the fifth floor of the university, she saw a tall, slim, and well-mannered professor, sixty-three years old. And he had a very good memory.
Goldstein recalled Soviet times, when KGB officers eavesdropped on the telephone system. They connected wires from the phone exchanges to hidden rooms where the monitoring took place. “Big, old-fashioned tape recorders turned on at the beginning of a conversation and started recording,” he recalled. “All of this was done in secret.”[8]
Goldstein described a critical difference between the Western and Russian approaches to intercepting communications. In the West, he said, the phone company or ISP gets an order to begin the interception, receives the identity of the target, and provides access. But in the Russian system the phone company or service provider has no idea who is being tapped. As Goldstein explained it, the Russian security agencies simply do not trust the operators.
Then Goldstein clarified why SORM was carried out in such secrecy. The black box installed at the provider is just one part of the system. The cable connects it to a second part at the office of the FSB, and these second devices are the work of the FSB’s own secret research institutes and are manned by the FSB. Goldstein made one thing very clear: it was not all that difficult for the authorities to shift from monitoring telephones, in SORM-1, to monitoring the Internet, in SORM-2. “Technically there was nothing new” in SORM-2, he said. To scoop up the data, “you didn’t need anything very special, just to mirror the traffic.” In some respects, Goldstein said, monitoring data was even easier than voices. After talking to Goldstein we realized that SORM probably had roots in the long-standing Soviet practice of tapping telephones. When the technology changed, the black boxes simply adjusted.
Still, not all of the pieces of the puzzle were fitting together. To get a better picture of how SORM began, we continued to scrutinize the Ministry of Communications documents from the 1990s, searching for clues in names, organizations, and facilities. Soon we discovered the name Sergei Mishenkov, then chief of the scientific department in the Ministry of Communications. In some documents he was identified as the official in charge of supervising SORM research “at the request and with the financial support” of the Russian security services. It seemed he might know a lot about SORM.
Andrei found him one day on the fourth floor of the Ministry of Communications in Moscow. Cheerful, paunchy, and with unruly hair, Mishenkov was a radio enthusiast from his youth—his e-mail address is his radio call sign—who filled his inner office with old radio sets made in Soviet times. He was an engineer who devoted his career to Moscow’s radio network and was recruited by his old pal Vladimir Bulgak into the government in the 1990s to bring more discipline to the ministry’s research institutes. They were accustomed to years of government subsidies, but now Mishenkov had to press them for real results. They also needed money. Mishenkov needed to find funds, and that is how he got involved with SORM: the FSB paid for the research on the black boxes.
Mishenkov explained to Andrei that the ministry’s central research institute in Moscow had traditionally been responsible for intercity phone lines, so naturally they got the assignment to handle the SORM black boxes for those. The St. Petersburg institute historically worked on local phone stations, so of course they were assigned the black boxes for local phones. When cell phones appeared, a third institute was put in charge of intercepting cell phone calls.[9] All of it was to help the FSB snoop on anybody.
After Gusev’s hostile reaction, Andrei didn’t have high expectations for his conversation with Mishenkov. But he had one small fact in the back of his mind: he had heard from another source that the real history of the SORM system could be traced to a place that Mishenkov had, so far, neglected to mention—the KGB’s top-secret research institute at Kuchino.[10]
“Kuchino?” Soldatov asked Mishenkov, almost casually.
Much to his surprise, Mishenkov nodded affirmatively. All the other institutes had done some research, but the birthplace of SORM was behind the walls at Kuchino, about twelve miles east of Moscow. Kuchino was the oldest research facility of the Soviet police state, and it had been in service as far back as 1929 for Stalin’s NKVD, a forerunner to the KGB. Kuchino had a storied history of accomplishments, such as figuring out how to intercept a human voice from the vibrations of a window. It was the sharashka—the prison camp—where the talented engineer Lev Kopelev had worked from January to December 1954.
Even today the facility is heavily guarded and the engineers carry the rank of officers in the FSB.[11]
We understood that we needed to find someone in the FSB to explain more about how SORM worked and how the technology originated. But this task proved nearly impossible. For years the FSB had been closed and inaccessible to journalists. The press office stopped responding to media requests; they didn’t care about public opinion anymore. After all, the rise of President Vladimir Putin had given the FSB a huge lift in power and resources.
We noticed in the documents the signature of Andrei Bykov, who was deputy director of the FSB from 1992 to 1996, holding the rank of colonel-general. Before 1992 he had been head of the KGB Operative-Technical Department, in charge of bugging, interception, and technical surveillance operations. It was Bykov whom the chairman of the KGB ordered on December 5, 1991, to hand over to the United States the documents that confirmed the bugging of the new US Embassy building in Moscow.[12] In the 1990s Bykov’s signature was on most of the SORM documents.
When he left the FSB, Bykov followed the path of many former security officers—he went to work at a private company, in this case a communications business.
Andrei tried to call, then sent an e-mail leaving his cell phone number.
That same day Andrei’s cell phone rang. He answered it. A few minutes later, looking shocked, he hung up.
“What happened?” asked Irina.
“You know who it was? It was Bykov!” he said. “I’ve never had a colonel-general of the FSB call me back!”
“What did he say?” Irina asked.
“He offered to meet in person,” Andrei replied. “He said the topic of SORM is not a phone conversation.”
Bykov offered to meet the next morning at ten o’ clock on Lubyanka Square, near the monument to victims of repressions. “There is usually nobody there in the morning, so we won’t miss each other,” he told Andrei and then hung up the phone. His voice was brusque, and Andrei thought Bykov might refuse to meet in a coffee shop. The next morning it was raining, and Soldatov went early, walked to the nearest café, ordered a cup of coffee and a cup of tea, and carried them to the rendezvous point.
Lubyanka Square is rectangular. On one side is the new luxury St. Regis Nikolskaya Hotel, on another the Detsky Mir department store, and three huge buildings of the FSB stand clockwise nearby; first, the so-called new building constructed in the early 1980s, then the main building—the most famous—headquarters of the central apparatus of the Soviet and Russian secret police, and finally the angular building built in the mid-1980s to house the Computation Center of the KGB, now the Information Security Center of the FSB.
On the south side of the square there is a small rectangular park lined by trees. To get to it requires walking through an underpass, beneath the busy traffic above. In the part facing the FSB there is a large, raw stone on a small pedestal and a tiny space before it. In October 1990 the stone was brought from the prison camp, Solovki, which was part of the gulag system, to honor victims of Stalin’s repressions. The space before the monument is usually empty but fills up every October when Muscovites gather to read aloud the names of victims in a commemoration ceremony. It was there Bykov chose to meet.
When Andrei exited the underpass near the stone, he saw a small, round-shouldered figure in an oversized gray suit that hung loosely on him. Bykov had gray hair combed back, sunken cheeks, and held an umbrella. As Andrei feared, he refused to walk to a coffee shop. Bykov also refused to have the coffee or tea Andrei brought. Andrei didn’t know what to do with the two cups, so he put them on the bench facing the monument. Bykov firmly declined the offer to sit down, saying, “We can have a walk around,” and the two of them circled the bench as they talked.
“My office was in the new building,” said Bykov, pointing to the edifice on the left.
Bykov, an engineer by training, studied at the Moscow State Technical University in Department No. 6, which focused on small arms research. Within three years after graduation he was recruited by the KGB. In 1966 he entered the KGB’s Operative-Technical Department and rose up through its ranks to become department chief. The department in earlier years had supervised sharashkas in Marfino and Kuchino. Bykov spent his career developing new kinds of weapons and special equipment, including listening devices.
The Twelfth Department of the KGB, which conducted eavesdropping, was beyond Bykov’s reach during the Soviet years. This was because the Twelfth Department had been always directly subordinated to the KGB chairman due to its sensitivity, and the chief of the section had been chosen for loyalty, not professionalism. But after the August coup attempt and the Soviet collapse, Bykov took over the Twelfth Department, incorporating it into his domain, and he became deputy director of the new Russian security service. The arrangement lasted only for a few years, then the Twelfth Department was raised to the level of a directorate inside the FSB. Its emblem proudly displays an owl. And it is this directorate that is in charge of SORM black boxes all over Russia.
Bykov told Andrei that in 1991 his most immediate problem had been to withdraw the KGB’s technical equipment and secret documentation from the Baltics to Moscow. The Soviet Union fell apart, and all of the KGB’s surveillance and eavesdropping equipment had been manufactured by two factories, Kommutator and Alfa, in Riga, the capital of newly independent Latvia. When he managed to get everything out, he had to respond to criticism of the KGB’s eavesdropping practices from dissidents and journalists. Legally the KGB’s eavesdropping was regulated by an order, No. 0050, signed by Soviet leader Yuri Andropov in 1979, but it had only one principal rule: it directly banned eavesdropping on party officials.
Bykov came up with the idea of “sanctioned surveillance.” The new system required some outside body to approve surveillance in advance—entirely a defensive move to fend off the criticism. Initially the security services toyed with the idea of having sanctions approved by the prosecutor’s office, but in 1995 it was decided that a court warrant would be required for advance approval.[13]
But the technical method of full, unrestricted access to all communications, developed at Kuchino in the 1980s, was not altered according to the new requirement. In practice it meant that the Russian secret service would get the court’s approval and then do whatever surveillance it wished. Bykov was confident the procedure would not hinder the way the surveillance was technically organized. When Andrei asked why they didn’t follow the American example, Bykov simply waved the question away. “Ah, they also sniff all information from the servers. It was proved by Assange and the like, and it didn’t start yesterday.”
As Bykov walked round and round the little park area with Andrei, the real situation became clear. The methods of SORM directly descended from when no one thought of court-approved warrants—from the Soviet system of phone wiretapping.
We searched hard to find someone who had experience back then, in the secret KGB recording chambers, sitting in front of the whirring tape recorders in the earlier days of phone wiretapping, the days when SORM eavesdropping began. The trail eventually led to a cheap café in the east of Moscow.
It was a woman’s job—to sit for long hours, facing metal stands with reel-to-reel tape recorders on the wall, mostly a West German brand, Uher Royal de Luxe, later replaced by eight-channel devices converted from video tape recorders.[14] The women appeared to be similar to phone operators, with headphones ready on the table, and there was indeed a telephone switchboard in the room. But there were also a few officer-technicians in the large room, and the women were not operators but rather “controllers” of the Twelfth Department of the KGB. Their rank was usually an ensign, the lowest possible rank in the KGB, and it was not up to them but to an officer at the switchboard, also a woman, to decide which stand to choose to connect the phone number marked for control. The job of controller was, in this sense, relatively easy—just make sure all reels moved properly and replace the tape when a reel was full. Sometimes the controllers were ordered to conduct “auditory control”: when they put on their headphones and grabbed the work notebooks to scribble notes. The women were trained to type and in stenography. They also were trained to remember over fifty voices and to recognize instantly who was calling.[15] For these skills they received a handsome Soviet salary of 300 rubles per month (an engineer or scientist earned around 180 rubles), with the real possibility they might become deaf in fifteen years.[16]
Andrei found one of these controllers. We met at the café Nikolai on Staraya Basmannaya Street, two hundred meters away from her current job, a pro-Kremlin website called Pravda.ru. A small woman in her early fifties, with black hair, black eyes, and wearing a modest business suit, she sat at a table in a corner of the café and looked around nervously. Her first name was Lyubov, and Andrei just showed her the report signed with her name, which we had discovered in a small-circulation book published in 1995.[17] A KGB document about the surveillance of Yeltsin’s people during the August coup showed that Lyubov was then a KGB senior lieutenant, an “interpreter of special purpose” of the Twelfth Department.
She confirmed that she was indeed a KGB “controller,” and in her report Lyubov described how, on the evening of August 20, 1991, the second day of the putsch, she eavesdropped on the conversations of Vitaly Urazhtsev, a democratic deputy of the Supreme Soviet and a Yeltsin supporter. Urazhtsev, a lieutenant colonel of the Soviet Army, became well known in 1989 when he was expelled from the Communist Party for his ideas about democratizing the army. In the early morning of the first day of the putsch he was arrested at a bus stop and interrogated by KGB officers who asked Urazhtsev whether he was planning to oppose the putsch. They urged him to support the coup, but he refused. In a few hours he was released. However, the next day he was put under surveillance of the KGB’s Twelfth Department.
Silently listening to his conversations was Lyubov. She was a 1984 graduate of the best university in the country, Moscow State University, with a degree in geography. She pursued work as a specialist economic geographer and Portuguese interpreter, but she didn’t remain a geographer; the KGB recruited her to join the Twelfth Department as an interpreter. If the KGB needed to eavesdrop on the Portuguese, Brazilians, or Angolans, Lyubov got the job. The rest of the time she listened to whomever was of interest to the KGB.
In the days of the putsch this meant eavesdropping on the parliamentarian Urazhtsev. Now, in January 2015, Lyubov looked worriedly at her report, published in a 1995 book. She looked at the once-secret report lying there, in the open. “It’s our internal things,” she said. “It should be secret.” She clearly didn’t know what to say: in the first line of a report written at the time for the investigation, Lyubov acknowledged that on August 20, 1991, she took part in the “anticonstitutional, unlawful operation” to eavesdrop on Yeltsin’s people. She wrote that she was ready to take responsibility. She even offered to reorganize the activities of the Twelfth Department to make it lawful. At that time she seemed contrite for what had happened.
“Despite all I wrote here, I’m a patriot!” she said nervously. We both knew in January 2015 her critical words about the way KGB surveillance had been organized had gone out of fashion. Andrei persuaded her to meet him again in the café, hoping to learn more. But she seemed edgy, nervous, and unsettled, only staying long enough to say that the FSB were the best people in the country—and then she was gone.
From other sources we learned somewhat more about the history and scope of SORM. The Twelfth Department had 164 control points arrayed across Moscow.[18] Tape recorders were rolling in district KGB offices, at the central listening point on Varsonofyevsky Lane, and in city telephone stations, where there was room for KGB controllers to hide and do their work. Foreign embassy phone lines were eavesdropped separately. It was called “object control,” which meant that each major embassy had its own surveillance team stationed permanently in nearby buildings, with KGB operatives at the ready in case someone of interest made a call to the embassy and would have to be apprehended before reaching the gates. All in all, until the breakup of the Soviet Union, over nine hundred people served in the Twelfth Department of the KGB in Moscow, with four hundred in Leningrad.
Even so, it wasn’t always that effective. At most, the department could simultaneously wiretap no more than three hundred people. Twenty-four hours of eavesdropping produced between eight and eleven hours of recordings, but one hour of recording required seven hours of transcribing by controllers. The existence of 164 control points was actually a sign of weakness; the KGB needed so many points to direct the traffic by hand because the quality of phone lines was poor, and phone stations in Moscow were of all different types, some dating back to the 1930s. The underground communication lines were awful; in some cases it was physically impossible to get lines connected to the central listening point.
In our investigation we learned that Moscow had extensively borrowed technology and know-how from the feared secret police in East Germany. The Ministry of State Security, known as the Stasi, started working on a national system of wiretapping in East Germany in 1956, at that time called “Systema-A.”[19] By the end of the 1960s Stasi introduced a more efficient, centralized system, known as Centrales Kontrollsystem, or CEKO, which became operational in 1973. It allowed Stasi to eavesdrop simultaneously on four thousand phone numbers, out of a total of 8 million in the country. In the early 1980s the system was updated once again, which became known as CEKO-2, with a very advanced and elaborate system, from the phone lines to tape recorders. CEKO-2 was equipped with tape recorders of the brand “Elektronik,” specially designed for the Stasi, the only security service in the Eastern bloc that enjoyed its own tape recorders. All technical hubs of CEKO-2, in 209 territorial departments of Stasi, were connected with fifteen district departments. In Berlin CEKO-2 had eighteen specially built stations. Central Berlin’s point of CEKO-2 on Frankfurter Allee had four huge communications racks with eleven hundred control points. Special cables were laid from CEKO-2 stations to the switchboard of the nearest phone station, and Stasi “controllers” could listen to conversations directly. Over 70 percent of connections were done on the main switchboard. Such an achievement was possible because the underground communication system in Berlin, built in Hitler’s times, had largely survived the battle for Berlin in 1945.
The KGB learned at the knee of the Stasi officers, envying the technical level of Stasi surveillance. Nikolai Kalyagin, a major-general of the KGB, was in charge of relations with East German secret services for twelve years, first as chief of the KGB station in Bonn and then as chief of the section responsible for cooperation with Stasi. We found his home phone number, and Kalyagin himself answered the call.
Kalyagin told us that there were indeed technical officers of the KGB permanently stationed in Berlin, always interested in German know-how in surveillance. Evidence from our source who served in Germany in the 1980s supported this confirmation.
Kalyagin was helpful, and then Andrei asked him, “Do I understand correctly that the control of phone lines was better organized in Berlin than in Moscow? And that sometimes Germans overtook us in technical means, especially in phone control?”
“Yes, you understand this right,” said Kalyagin.
The Stasi possessed what the KGB so badly wanted—a national system of eavesdropping on communications. SORM was designed to fill this gap, to provide the Soviet KGB with a system built in Moscow and then replicated in all Russian regions. At the time the Soviet Union fell apart, the KGB was working on it but had not fulfilled its goal. After a few years the new Russian secret service, the FSB, took over, and this time new digital technologies helped make the system quite sophisticated.
When, on a summer day of 2014, Andrei walked into the tall building on Butlerova Street in Moscow that houses M9, he saw for the first time the mammoth crossroads for traffic moving between the Russian Internet providers. Nearly a decade ago a single Internet exchange point, MSK-IX, had started in a corner of the twelfth floor of this building. Now it expanded to seven floors, filled with hundreds of communications racks.
With the help of some engineers, Andrei got a pass into the restricted building. Every floor has a special door with a separate code requiring a key to get through. Andrei’s contacts had a key for the eighth floor. The heavy metal door was opened, and Andrei quietly stepped inside a small room, packed with equipment on the racks. One of them had a small black box. It was labeled SORM. It had a few cables and a few lights. Andrei was told that when the small green lamp was illuminated on the box, the FSB guys on the eighth floor have something to do.
As he looked down, Andrei saw the small green lamp winking.
In 1998 and 1999 Levenchuk had done much to bring SORM to public attention, but when none of the big ISPs resisted, he felt deflated and discouraged. In 1999 Egorova and Levenchuk got married. He gave up his involvement in politics. Levenchuk had lost his battle against SORM, and he lost it to a new director of the FSB. His name was Vladimir Putin.
In the aftermath of the Russian economic crisis of 1998 President Yeltsin appointed three prime ministers in succession. None were economists, but all were closely tied to the security services. Yevgeny Primakov, who had been head of the foreign intelligence service, served as prime minister from September 11, 1998, to May 12, 1999. He was replaced by Sergei Stepashin, who had been director of the FSB in 1995. Then, on August 9, Yeltsin appointed Vladimir Putin, who had served as director of the FSB from 1998 to 1999.
By the summer of 1999 Russia was slowly and painfully recovering from the economic crisis, and in September Moscow was shaken by two apartment-building bombings that killed 216 people.[1] Chechen terrorists were blamed, and soon a new military offensive was launched in Chechnya in retaliation. But Yeltsin was not afraid of riots or terrorists; he and his entourage only feared his former close allies. A powerful political figure, Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, made a bid for the Kremlin. He also launched an attack on Yeltsin’s family, accusing them of corruption. Yeltsin’s team watched anxiously when Primakov joined with Luzhkov, and together they formed a new political party called Fatherland, seeking seats in parliament in the election of December 1999 and, it was assumed, the presidency in the contest set for March 2000. Yeltsin’s term was to end in a few months, and his safety and that of his family was under question.
On Sunday night, May 30, 1999, Yeltsin was stunned as he watched TV in his mansion in Barvikha, a village filled with walled-off mansions of top-level Russian officials, thirteen miles from the Kremlin in the lush green forests outside of Moscow. The influential journalist Yevgeny Kiselev displayed a chart of the president’s family, suggesting they had engaged in corruption and had spirited their illicit gains abroad. This appeared on NTV’s widely respected show Itogi, then the most popular political broadcast in Russia.
Kiselev, then forty-two, the most prominent and respectable political host on television, specifically raised questions about the integrity of Yeltsin’s daughter Tatyana; her husband, Valentin Yumashev, both of whom worked in the presidential administration; as well as Alexander Voloshin, the chief of the administration; and billionaire oligarch Roman Abramovich. “The photographs on TV reminded me of wanted posters I used to see at factories, bus stations, or moving theatres in Sverdlovsk,” Yeltsin later wrote. “The posters usually depicted the faces of drunks, thieves, murderers and rapists. Now the ‘police,’ in the person of NTV, was talking about my so-called Family—myself, Tanya, Voloshin, and Yumashev. All of these people were accused of everything under the sun—bribery, corruption, the hoarding of wealth in Swiss bank accounts, and the purchase of villas and castles in Italy and France. The NTV show put me in a state of shock.”[2]
Every night the power struggle played out on television. The wealthy oligarch and wheeler-dealer Boris Berezovsky, who was close to Yeltsin’s team, controlled the first channel, ORT, with a massive audience across Russia’s eleven time zones, a legacy of Soviet state television. A second force was Gusinsky’s NTV, a channel that earned its reputation for professionalism in the first Chechen war. Luzhkov, the Moscow mayor, also had his own television channel, popular only in the capital. All of them—Berezovsky, Gusinsky, and Luzhkov—had supported Yeltsin in the 1996 reelection effort, but now, in the twilight of Yeltsin’s second term, they were jockeying for power, anticipating the moment when Yeltsin would leave the scene.
While Yeltsin endured the criticism from Luzhkov’s media outlets, he was stunned at the NTV broadside, which he called “a stab in the back from people I had thought were of my mind.” Gusinsky’s media empire, called Media-Most, consisting of NTV, the newspaper Segodnya, and the weekly Itogi, had placed their bets on Luzhkov and Primakov in the great power struggle. Like the other oligarchs, Gusinsky wielded power through his media holdings. Investigations of corruption targeting the Kremlin were exposed by NTV, then commented on in Segodnya, and then picked up by other printed media.
For the Yeltsin circle it was a very serious and direct personal threat. Following Kiselev’s program, Voloshin summoned journalists in the Kremlin pool to a meeting and told them, rather melodramatically, of Gusinsky’s Media-Most. “Either we break Most,” he said, “or Most breaks the state.” Elena Tregubova, a correspondent of Kommersant, present at the meeting, was certain that Voloshin meant the Kremlin when he was speaking of the “state.”[3] And the Kremlin decided to retaliate. In July the state-owned Vnesheconombank refused to extend a previously agreed-upon loan to Gusinsky’s Media-Most, then announced that Media-Most had failed to repay the loan.[4] Later Media-Most’s accounts at the bank were seized, journalists who worked in Media-Most outlets were denied access to the Kremlin, and their accreditations for briefings by Voloshin were annulled.[5] Sergei Parkhomenko, the journalist who had earlier exposed reasons to fear the security services in “Merlin’s Tower” articles, recalled that one day his chief political correspondent, Dmitry Pinsker, came to him with bad news. “The Kremlin decided to end my access to information,” he said. “My sources refuse to talk to me and be quoted, so please understand why in my stories there will be more anonymous sources and commentators.” Parkhomenko added, “It happened not only with information from the Kremlin. When the war in Chechnya started in September, our correspondents were not given access to the military nor provided help in getting to the troops. It was a well-defined strategy.”[6] In the view of the Kremlin the journalists working for Gusinsky’s media were the enemy’s soldiers.
Yeltsin and his entourage desperately looked for someone to whom they could entrust their fate after his presidency ended. On August 9 Yeltsin named Putin, then forty-six years old and a protégé of Berezovsky, as the new prime minister. Yeltsin also made clear that he considered Putin his successor. Putin then appeared on television after the appointment and declared, “The main problem—I repeat, I have already spoken about this—what we have is the lack of political stability.” It was a remark aimed directly at preserving the status quo.[7]
In 1999 Putin was not a public figure accustomed to journalists and the free exchange of information. In the perestroika years Putin had been stationed in Germany as a KGB officer, and he missed everything that happened, including Gorbachev’s campaign of glasnost—or openness—when newspapers were competing to expose Stalinist crimes; Soviet apparatchiks argued with dissidents like Andrei Sakharov at Congress of People’s Deputies, broadcast in real-time on television; and the pages of democratic Moskovskie Novosti were read aloud by Muscovites on Pushkin Square. Putin had little idea of how the West functioned from his posting in East Germany, which was under total control of the secret services. He missed even the fall of the Berlin Wall, because he was serving in Dresden, 125 miles south of Berlin.
Upon his return to St. Petersburg in 1990, Putin was hesitant. He later said he didn’t want to remain with the KGB and refused a transfer to the central headquarters in Moscow. “I understood this system had no future,” he recalled.[8] But he was afraid to leave it entirely, so he chose instead a “safe” option, asking to be attached to Leningrad University, as a KGB officer, to get a doctorate, which he later abandoned. The following year Putin went to work for Anatoly Sobchak, a prominent democrat who led the Leningrad City Council and became the first post-Soviet mayor of St. Petersburg, the city’s imperial name, restored after the Soviet collapse. But Putin formally retired from the KGB on August 20, 1991, when it was crystal clear the coup had failed in Moscow.
In the 1990s Putin hewed to the methods he had been taught at the KGB, especially when he dealt with journalists. He sought to flatter and recruit.
In 1995 a group of journalists from Moskovskie Novosti went to St. Petersburg for a meeting with the newspaper’s readers. Sobchak was an old admirer of the Moskovskie Novosti but was out of town, so he asked his deputy, Putin, to arrange a dinner for the journalists. Mikhail Shevelev and his colleagues found themselves at the table with Putin, who didn’t impress them, though he tried his best to entertain them. He saw they were Jewish and carried on about his recent visit to Israel, praising the country, but his attempts to please them fell flat. “That evening I tried to get more drinks to forget him,” Shevelev said.[9]
In late December 1998, having come to Moscow and been appointed director of the FSB, Putin took Tregubova, a Kommersant correspondent, to dinner. Seemingly out of the blue he asked Tregubova about her father and described to her, in astonishing detail, a conflict between the institute where her father worked and its competitor in St. Petersburg. Tregubova realized it was an attempt to recruit her.[10]
Putin was FSB director only for a year, from July 1998 to August 1999. One of his accomplishments was to turn on SORM monitoring of the Internet.
Putin’s formative lessons came from a career in the KGB devoted to protecting the Communist Party’s monopoly on power. He joined in 1975, at a time when veterans of Stalin’s secret services were still serving. He heard something about Stalin’s mass repressions, but “not much,” he later said, and he was not supposed to, as the KGB officers were mostly inward-looking officers, and for many of them the service was a source of jobs for members of their family.[11] They strongly believed that access to information and to means of communications should be under control of the state. In the same year Putin joined, Andropov, chairman of the KGB, reported to the Central Committee of the Communist Party about the threat of international phone calls made by Jewish refuseniks, proposing to sharply restrict the use of international communication channels.
Although Putin was trained as a foreign intelligence officer, he was not immediately sent abroad. He spent four and a half years at the Leningrad KGB office in a section recruiting foreigners. He was in the KGB when it crushed dissidents, hunted for samizdat publications, and sought to cut back the international phone lines after the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow. This was the organization that shaped Putin’s view of the world.
Long after he left the KGB and after he was promoted to prime minister, Putin still retained a deep suspicion of journalists, a legacy of his years in the security service. One day at the Helsinki airport, during his second visit as prime minister overseas, Putin stopped to answer questions from Finnish journalists. One reporter asked, reading from a paper slowly in Russian, about the war in Chechnya. Putin responded harshly, “First, we are not on equal terms: You were reading your question prepared beforehand on paper, and I should respond right now.”[12] For those trained in Soviet secret services, if a correspondent reads a question, this signaled that someone else had written and prepared the question for the journalist. In fact, however, the Finnish reporter had just wanted to ask the question properly in a foreign language.
The fall of 1999 was full of dramatic events: the apartment bombings in Moscow, the war in Chechnya, and parliamentary elections. The Kremlin’s political masters saw every critical piece of reporting by journalists of Gusinsky’s media empire—above all, NTV—as yet more signs of a conspiracy against them. In this dramatic battle newspapers were not major players, and the Internet was not taken seriously; television dominated all.
However, one person saw the potential to exploit the Internet for the Kremlin. Gleb Pavlovsky, then forty-eight years old, was a plump, round-faced public relations man with gray hair and brown-framed glasses and always dressed in a sweater. Though self-assured, Pavlovsky harbored memories of his own harrowing experience with the KGB. Born in Odessa, Pavlovsky went to Moscow in 1974, where he continued his involvement with the dissident movement. Under a pseudonym, he wrote a long and critical article about Brezhnev’s constitution for the samizdat journal Poiski. In April 1982 the KGB went after him. During the investigation he repented and began to cooperate with the authorities. As a result, instead of being sent to prison camps, he received a few years of exile in the Komi Republic, eight hundred miles northeast of Moscow. “Internally, I realized that I crossed the line,” Pavlovsky admitted many years later.[13] Although his behavior appalled his former dissident friends, he returned to Moscow in 1985, and soon after perestroika started, he found his way back to democratic circles, with at least some of his former friends accepting him back. In 1989 he founded the very first independent news agency, Postfactum. Pavlovsky saw that sometimes it was possible to cross a line and then to cross back again.
In 1999 Pavlovsky was called on by the Kremlin to help build a new progovernment party, Edinstvo, or Unity, and to devise a smear campaign against the Kremlin’s opponents, including Luzhkov, Primakov, and the tycoon Gusinsky and his mass media. “There was a war with Gusinsky then,” Pavlovsky said.[14] His organization, the Foundation for Effective Politics, was a public relations company. It launched a number of websites with kompromat aimed at Luzhkov, a collection of revealing dossiers on various profitable Moscow businesses under the control of the mayor’s associates. It also created a false site that pretended to be the official website of the Moscow mayor. Television journalists close to the Kremlin then recycled the kompromat posted on these sites.
One day in 1999 Pavlovsky came to the presidential administration with an idea. At the time it was against the law to publish exit polls on Election Day, but the restriction applied only to traditional media—the law did not cover the Internet. Pavlovsky suggested a way to exploit the gap. On December 16, three days before the parliamentary elections, Pavlovsky’s foundation launched a website, elections99.com.
On Election Day the website published real-time exit polls from the Russian regions. Widely quoted by traditional media, including TV channels, its data helped sway voter sentiment in favor of Putin’s Unity Party, helping it gather 23.3 percent of the vote, compared to 13.3 percent for Luzhkov’s party, translating to 73 seats in the 450-member State Duma, the lower house. This was a victory for Unity, which had not existed before as a party.
At 9:51 a.m. on Election Day, Pavlovsky, excited, sent a message by pager to Yumashev, Yeltsin’s son-in-law and a member of the Kremlin’s inner circle, saying, “It looks a lot like victory!”[15]
Pavlovsky had been busy in other ways too. Putin, having been appointed prime minister, was actively planning to run for president to succeed Yeltsin. Pavlovsky had been regularly going to Putin campaign meetings, which convened at Alexander House near the Kremlin and often included Putin. Putin’s presidential campaign staff was headed by his loyal ally, Dmitry Medvedev. Pavlovsky spoke up to suggest that Putin should meet with Internet entrepreneurs, explaining that the meeting with the Internet crowd could help shape Putin’s image as leader of the new generation. After all, he said, Russia was approaching the twenty-first century, and the country wanted to rely on new people. Pavlovsky got a green light to set up the meeting.
In the 1990s Pavlovsky had not been very successful, always close to many promising projects, but he had never really come out on top. His Postfactum news agency had closed in 1996, and although he had been on the board of Kommersant, the most successful Russian business daily, somehow Pavlovsky was always distracted with minor public relations projects throughout the 1990s. Now Putin’s campaign offered him a new route to success. But he knew the rules: you should have something behind you to be useful, either a reputation—which Pavlovsky lacked—or a TV channel or a newspaper, like the tycoons had; he did not have those either. The one thing he did pay attention to was the Internet. The meeting between Putin and the Internet entrepreneurs could prove to the Kremlin that Pavlovsky was in command of the Internet and, thus, enhance his prestige.
Pavlovsky called Anton Nossik, the then thirty-three-year-old editor-in-chief of a new online media outlet, Lenta.ru, and invited him to attend the meeting with Putin. Nossik had few illusions about Putin and his KGB past. His family was a part of rebellious liberal-minded Moscow intelligentsia who didn’t like official Soviet policy regarding art. Nossik was quite certain that his generation was smarter and had brighter prospects than the old Yeltsin elite. It didn’t help that a week before the scheduled meeting, on December 20, Putin went to FSB headquarters on Lubyanka Square to celebrate the Day of Security Organizations and made a famous remark: “Dear comrades, I can report that the group of agents you sent to infiltrate the government has accomplished the first part of its mission.” This was followed by approving laughter from FSB officers.[16]
Nossik wasn’t surprised by the invitation; his new project was part of Pavlovsky’s collection of online media. “I had known Anton for long, over ten years maybe, and I invited him to launch Lenta.ru,” said Pavlovsky. And Nossik recalled that “all our projects then were with” Pavlovsky. Nossik’s office was located in the hulking building of the state-owned news agency RIA Novosti on Zubovsky Boulevard that also housed Pavlovsky’s online media.
Pavlovsky asked Nossik and Marina Litvinovich, a young online journalist well connected in Moscow’s Internet subculture and working in Pavlovsky’s foundation, to select people for the meeting with the prime minister. Nossik selected his young friends, most in their twenties, including colleagues at Pavlovsky’s organization, and people who had websites and online media.
But the preparations took time, and word of the meeting filtered over to the offices of the Russian government, the formal structure of ministries and agencies, led by Prime Minister Putin. One of those who heard about it was Oleg Rykov, a veteran adviser to the government on information technology.[17] In the 1980s he had been involved in a top-secret, ambitious, and very expensive program, supervised by the KGB, to build a system of managing the Soviet Union during war with underground city bunkers built all over the country as well as powerful computer centers burrowed deep underground. He knew a lot about computers and hated secrecy; he was sure that in most cases it just covered up incompetence. He was also very skeptical of government intrusion into the Internet.
Rykov became alarmed when he heard of a plan drafted by Mikhail Lesin, then minister in charge of the news media, that would effectively hand over the distribution of domain names from the nongovernmental organization based at the Kurchatov Institute to the government. For him, it meant only one thing. “Lesin wanted to take away the entire Internet,” Rykov said later.[18] Rykov learned that Lesin would present the plan at the meeting with Putin that, if approved, would effectively put the Russian Internet under direct control of the state, determining who used which domain names.
Rykov immediately called Alexey Soldatov and warned him about Lesin’s worrisome plan. Officially the Information Department of the government was tasked to select the meeting’s participants, so Rykov lobbied to include his government department, the Department of Science, as one of the official organizers. Finally it was agreed that both departments would jointly select the twenty attendees. Rykov and Soldatov huddled to make choices for their slots, choosing mostly veterans of the Internet of the early 1990s.
Simultaneously Soldatov, seeking to build a united front against Lesin’s initiative, called Anatoly Levenchuk and asked him to find Nossik. Levenchuk put all his energy into it and tried for two weeks to locate Nossik, but without success.
When the date of the meeting was announced, Soldatov gathered his group at the offices of Relcom, still next door to the Kurchatov Institute, to establish their strategy. They decided that Soldatov was to speak first and that they would try to kill the Lesin proposal.
On December 28, 1999, two groups of people went separately to the White House. Eight years after Yeltsin and his supporters had barricaded themselves inside and seven years after the violent confrontation with hardliners in 1993, when it was shelled by tanks, there were no visible traces. The building was now renovated and surrounded by high fences and checkpoints, and demonstrations were prohibited near the building.
The two groups saw each other for the first time in the lobby, then took the elevator to the fifth floor, to the so-called central zone of the Dom Pravitelstva, or house of government. As they waited outside the conference hall on the fifth floor, they didn’t talk much to each other.
They looked as different as they felt. The younger ones were dressed casually, whereas the older generation wore suits. The younger group “was another crowd,” recalled Alexey Platonov, a director of the nongovernmental organization that managed domain names and a friend of Soldatov. “We were dealing with the infrastructure,” Platonov said. “There are several levels of the Internet, and ours was the low and the middle levels, and then on the top there is the add-on that became known as ‘the Internet.’ They then considered themselves the elite, and they called us communication people, plumbers.”[19]
Finally the participants were shown into the large conference hall with a long horseshoe-shaped table with chairs lined up shoulder to shoulder. They sat as they wished. Putin was at the head of the table, along with a deputy and two ministers—Lesin and Leonid Reiman, who was minister of communications. Soldatov sat to the right of Putin, and Nossik sat opposite him. Pavlovsky, who had thought up the idea of the meeting, did not attend.
Putin made a brief introduction. Soldatov immediately raised a hand.[20] He delivered a lecture, speaking somewhat slowly and clearly, about the history of the Internet in Russia. Then, following a plan agreed beforehand, Soldatov turned to Mikhail Yakushev, a well-known jurist, who explained with equal care how the Internet was regulated.
Putin nodded and then suddenly produced a file. Inside it was a description of the Lesin plan to take over the domain names, agreed upon with Reiman. It had two chapters, titled, “On Ordering the Allocation and Use of Domain Names” and “On the Establishment of a National System of Registration of Domain Names.” Taken together, they would deliver control over the domain .ru to a government body and to make all kinds of organizations, from joint-stock companies to media to schools, use these domain names and launch their corporate sites by December 31, 2000.[21]
Putin asked what everyone at the table thought about the proposal. They all pretended to be surprised. Nossik raised his hand. “This is exactly why we are afraid of the government,” he said. “Like a magician, you pull out of your sleeve some government regulation, after which everyone can go home!”[22]
A close friend of Nossik, Artemy Lebedev, a young website designer, arrived late to the meeting and took an empty chair, followed by his girlfriend, Marina Litvinovich, who worked for Pavlovsky. Lebedev, the son of a famous Russian writer, Tatiana Tolstaya, wore a bandana over his head, and was always carefully unshaven, with the manners of a creative type. Lebedev at once launched into an attack on the nongovernmental organization that was controlling the domain names. The director, Platonov, sat directly opposite Lebedev during the tirade. Lebedev accused the organization of unfairly setting prices too high for domain names.
Platonov, forty-five years old, was a nuclear physicist who had spent his entire career at the Kurchatov Institute. Sitting there, the target for a verbal attack right in front of a prime minister whom he just met for the first time, he was evidently confused. Platonov surmised that Lebedev’s angry speech was not accidental. The main topic of the meeting was state regulation and, in particular, the question of what to do with the domain .ru. For Platonov, the idea of state regulation of domain names—what Lesin was proposing—seemed “some sort of a racket: you have something profitable—give it to me.” And Lebedev’s attack in front of Putin provided the government arguments for why the status quo should be changed. Platonov responded emotionally.[23] The volume of the discussion and the cross talk soon became unmanageable, but it was clear that everyone at the table, both old and young generations, were dead set against the Lesin proposal.
Soldatov raised his hand again. When Putin nodded, he said, “I suggest we should have the project subjected to public discussion.”
Putin immediately responded, “Agreed. Let’s decide that this project, and all projects in the area of the Internet, will be subject to public debate.”
With that, the Lesin proposal was effectively killed off. The meeting had lasted more than an hour and a half.
Arkady Volozh, founder of the Yandex search engine and present at the meeting, though mostly silent, took with him a pencil from the White House, which his son put up for sale the next day on the online auction Molotok.ru for 2,500 rubles, with the description, “A pencil stolen from Putin’s meeting with the Internet professionals.”[24]
To Nossik, the meeting was pure theater. He was certain that Putin knew the script and how it would turn out. He concluded that the real purpose of the meeting was to improve Putin’s image as an advanced and liberal-minded leader of Russia. After all, Putin was, at the time, making parallel efforts to persuade Western businessmen that he accepted the free-market system and would be committed to Yeltsin’s path. Nossik also thought that the Internet crowd was summoned to show their support, and they delivered. “Thanks to me, thanks to all of us, Putin got what he wanted,” Nossik recalled. “He was supported by the most advanced part of society.”
Nossik never thought the Lesin project had a real chance of being implemented. But Soldatov believed the project was for real, and he felt great relief when they secured Putin’s promise not to sign anything without a public debate. For years the Kremlin kept this promise. “We got what we wanted,” Soldatov recalled.
For all of the Internet people who came to the White House that day, the encounter left the rules as they were. The status quo remained in place, and that was what they wanted.
Putin took away a different impression. In 1999 Putin was not very familiar with the brave new world of the Internet. He didn’t have e-mail, and he was given information from the Internet on printouts. As always, he tried to shape the people he saw into his understanding of the world, defined by his KGB background and his tough years in St. Petersburg in the early 1990s. And what he saw was that the most important figures in this new area were all closely tied to the Kremlin in one way or another—through his spin doctors or government agencies, many of them dependent on government contracts. He also saw, in Lebedev’s remarks, that these people could be easily manipulated. They could be divided and subdivided. This was a KGB method, but for now he didn’t need to do anything.
Three days later, on New Year’s Eve, Yeltsin announced he was resigning and then handed over his powers to Putin.
President Putin never forgot that Vladimir Gusinsky’s media empire had nearly broken the Kremlin. He was determined to seize control of broadcast television, by far the most pervasive and effective news media in Russia. But just as Putin went after television, the news media reached a turning point. People lost faith in traditional news sources and began to rely on digital outlets. A new wave was coming, gradually but with profound consequences, and it all started with a few independent bloggers.
Putin won the presidential elections on March 26, 2000, and took the oath of office on May 7 in a grand ceremony in the gilded and chandeliered Andreev throne hall of the Kremlin Palace. Four days later, on May 11, armed officers of the security services raided the offices of Media-Most on Palashevsky Lane in Moscow. A month later, on June 13, Gusinsky was detained and imprisoned in the Butyrka jail in the center of the city, placed in a tiny cell with six other inmates in the most notorious of Russian prisons. On the morning of his first day in jail, while meeting with his lawyer, Gusinsky wrote on a copy of his arrest warrant, “It is a political intrigue, organized by high-placed officials for whom freedom of speech poses a danger and an obstacle to their plans.”[1] Soon he received a message from Mikhail Lesin, the Russian government’s press minister. Lesin wanted Gusinsky to sell Media-Most in return for his freedom. After three days in jail, Gusinsky agreed. He was released on June 16, and from the prison he went directly to the Media-Most offices and secretly recorded a video statement saying that he only agreed to sell the company under duress.
Gusinsky was put under house arrest. Over the next three weeks his lawyers hammered out the terms of the sale of Media-Most to the state-owned natural gas monopoly Gazprom. Gusinsky signed the agreement, and it was countersigned by Lesin in his capacity as minister. Then Gusinsky was allowed to leave the country. He fled to London and exile.
Despite the agreement, Gusinsky was reluctant to hand over the company. To pressure him, different law enforcement agencies, under guidance of the General Prosecutor’s Office, launched a massive attack on him personally and the media that were part of his empire. To turn up the heat, arrests, criminal cases, accusations, and visits from the FSB and tax police followed. The financial director of Media-Most, Anton Titov, was accused of fraud and sent to jail.
In January 2001 the General Prosecutor’s Office summoned Tatiana Mitkova, the top NTV anchor, for interrogation. Now the NTV journalists felt they needed to act on their own. Mitkova’s colleague, Svetlana Sorokina, the presenter who had first interviewed Putin a year earlier, addressed Putin during her program on NTV, saying, “Vladimir Vladimirovich, maybe you can find some time to meet us, the journalists of NTV?” The same day she got a call from Putin, and a few days later the president invited eleven journalists from the channel to a meeting at the Kremlin.
At noon on January 29 the NTV journalists gathered at Red Square. They were ushered into the Kremlin through the gates of the Spasskaya Tower and directed to the Kremlin Senate building, an ornate, neoclassical structure with a dome visible from Red Square. Since the Bolshevik Revolution this stood as the very symbol of the state and the seat of power for Soviet leaders: Lenin lived here, and Stalin had kept a small apartment in the building. The journalists were escorted to the presidential library on the third floor. The round hall housing the library had recently been renovated: the expensive wooden shelves held beautiful volumes, but all of them were stored behind glass, mostly brand-new encyclopedias, books on Russian history, or gifts from foreign leaders.
Suddenly Sorokina was called to a private meeting with Putin while others waited at the library. Putin spoke to Sorokina for forty minutes. Only after that did Putin proceed to the library, accompanied by Vladislav Surkov, a backroom political strategist, and Alexey Gromov, an official from the presidential administration.
Putin walked around the group of journalists, shaking hands.
Viktor Shenderovich, a famous television presenter and political satirist, was in a gloomy mood. “I didn’t like the idea of asking the president for help, as if we were his slaves. I didn’t believe it would end well,” he recalled. He already knew that the Kremlin had quietly hand-carried a proposal to NTV with three demands: stop an anticorruption investigation of Yeltsin’s family, stop criticism of the Chechen war, and remove the puppet portraying Putin on Shenderovich’s satirical television show known as Kukly, or puppets. The show had been poking fun at Russian politicians for five years by creating skits with puppet characters. It was wildly popular and had skewered Yeltsin and other politicians, but Putin disliked being mocked. Shenderovich had recently portrayed Putin as a character from German author E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Klein Zaches—an ugly dwarf who got magic powers over people.[2]
Shenderovich decided to speak first. He thought that, as a satirist, he had more freedom to speak out about uncomfortable truths. He asked whether Putin was ready to talk honestly, or would they talk on PR terms. “What PR?” asked Putin, “I don’t understand a thing about it!” And his blue eyes zeroed in on Shenderovich. Then Shenderovich asked Putin to make a call to the general prosecutor and ask why Titov, the NTV financial director, was still in prison. Putin said that as president he couldn’t interfere with the general prosecutor’s activities.
The meeting was a disaster. At the very beginning Sorokina wrote two words on a sheet of paper and handed it over to Shenderovich: “All useless.” But Shenderovich kept trying, as did his colleagues. To every question the journalists posed, Putin answered with bland formalities. He said he could not talk to the general prosecutor because the office was an independent institution in Russia. He claimed he did not appoint the general prosecutor because it was the right of the Federation Council, the upper chamber of parliament; the president could only propose. And so it went on. But the journalists knew that Putin’s answers were a far stretch from the truth. “What should one do when faced with a bald-faced lie over and over again?” Shenderovich said. “The most silent protest is to get up and leave. Maybe we should have done that, but nobody dared. He was a president, after all. And we had been sitting there for three and a half hours.” Yevgeny Kiselev believed that Putin wanted to recruit them, promising a bright future if they stopped criticizing the Kremlin. “When he understood we were not ready for this, he became hostile and turned to threats. He told me: ‘And you, Mr. Kiselev, we know everything about your hour-long phone conversations with Gusinsky.’” Kiselev asked, “Does it mean you are listening to my conversations?” Putin pretended that he didn’t hear the question.
For the next three months NTV was left twisting slowly in the wind. Then on the night of April 14 journalists were thrown out of the NTV offices located on the eighth floor of the Ostankino television building. The old NTV was over. Two days later the newspaper Segodnya was shut down, and the seventy-four people staffing Parkhomenko’s Itogi newsweekly were ejected from their offices. The largest media empire independent of the Kremlin was brought to heel.
The journalists of Media-Most fought desperately, and they fought almost alone. Others in Russia’s journalistic community did not support them. We then worked at Izvestia, and although Irina was able to write critical stories about the government pressure on Media-Most, the newspaper office was filled with a mood of indifference if not quiet pleasure at the downfall of the Media-Most empire. The NTV journalists were regarded as very professional in news, but they were also seen as arrogant. They were well paid in a field where others were not. Many Russian journalists also rejected the argument offered by NTV that the Kremlin attack was aimed at silencing the only independent television channel in the country; they thought Gusinsky had just made a bid for power and lost. They did not see the attack on Gusinsky as an attack on them or press freedom generally.
What was missing from this picture was the fact that the public began to slowly turn against journalists. During the kompromat battles of the late 1990s and the television wars between the channels, the very idea of investigative journalism was seriously compromised. A number of famous reporters who made their reputation in the early 1990s turned out to be fairly corrupt, ready to publish all kinds of stories if paid properly.[3] The profession of journalism was thrown off the pedestal it had occupied since the perestroika years in the late 1980s. Perhaps even more salient was that to many people in Russian society, journalists and the free press symbolized the liberal values that flooded in after the collapse of the Soviet Union. A large segment of society still felt embittered and betrayed by the West, especially since the Russian economic crisis of 1998, when it seemed that markets and democracy, ideas imported from the West, had produced nothing but chaos. The very ideas of journalism and the free press suffered a loss of credibility.
Journalists in traditional media were losing not just the trust of the public but also their jobs. Over seven years the authors held positions at five publications: the political department at Izvestia was dispersed, the editor of Versiya weekly was fired, Moskovskie Novosti was closed down along with two subsequent attempts of the Moskovskie Novosti team to launch a political magazine, and a political website came to nothing. We then joined Novaya Gazeta, but after two years it let us go when the management decided to reduce its coverage of the secret services. In the early and mid-2000s Moscow’s newspapers and magazines often changed hands, most of them ending up at the hands of oligarchs loyal to the Kremlin, which helped Putin dampen any hostile reporting. This trend went almost unnoticed by the public. On October 6, 2006, Anna Politkovskaya, the most famous independent investigative journalist in Russia, was killed by hired assassins in the center of Moscow. More people went to the streets to honor her in Paris than in Moscow. Those who ordered this crime were never found.
With television under the control of Putin’s government and with the newspaper industry in pro-Kremlin hands, the oligarchs now turned to the Internet. In 1999–2000 they launched the most prominent and potent of the new media in Russia: Gusinsky started NTV.ru (Newsru.com since 2002), and Berezovsky started Grani.ru. The oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky bought Gazeta.ru from Pavlovsky and relaunched it.
Meanwhile Pavlovsky’s Foundation for Effective Politics, still in Putin’s corner, enjoyed free reign from the Kremlin and launched a number of ambitious projects, including Lenta.ru and Vesti.ru, both Internet newspapers, and Strana.ru, a Russian national news service, which was presented as a new kind of media combining text, video, and audio. Strana.ru’s editor position was given to Marina Litvinovich, Pavlovsky’s deputy, who, with Artemy Lebedev, had arrived late to the meeting with Putin in December 1999.[4]
All these new media lacked in-house correspondents, and Lenta.ru and Newsru.com were just news aggregators. Gazeta.ru was the only website with a full-scale editorial office. It was also the only site staffed by print journalists; Gazeta.ru was created by reporters who had previously worked at Kommersant. But Gazeta.ru was also the most expensive website to run, while the news aggregators limited themselves to few editors whose task was to rewrite the stories published by wire agencies and newspapers as quickly as possible. Presentation and packaging took over from fact-checking.
But it was clear that a new age was dawning.
On October 23, 2002, a group of armed Chechen terrorists seized a packed theater on Dubrovka Street in Moscow. The Nord-Ost crisis lasted for three days. On Saturday, October 26, FSB special troops stormed the theater, and 130 people were killed, many of them innocent civilians poisoned by a gas containing fentanyl, a narcotic pain reliever, that special forces pumped into the theater in order to subdue the terrorists. During and after the siege the Kremlin found itself for the first time overwhelmed by hundreds of news items and electronic messages critical of the official version of events, circulated on the Internet and promoted by news aggregators.
We worked then for the weekly Versiya, and on Sunday, October 27, the day after the storming of the theater, we realized we could not wait a week for our reportage to run in the printed paper. We had a story about what a disaster the storming of the theater had been, and we needed to get it out quickly. We decided to publish it on our website, Agentura.ru, launched two years before to cover the activities of the Russian secret services.[5]
The following Friday, November 1, when Versiya was finally going to press with our print story, a group of FSB officers arrived at the editorial offices of the paper and began a search. They hoped to stop the paper from printing but were too late—the pages had already been sent off. A few computers, including the editorial server and Andrei’s computer, were seized.[6] The FSB’s raid lasted for hours, and our editor, fearing our arrest, told us to stay out of the office. We found a tiny café on Stary Arbat Street near the Versiya office. As we sat waiting, a gaggle of reporters we had worked with in the late 1990s at the crime department of Segodnya arrived. Hugs and smiles and jokes followed. Immediately they floated dozens of wild ideas on how to organize public support for us, but they were all pure fantasy. We all knew that this time was different. It was clear that the traditional print media our friends worked for were hardly in the mood to support journalists.
The stakes were high. The FSB kept up pressure on Versiya. Journalists were summoned for interrogation, including us, and we understood from the questioning that the security service was building a criminal case around a supposed disclosure of state secrets.
What was different this time, however, was the rise of the new media. A few days after the FSB had raided Versiya we went to the offices of Newsru.com, a few tiny rooms in the building occupied by Media-Most on Palashevsky Lane. We met with Lena Bereznitskaya-Bruni, an editor of Newsru.com, who had been a friend since the days when we worked at the newspaper Segodnya. Lena was outraged by the storming of the theater and promised to help. Newsru.com organized a constant stream of public pressure, reporting every interrogation, and finally succeeded in forcing the FSB to back off bringing any charges.
Meanwhile other traditional media who questioned the special forces’ performance at Nord-Ost were put under pressure. The press ministry officially warned the radio station Echo Moskvy that it could be closed down for airing interviews with the Chechen terrorists. The television channel Moskovia’s broadcasts were temporarily halted. Putin personally criticized the NTV coverage of the crisis.[7]
But the Kremlin could not catch the new media. The independent digital outlets were better designed, faster, and smarter than anyone else. This time the flow of information turned squarely against the Kremlin. Pavlovsky’s pro-Kremlin websites lost the battle for the online audience. In 2002 Pavlovsky had sold two online projects, Vesti.ru and Strana.ru, to the All-Russia State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company, a state-owned corporation that included a major television channel. If this was intended to bolster the Kremlin’s defenses with more resources, it faltered. The problem was that these outlets just appeared hapless and vapid at a time of crisis. As an attempt to spin public opinion, it failed. A few years later Strana.ru was quietly relaunched as a guidebook about Russia’s regions.
In the mid-2000s more print journalists lost their jobs. For many the Internet was the only place where it was possible to express their opinions. At the same time, online media had no resources to pay for investigative journalism and genuine revelatory reportage. So instead reporters turned into bloggers and opinion columnists, which would be less expensive. The overwhelming number of them were highly critical of Russian domestic policy, despite lacking access to information. Some enjoyed thousands of followers. Many of them also had very popular blogs on LiveJournal.com, a blogging platform. Among them, Nossik had been one of the first Russian-speaking users of LiveJournal.com; soon he was the most prominent Russian blogger. In 2006 he was appointed the chief blogging officer at SUP Media, the owner of LiveJournal.com. Within a year he had a new position in the company: “social media evangelist.”
The Kremlin was not happy with the explosion of bloggers and turned to means already proven to be effective in dealing with newspapers: having loyal oligarchs buy off the Internet platforms. The first to go was Gazeta.ru—then the only news website with a fully staffed team of reporters—purchased in 2006 by Alisher Usmanov, founder of Metalloinvest and close to the Kremlin. Early the same year Usmanov had acquired Kommersant Publishing House, including its respected business newspaper Kommersant, and Gazeta.ru went under its control. In 2008 Usmanov further expanded his media empire: Kommersant agreed to merge Gazeta.ru into SUP Media, the biggest blog service in Russia. The result was that it all ended up in the hands of an oligarch.
In May 2008 Putin turned the presidency of Russia over to Dmitry Medvedev, and Putin became prime minister. The mild-mannered Medvedev, then forty-three, who had first worked with Putin in St. Petersburg, was presented to the public as a liberal-minded politician with an interest in the Internet and technology. But he was still close to Putin. He was the same Medvedev who had been chief of Putin’s campaign staff in the Alexander House back in 2000.
One of Medvedev’s early moves was to recruit Alexey Soldatov, who had done so much to bring the Internet to Russia at the Kurchatov Institute, to become deputy minister of communications, responsible for the Internet. Alexey agreed to take the post. The joint venture of Relcom, his company, and FAPSI had come to nothing, and the company had struggled to survive for years in competition with big telecom holdings that also had their own landlines, an advantage Relcom never had. In a last desperate move the teams of Relcom and Demos tried to unite, but the attempt failed, and the national network of Relcom ceased to exist.
Andrei and Alexey Soldatov’s relationship was strained again, and Andrei learned about his father’s appointment when he got a call from a wire service correspondent. At that moment he was in the parking lot of Novaya Gazeta trying to inflate a tire on his eight-year-old car, an Opel. “Wow, Andrei, leave your old Opel—your black BMW is surely coming!” was the first mocking reaction of our amused colleagues at Novaya Gazeta.
Months after Medvedev took office, in August 2008, war broke out with Georgia. In six days the Russian army crushed the Georgian army, but the Kremlin was not happy with media coverage, especially on the Internet, where the war was frequently criticized.
At the time the biggest and the most popular search engine in the Russian-speaking world was Yandex. Every day the Russian news media struggled to get their stories placed in the top rankings of the search engine. In the late 2000s the middle class in Russia, especially educated people in the cities, lost their newspaper-reading habit in the morning and instead started using the Yandex home page as the starting point of the day and for their daily journey on the Internet. Five top news items on Yandex’s home page replaced the front pages of newspapers for millions of Russian Internet users.
In 2008 Yandex became the ninth-largest search engine in the world.[8] The company grew so quickly that the management thought of moving out of the offices on Samokatnaya Street that they had moved into just three years before. This pleasant area of Moscow was built up with red-brick factories in the late nineteenth century and maintains its character to this day. Yandex extensively renovated a three-and-a-half-story building of a former weaving mill down the road, giving it all the hallmarks of a global Internet giant headquarters: a parking lot for bicycles, a large open space inside, a reception desk held up by the letters of the Yandex logo, and an internal museum, with the very first server of the company on display.
In early September 2008, at the end of a working day, two black BMW sedans with flashing lights passed through the gates at Samokatnaya Street, past the life-sized statues of horses that had been brightly painted by children of Yandex employees, and pulled to a stop in front of the former factory.
Out of the cars climbed Surkov, Putin’s backroom strategist who was deputy chief of the presidential administration, and Konstantin Kostin, deputy head of the internal politics section of the administration.[9] Surkov and Kostin went to the second floor, to the office of Arkady Volozh, the head of Yandex. In those days Volozh and the Yandex team were preoccupied with the threat of takeover by the oligarch Usmanov. His moves mysteriously coincided with the troubles the company now faced: a new data center had not opened because of a lack of some documentation, a strange criminal case was launched, with Yandex’s CEO made defendant, and so on. Volozh was a frequent guest at the presidential administration, and he tried to make friends to counter Usmanov’s moves. The Yandex people expected Usmanov to be the main topic of the meeting. For that reason Volozh invited Elena Ivashentseva, a senior partner at Baring-Vostok, a private equity fund and the main Yandex shareholder, to be present.
Lev Gershenzon, the twenty-nine-year-old chief of the Yandex News section, was also tipped off and told to be ready to provide explanations if the visitors were to ask how Yandex used algorithms to select news for the home page of the search engine. Volozh told Gershenzon that when he had gone to see Medvedev a few days before, he had noticed on his table a few screenshots of the Yandex home page, with headlines from Georgian media. Gershenzon recalled, “I had two tasks: to show them that it was a robot, not a human, who chose the news, and for that, to show the internal interface, the mechanism. The second task was to explain the top of the rating, and to show that it was selected by algorithm, not randomly.”
Indeed, soon after the meeting started, Gershenzon was summoned to Volozh’s office. When he came to the room, he saw Volozh, with two subordinates, along with Ivashentseva, Surkov, and Kostin standing. He was introduced, but Surkov and Kostin did not introduce themselves. They shook hands, and Gershenzon rushed to the table, knocking a glass over the table. It crashed to the floor. He quickly plugged his laptop into a large, flat TV and started showing his slides.
Gershenzon, who spoke slowly and softly, had strong democratic views. In fact, he had participated in all the anti-Putin protest marches. Gershenzon was not a programmer but rather a linguist. He joined Yandex in the fall of 2005 along with a team of friends to work on a special project—to use the search engine to identify the events connected with known persons, like politicians and celebrities, and fashion it into a news stream. Soon Gershenzon became the head of the larger operation of Yandex News. He knew how it worked from the inside, and when he was summoned to the meeting with Surkov and Kostin, he was well aware what was at stake.[10]
Surkov, forty-three, was widely known as the Kremlin’s gray cardinal.[11] He had an astonishing career; he had started in the early 1990s as a bodyguard for one of the most prominent Russian oligarchs, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, then made it to the position of his top advertising and then public relations man. In 1999 he landed in the president’s administration. Under Putin, he was believed to be behind most of the attempts to transform Russia into what he called a “sovereign democracy,” a term coined by Surkov, meaning that democracy in Russia should have different rules from that of the world outside.[12] These projects included creating pro-Kremlin youth organizations who could take to the streets to counter popular demonstrations, the so-called color revolutions such as Rose in Georgia and Orange in Ukraine, both uprisings that had forcibly ejected leaders from office. Surkov also built an effective system to corral the traditional media. He had sat at Putin’s right hand during the meeting with NTV journalists seven years earlier. Kostin, thirty-eight and fat and bulky, in the early 1990s had worked briefly at Kommersant, had a brief stint in public relations work, and had then gone to Khodorkovsky’s Menatep Bank, where he met Surkov. He worked on many pro-Kremlin projects, maintained good relations with Surkov, and in June 2008 was appointed to the president’s administration as “the right hand” of Surkov.
“I briefly explained to them how news stories are selected, what factors affect the ranking, what principles are used for annotation and for headlines,” recalled Gershenson. “I showed screenshots related to the war in Georgia.” Gershenzon tried to explain why it was normal to have a couple of references to Georgian media, out of fifteen altogether.
Surkov interrupted him, pointing his finger to the headline from a liberal media outlet in the Yandex ranking, “This is our enemy,” Surkov said. “That’s what we do not need!”
Gershenzon soon left the room, and Surkov told Yandex’s leadership that the Kremlin needed Russian business success stories. He clearly tried to leave the impression they wanted to be friends, but Kostin requested access to the interface of Yandex News that had Gershenzon explained to them. When the two Kremlin officials finally left, the Yandex people gathered to talk over what had happened. “Everybody was impressed, and clearly shocked,” Gershenzon said. He tried to persuade the Yandex management to not cooperate too closely with the Kremlin. “I told them, guys, these are not our terms, we do not need to talk their language, we do not need to talk in terms of enemies and friends.”
Surkov and Kostin wanted to control not only traditional media but also what Russia’s growing Internet audience was seeing on Yandex. They wanted to define a political agenda every day and every hour. When they pressured Yandex to exclude Georgian sites from the algorithm, they wanted to control not only Russian media, traditional and online, but also the wider Russian-speaking Internet.
Yandex refused to provide access but instead decided to put greater effort into explaining how the news was chosen.
Kostin returned to Yandex once again in spring of 2009. Eventually they came to some sort of agreement. The Yandex operating model was to have relations with all media they had added to Yandex’s database of news; the outlets were called partners. They agreed to treat Kostin as a partner. What did he get? Inside Yandex Kostin was given a special name, “interested representative of a newsmaker,” and a special phone number to call in case the presidential administration had any questions about the news headlines the Yandex News algorithm selected. Gershenzon recalled, “It was clear, of course, that they were not very interested in algorithms; they were interested in one thing, that they have only what they wanted in Yandex News, and what they do not want will be removed. But we were playing this game very successfully.” Kostin called, and Gershenzon sent back explanatory letters. The reaction from Kostin was, “All your explanations are extremely unconvincing.”
In most cases these angry calls were caused by the Kremlin’s own public relations mistakes. They might present some sort of initiative they wanted to promote and request progovernment media to publish stories about it, but these media just copied the message over and over again. The Yandex algorithm immediately identified the flood of almost identical stories as duplicates and ranked the story very low.
For some time the game satisfied the Kremlin. Yandex withstood the pressure and did not give in.
On September 6, 2008, Medvedev changed the structure of the Interior Ministry, which acts as a national police force. The department dedicated to fighting organized crime and terrorism was disbanded and a new department established, charged with countering extremism. Similar changes were made through all regional departments. With a new global financial crisis hitting Russia, the authorities feared popular uprising. The new department and the FSB launched a massive program to monitor any kind of civil activity, including surveillance of religious organizations, political parties not in parliament, and even informal youth groups. Most of the effort was invested in building huge databases on would-be troublemakers and developing and installing systems to control movements on all kinds of transport. The intention was to have technologies and logistics that could be used to prevent activists from reaching the demonstration. The Interior Ministry, the FSB, and local authorities started to buy advanced surveillance technologies, ranging from drones to closed-circuit television cameras to face recognition systems, all installed on railway stations and the Moscow Metro.[13]
Simultaneously the Kremlin was desperately searching for new methods to deal with the ever-growing blogging community and independent websites. For some years liberal bloggers had complained of trolls. In Internet slang, a troll means a person who sows discord by posting inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community—a newsgroup, forum, chat room, or blog—with the deliberate intent of provoking readers into an emotional response or otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion. It is possible to post anonymous posts on LiveJournal.com, an option the Russian “trolls” exploited to the fullest. Meanwhile liberal media websites suffered a series of attacks known as distributed denial of service, or DDOS, which were carried out by “hacker patriots,” who also attacked government agencies in Estonia, Georgia, and Lithuania. The DDOS is a sort of attack in which a targeted site receives so many requests for access that it simply shuts down. It is a simple, cheap, and effective way to disrupt a website, at least temporarily.
But who were these hacker patriots? During the 2000s the Kremlin had created large pro-Kremlin youth organizations, which mostly consisted of youth recruited in Russia’s regions. Two of the most important organizations were Nashi (“Ours”), the oldest movement, built up under direct guidance of Surkov, and Molodaya Gvardiya (“Young Guard”), the youth wing of the pro-Kremlin political party United Russia. It was hardly surprising that activists of both movements were caught trolling and launching DDOS attacks against the Kremlin’s opponents.[14] But for a while the tactics helped maintain a façade of plausible deniability for the Kremlin.
In May 2009 a Kremlin “school of bloggers” was launched, headed by an associate of Pavlovsky.[15] The school reportedly consisted of eighty people from all over Russia, each working with two or three activists, and their graduates were supposed to organize information campaigns online. The Kremlin also tried co-opting some prominent bloggers and promised them access to high-ranking officials.
Then, on August 17, 2009, the Sayano-Shushenskaya Station on the Yenisei River in Siberia, the largest hydroelectric plant in Russia, suffered an accident that caused flooding of the engine and turbine rooms and a transformer explosion, killing seventy-four people. The accident was caused by human error, and the media coverage of the catastrophe worried the Kremlin. In response, they tested new media approach: A journalist from Interfax, a straightforward news agency, was expelled from the area of the Sayano-Shushenskaya Station for his critical reporting. Instead, the popular blogger, Rustem Adagamov, also known as drugoi, or “another,” who headed the multimedia department of SUP, the company that owned LiveJournal, was invited to report on the relief operation. So he did, reporting favorably for the authorities. In October Adagamov was invited to join the Kremlin press pool, an elite group given special access to the president who are also sympathetic journalists, and he accepted. The new approach showed that the Kremlin could substitute hard-hitting news coverage with friendly bloggers.
Two developments changed the landscape on the Russian Internet in 2010. In April a new cable television channel called TV Dozhd, or Rain, was launched. The channel’s owner and main driving force was Natalia Sindeeva. An energetic woman who always greeted people with a big smile, Sindeeva had no television experience. But she had launched a very successful radio entertainment station, Serebryany Dozhd (Silver Rain), in the 1990s. It had taken Sindeeva three years to launch TV Dozhd, and the idea slowly expanded so that by the spring of 2010 she was leading a small media empire, consisting of the news website Slon.ru, launched in May 2009, and a just-acquired city magazine, Bolshoi Gorod, or Big City. All of Moscow’s journalists were guessing who underwrote Sindeeva’s projects, though the official version was that they were funded by her husband, a banker, Alexander Vinokurov.
Sindeeva, very ambitious, first wanted to rent a space for her channel in one of the soaring towers of Moscow city, a skyscraper financial district still developing. The idea was dropped because of the economic crisis of 2008. She desperately needed to find space for a headquarters and one day took a call from friends. “They told me, look, there are premises which could be rented for 100 dollars for a square meter,” she recalled. It was the former Red October chocolate factory, a large red-brick complex built in the late nineteenth century on an island in the Moscow River, with a view of the Kremlin. Sindeeva went to look at it; the large space, still smelling of chocolate, was almost empty. Sindeeva found the owner, but the talks took months, and then more months were spent on renovation. When finally TV Dozhd opened on the fifth floor of the building, Red October had already become a very fashionable place in Moscow, the epicenter of the hipster movement, with dozens of cafés and art studios occupying other floors and premises.
At first TV Dozhd was not meant to have much presence on the Internet or be a political challenge to the authorities. “In the beginning we didn’t think of a news channel,” said Sindeeva. “We thought of television with hosts as authors, we thought of the channel that should get the audience back to intelligent content. After all, I knew that a news channel was the most expensive thing to launch. And personally I was not interested in news.”
The full logo of the channel was displayed in English: “TV Rain: The Optimistic Channel.” And indeed, optimistic it was—the main color was pink, the channel’s logo was pink, and the office of Sindeeva in the corner of the large, open space on the fifth floor of Red October was full of devices in pink—even her chair and the refrigerator were pink. What’s more, even though Moscow was full of disenchanted TV journalists who had lost their jobs in the 2000s, Sindeeva didn’t want them; her presenters had no prior experience on television. She wanted a fresh, positive perspective.
The channel was officially launched in April 2010, but it was not admitted to the cable television world right away, as she had planned. “When we went on air on April 27,” Sindeeva recalled, “we were immediately turned off by cable operators, not because we did something, but as a preventive measure. Surkov simply didn’t want an independent channel and, at a meeting with the owners of the two biggest cable operators, he voiced his opinion.”[16]
She turned to the website of Slon.ru, a part of her nascent media empire, and on the home page of the site appeared a window, displaying the broadcasts of TV Dozhd. Quickly TV Dozhd became very popular. Intelligent speech and faces were missed so badly on television that all of a sudden Moscow’s middle classes tuned in to the new channel. In the summer Sindeeva realized that her audience wanted not only intelligent faces but political news as well.
Now she needed an editor-in-chief for the channel. As a temporary measure, she asked an editor from Slon.ru to sit in and create a news team. In September Dozhd was included in the package of the NTV Plus satellite pay-TV platform. It was a way to let TV Dozhd in Moscow homes and not just on the Internet.
To lead the news team Sindeeva selected a journalist from Russian Newsweek, which had just ceased operating. Mikhail Zygar, twenty-nine years old, had spent nearly a decade at the foreign desk of Kommersant. “I saw my task very clearly from the beginning,” Zygar remembered. “I was there since June, and, well, I found here twenty-three-year-old journalists, and a twenty-five-year-old journalist was considered very experienced.”[17] Sindeeva never defined the task for Zygar; they just decided they could work together.
With that, Russia again had a private, independent television channel.
And the digital wave was unfolding ever faster. In 2010 Alexey Navalny, a thirty-four-year-old lawyer, became the most popular Russian blogger with a clear political agenda. Over the previous decade Navalny tried different roads to prominence. He joined the democratic and socialist party Yabloko, from which he was expelled for his xenophobic views.[18] In 2007 he founded a nationalistic movement, Narod, or People. He even took part in the Russian March, an anti-immigrants rally in Moscow, calling for Russia to separate from the North Caucasus. He didn’t gain popularity.
He found his magic tool in the spring of 2008 when he bought stocks of the biggest oil and gas companies like Rosneft, Gazprom, and the oil transport monopoly Transneft, all of which were partially owned by the state. He spent over 300,000 rubles, or about $10,000, for all the shares. He gained the right to receive information about the companies’ activity and then sue their leadership for corruption. “My goal is to include the question of this investigation into the political agenda of the country,” Navalny declared in a blog post about Transneft on November 17, 2010.[19]
That month Navalny posted on his blog his investigation of corruption in Transneft during the construction of a pipeline from Eastern Siberia to the Pacific Ocean. He found that 120 billion rubles had disappeared, and he then posted online scans of documents he had obtained. The next day he woke up the most popular muckraker in Russia. In the country where traditional media were distrusted and investigative journalism was compromised, he soon earned a reputation as a fearless fighter of corruption. “My blog exists only because there is a censorship in media,” said Navalny.[20] His popularity among the middle classes in big Russian cities, fed up with corruption, rocketed. TV Dozhd reported his every move.
Meanwhile the authorities were still foundering in the new digital era. Medvedev made a show of being in tune with the age by visiting Silicon Valley in the United States. He opened a Twitter account—@kremlinrussia—during his visit to Twitter headquarters and ordered government ministries to launch Twitter accounts as well. Even the FSB followed orders and launched an account, but only for a few months. Medvedev also started a high-tech incubator project known as Skolkovo, an attempt to create a Russian version of Silicon Valley. But it was very late to the game, and rather than springing up from innovation, it was directed from the top down.
Medvedev wanted to make Russia technically advanced but not necessarily more democratic. He was eager to follow Singapore’s authoritarian leader, Lee Kuan Yew, who was put on the board of Skolkovo, chaired by Medvedev. When Medvedev visited Singapore in 2009, the bureaucracy’s effectiveness impressed him; he registered a company online, and it took just a few minutes. Medvedev cited Singapore as the model Russia must follow.[21]
Navalny was equally fond of Lee Kuan Yew, praised his effectiveness in fighting corruption, and said, “I would forgive many things to Putin, if he were a Russian Lee Kuan Yew.”[22]
Authoritarian leaders don’t tolerate criticism from outside and zealously protect their national sovereignty. Medvedev shared this approach, and Shchegolev, his minister of communications, began to promote the idea of Russia’s “national sovereignty” on the Internet. Soldatov helped acquire for Russia the Cyrillic domain .рф from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, in charge of managing domain names worldwide. But he left the government in November 2010, unwilling to support other ideas being debated, such as the development of a national computer operating system or a national search engine that would stand apart from the wider world of the Internet, ideas that were being frequently discussed in the corridors of power.
The mass protests that broke out in the Middle East in early 2011, known as the Arab Spring, struck Moscow as a threat to the Kremlin too. On January 14 the president of Tunisia, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, fled to Saudi Arabia after twenty-three years in power. On February 11, following waves of huge demonstrations, President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt resigned after twenty-nine years in office. Ten days later, on February 22, the Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, flew to Vladikavkaz, the capital of North Ossetia, a republic in the North Caucasus. The visit was not announced in advance. At the airport he was met by FSB director Alexander Bortnikov, and they went together to an urgently convened meeting of the National Antiterrorism Committee, which consisted of leaders of the security and law enforcement agencies. In the past Bortnikov had always chaired committee meetings, but this time Medvedev personally took the chair at the head of the table, with Bortnikov on his right. His face was gloomy; he spoke very slowly, emphasizing each word. He started by describing the situation in the North Caucasus and then turned to the Middle East. “Look at the current situation in the Middle East and the Arab world. It is extremely difficult and great problems still lie ahead,” he said. “We must face the truth. That scenario was harbored for us, and now attempts to implement it are even more likely. In any case, this plot will not work.” He was suggesting that a Western conspiracy was afoot, aimed at instigating protests to overthrow the Russian regime.[1]
Putin, then prime minister, was even more emotional. On March 21 he visited a Russian ballistic missile factory, and one of the workers asked him about Western airstrikes aimed at toppling Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi. Putin retorted that it was just another example of the United States resorting to armed force. He then compared the Western air strikes to a medieval crusade, a comment with deep echoes in Russia’s historical memory: one of the early crusades, in the thirteenth century, was directed at Russia. Although it was repelled, the mention of crusades for many Russians evokes fear of being invaded by Western hostile forces.[2]
Putin had long harbored a suspicion that the United States was working on technology that would allow it to topple political regimes on the soil of the former Soviet Union. The “color revolutions” of the early part of the decade in Georgia and Ukraine were seen in the Kremlin as the direct result of an American effort to interfere with regimes closely allied with Moscow. Putin’s fear was uncomplicated: a revolution needs crowds, and authoritarian regimes had often successfully suppressed traditional means of mobilizing people, like trade unions and opposition parties. But the new method championed by the United States would bring to the streets youth movements organized from scratch. To counter this threat, the Kremlin attempted to straitjacket any political opposition groups that might use street demonstrations or occupy government buildings in protest. The Kremlin also launched pro-Putin youth movements, whose role was to fill the streets in case of a crisis.
Beyond this, the Kremlin also saw the Arab Spring as another threatening step toward American hegemony. It was not lost on Putin and his people that the events in Tunisia and Egypt were widely characterized as Facebook and Twitter revolutions. Putin and his entourage became worried that this time the United States had found a truly magic tool that could bring people to the streets without any organizing structure: the Internet. Anxious political masters in Moscow took careful note of a speech by Alec Ross, adviser for innovation to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, on June 22 in London, in which he declared that the “Che Guevara of the twenty-first century is the network.”[3] Two of his points were particularly threatening to the Kremlin: the Internet acted as an accelerant for the Arab Spring, and the Internet facilitated leaderless movements. Ross said that “dictatorships are now more vulnerable than they have ever been before, in part—but not entirely—because of the devolution of power from the nation state to the individual.” For people with a KGB mindset, this was a serious warning that the security services could easily miss the right moment and fail to identify the ringleaders, as there were no leaders of protests in the digital revolution and a crisis could break out swiftly. Soon social network technology was made a priority target for the secret services, primarily the FSB. But it was strange new territory they did not fully understand.
Yuri Sinodov, thirty years old, had been a spacecraft engineer by training but made his career in the new world of digital media. He cofounded Roem.ru, a website specializing in web enterprises and social networks. By 2011 the site became the most insightful source in Russia on social networks and Internet companies. Sinodov was the owner and editor-in-chief of the site.[4]
On April 28, 2011, Sinodov received a phone call from the FSB in which an officer from the FSB’s Information Security Center asked him to disclose the identity of a journalist who worked for him and had written a posting on the popular social media site, Odnoklassniki, or Classmates, about an obscure legal battle involving a private company. The FSB officer said that all he wanted was the name of the journalist, but Sinodov didn’t give it up. Instead, he asked the FSB for official confirmation that they had made the request. He soon received it in the form of an e-mail from “cybercrime@fsb.ru” that arrived with the FSB crest and was signed by Sergei Mikhailov, the head of one of the sections of the Information Security Center.[5] Five years later, in the aftermath of the DNC hacking scandal in December 2016, the FSB arrested Mikhailov. He was accused of spying for the Americans and thrown into Lefortovo, the famous KGB prison.
Sinodov then contacted the Directorate of Internal Security of the FSB, asking them whether this interest in his journalists was legal. The reply he received came again from the Information Security Center, which made the original request, this time signed by a first deputy director, establishing that the request was legitimate and was purely for reference. Sinodov still did not reveal the name. He next asked the General Prosecutor’s Office, which is separate from the FSB, whether the request was legitimate. Now the response was different: the procedure in question breached a law titled “On Operative-search Activity,” the Prosecutor General’s Office said, and the Directorate of the Information Security Center had been informed that it was not permitted to make such requests.
Sinodov immediately published his correspondence with the FSB and the General Prosecutor’s Office on his website. “I thought I had no right to publish FSB letters without the response from the Prosecutor’s Office, and now I’ve got it,” Sinodov recalled thinking at the time.
Sinodov believed that the FSB’s interest in his employee may have been an example of private firms using FSB officers to investigate leaks of confidential business information. This kind of working on the side—essentially corrupt moonlighting—was known to happen. “I think the company referred to in the post was trying to trace leaks of unofficial information about it,” Sinodov said. “The FSB itself has no interest in this. It is not a question of any national significance; it’s the company’s problem.”
But Sinodov’s story exposed something much more important than moonlighting. The FSB is divided into two large parts. The operations departments consist of counterintelligence, intelligence, counterterrorism, and other activity, whereas the support side of the organization includes such things as creating and providing special technical equipment and meeting other material needs. It was long believed that the Information Security Center belonged to the second part, but the FSB letters Sinodov published showed that the center was situated in the first, in the operations part, which is the most proactive, involved not only in the technical protection of computer networks but also in active operational surveillance, clandestine activity, and intelligence collection on the Internet. From this discovery it was clear who inside the FSB was working on social networks.
On the corner of Lubyanka Square and Myasnitsky Street is a blockish, looming structure that was once the KGB’s Computation Center, now housing the FSB Information Security Center. The center was initially responsible for protecting computer networks and tracking down hackers, but it had been greatly expanded. The duties now went beyond just protecting the government’s networks but also encompassed monitoring the Internet and the media closely. To do this the center used special analytical search software systems developed by Russian programmers.[6] One of the software systems was “Semantic Archive,” used by the security services and Ministry of the Interior to monitor open sources and the Internet, including the blogosphere and social networks.[7]
In 2011 the Semantic Archive team developed a special module for forums and blogs. It looked like a simple table on a screen with space to add names of specific blogs. When a user added the names, the system searched a wide swath of sources—not only the Internet but also such things as Russian law enforcement databases, court records, corporate records, blogs, and social networks—producing a report identifying links and connections, such as whether certain people went to the same school or were partners in a project, and sifting other places and events to tie them together.
The Semantic Archive engineers acknowledged there were drawbacks. Only a few dozen officers could use the module at a time. It was not only Semantic Archive that suffered from this problem; a lack of computing capacity crimped the security services from using these systems more widely. The size of the software packages, usually designed to suit a single department of about twenty- to twenty-five people, explains why the FSB and Interior Ministry bought dozens of different systems from different companies. Moreover, Russian programmers had not been able to overcome other problems. First, the monitoring systems were developed for searching structured information, such as databases, and only afterward adapted, some more successfully than others, for semantic analysis of the Internet, in which information can be more free-flowing. Second, the systems were designed to work with open sources and were technically incapable of monitoring closed accounts on Facebook or Twitter, so they could not be used to identify users and authors of posts on Facebook and elsewhere. Yet that was information the security services wanted. For that the FSB had to pick up a phone and call Sinodov.
As the planned presidential election in 2012 drew closer, both Putin and Medvedev were reluctant to say which of them would run. Both hesitated, and hesitated again. Time worked in Medvedev’s favor because Putin was losing popularity among bureaucrats and the elites. Sources inside the security services told us that even the FSB’s loyalty to Putin begun to waver as a group of generals attempted to contact Medvedev.
The reason was not political but generational. By 2011 the Russian bureaucracy at all levels was chock-full of Putin’s people—appointed in the early 2000s—who clogged channels of promotion. Putin’s friends and appointees occupied jobs in government, the news media, and state-controlled corporations. There was no upward mobility and no hope for any among a younger generation. The crisis hit even the security services, where all senior positions were occupied by those Putin selected from among people he personally knew from his time in the FSB in the 1990s. Tensions and mistrust between senior and midlevel officers caused a paralysis of leadership, and the friction between the different generations engendered passivity among midranking officers.
Medvedev’s inner circle exploited this frustration. In December 2010 Medvedev signed a law that stipulated a retirement age of sixty instead of sixty-five for military and other state jobs. Many in Moscow wanted to believe it was a sign that Medvedev wanted to get rid of the old guard, Putin’s generation. In the spring of 2011 every move by Medvedev, every media appearance, was closely examined for signs of whether it meant he would venture to challenge Putin.
In these months Natalia Sindeeva, the owner of TV Dozhd, was desperately trying to get her channel on cable distribution networks. Finally her friends in the television industry told her that the only thing that might help the channel was to put Medvedev on the air.
The opportunity presented itself in mid-April. It was a difficult time for Sindeeva. She had just killed a short, critical poem about Medvedev that had been written for a very popular satire show on the channel Citizen Poet that often wickedly lampooned politicians, just as Kukly had in earlier years. Sindeeva had pulled the piece on grounds that it insulted the president personally. The authors of the show left the channel in protest, and Sindeeva came under a storm of criticism from liberal circles for imposing direct censorship.
Then, one day in mid-April, technicians from Digital October, a mix of digital startups, new enterprise incubators, and a conference center, which occupied space at the former chocolate factory on the other side of the wall from TV Dozhd, came to Sindeeva’s producers and asked for help. In a week they planned to host a closed meeting of a presidential council on modernization and innovation, to be chaired by Medvedev. Digital October had no cameras to record the event and asked TV Dozhd to lease them some cameras for the meeting. When Sindeeva learned about it, she at once sent an e-mail to Natalia Timakova, a spokeswoman for Medvedev. She had known Timakova for years and addressed her informally. “Natasha, we need Medvedev to come to our channel!” she wrote. Then she listed her arguments: the channel was all about innovation and modernization, the core of Medvedev’s political agenda.[8]
Timakova responded the same day. She wrote that Medvedev would come, adding, “You will have ten minutes.” In two days the presidential bodyguards sent officers over to check out the premises, a signal to Sindeeva it was for real. It is not entirely clear what prompted Medvedev to accept the offer—the channel’s reputation or the flare-up over Sindeeva’s decision to kill the piece critical of Medvedev.
On the morning of April 25, the day of Medvedev’s planned visit to TV Dozhd, Sindeeva pondered how to dress for it. She had never met Medvedev before and worried she would look much taller than him—Medvedev was quite short—so she abandoned formality and high heels. Instead, she chose blue jeans with holes, a white shirt, and flats.
The door from the Digital October to the premises of TV Dozhd led to the kitchen, then a long corridor, and a large open space, with the brick walls of the old factory exposed under high ceilings. In the kitchen hung a big portrait of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the Russian oil tycoon who had been imprisoned during Putin’s first term. Timakova arrived and walked with Sindeeva along the short route through the kitchen to be taken later by Medvedev. She saw the portrait and turned to Sindeeva, “Is it correct that you want to meet Medvedev in this outfit and you have no intention to remove the portrait of Khodorkovsky?” Sindeeva made no apologies for the jeans and said, “Look, if you want us to remove the portrait, we can do that, but it would be very odd as it has been here for a long time.” Timakova said nothing, and the portrait stayed on the wall.
Finally Medvedev walked in, Timakova introduced Sindeeva, and then Medvedev saw the portrait. He smiled and said, “Well, it seems I found myself in the right place.” Sindeeva thought it was refreshingly informal. Medvedev charmed Sindeeva, and she showed Medvedev all the offices of the channel, introduced her journalists, and had Medvedev sit at the news anchor desk. At the head of the desk was the editor, Mikhail Zygar, with his co-anchor, four other journalists, and Sindeeva. All the other TV Dozhd personnel gathered behind to listen to the president. Medvedev seemed relaxed and spoke at length of the future of Internet technologies and Internet television. When Zygar asked whether he was going to run for president, Medvedev didn’t answer; instead, he laughed and spoke of his plans to teach at the university after his presidential term ended.
Instead of ten minutes, the visit lasted forty-five and was broadcast live.[9] “We were so charmed and inspired by him,” Sindeeva recalled. “We all liked him,” said Mikhail Zygar.[10] When he left, TV Dozhd’s employees and journalists applauded. “It was clear—he is a normal guy!” said Sindeeva. After the visit she wrote to Timakova, “Could you pass on from us some sort of message—let him believe in himself. Normal people will support him.” The visit changed things dramatically for the channel: officials and politicians started accepting invitations to appear on air, and the channel was included in cable television distribution packages, making it available to millions of people across Russia.
Medvedev was presented as a symbol of the new economy, or “modernization”—the economy of computer and information technologies. His most widely known personal initiative was the launching of the Skolkovo technopark eleven miles west of Moscow, a place to foster new start-ups and advanced information technology projects, modeled after Silicon Valley and funded by government contracts. Medvedev had visited Silicon Valley and Stanford University, wearing jeans and using his iPad. The Russian middle classes greeted Medvedev’s project as a welcome sign that he was committed to a new economy to compete with the old commodities industries, which were permeated by corruption.
Medvedev’s time also saw a flowering of initiative and creativity in Moscow, especially in public spaces. Modern art galleries and critics were courted by the Moscow city authorities and invited to realize their dreams in parks and old Soviet factories, which were being turned into modern exhibition centers. City authorities renovated Gorky Park. For twenty years the park looked like an out-of-time symbol of Soviet style, shabby and full of abandoned old attractions, but soon it was turned into a Russian Hyde Park. People crowded into European-style cafés, free WiFi was available throughout the park, and no chaise lounge remained empty. The middle class spread out in Moscow; they rode fancy bicycles, enjoyed the proliferation of free WiFi networks, marveled at modern, Westernized fonts on public signs, and everywhere there were IKEA chairs in parks and public areas.
The people hanging around the former chocolate factory, a new hipster mecca, clearly placed a bet on Medvedev. But his manners and interest in new technologies, so charming for Sindeeva and the journalists of TV Dozhd, didn’t make him more of a democrat. If he dared to make a bid for power, as Sindeeva urged in her e-mail to Timakova, it would not produce an open challenge to Putin in a democratic election; rather, it would mean using turf-war methods to outsmart Putin and force him to quit. For a while the Red October generation turned a blind eye to Medvedev’s rhetoric about the Arab Spring, his background, his initiatives in fighting extremism that effectively silenced dissent in the country, because he was their “normal guy,” the guy who could get rid of Putin.
On August 1 Putin visited a camp on Seliger Lake where his pro-Kremlin youth movement assembled. Inevitably he was asked about his plans for elections, and he didn’t respond. Nobody understood why Putin and Medvedev could not decide who would run for president. Both teams tried to push their candidates toward announcing, and Pavlovsky, who had once been a Putin spin doctor, said that “silence of the president and prime minister costs the country dearly.”[11]
But still they hesitated.
On Saturday, September 24, 2011, there was a stir in the seats at Luzhniki, Moscow’s vast sports arena, which was filled with members of the establishment, the people of Putin’s era, as Putin walked to the podium. Spread out in front of him was a sea of government officials and bureaucrats, famous sportsmen and celebrities, all attending the second day of a party congress for United Russia, Putin’s party and the dominant force in parliament and the corridors of power. As the foot soldiers in the party of power looked on from the stadium to a stage decorated with a bear and the Russian flag, a question lingered: Would Medvedev run for president again? Or was he just a puppet, a temporary stand-in for Putin? The Kremlin functioned in such an opaque manner that no one was really sure.
Putin took the stage with a swagger of self-confidence. He leaned on the podium, offered a few pleasantries, then declared that he and Medvedev had settled things among themselves years ago. He spoke slowly and seriously. Putin said that people had wanted him to lead the party ticket in the coming elections for parliament and president, but perhaps it was best to leave that to the current president, Medvedev.
Then Medvedev took the stage. After a long, detailed policy speech, he finally came around to what everyone was waiting for: he was in fact endorsing Putin for a return to the presidency, that he was not going to run again.
The applause from the party people was long and enthusiastic. The real power was coming home to the Kremlin—again.
One of Medvedev’s close advisers, Arkady Dvorkovich, was watching on television. He let everyone know of his disappointment on Twitter. “Well, nothing to be happy about,” he wrote.
The moment was the first tremor in what would become a wave of discontent in Russia. The boisterous democracy of Yeltsin’s era had all but died by this point. The Putin party, United Russia, was gray and unremarkable, without any serious ideology other than loyalty, made up of legions of bureaucrats, politicians, and those who depended on them. But unquestionably United Russia was boss. It had no serious competition for power.
On the day of the party congress Zygar, the editor of TV Dozhd, was in the city of Perm attending a theater premiere.[12] When the Moscow office called with the news that Putin was returning, he was sitting with his wife at a café. It was already cold and snowy in Perm in the Ural Mountains, 725 miles east of Moscow. Zygar went out on the street. In shirt-sleeves in the cold, he made round after round of calls on his cell phone to his producers, journalists, technical personnel, then to the anchor and the chief executive of the channel, Sindeeva. It took almost two hours. His first instinct was to react professionally, to cover the news and only later to think about his personal feelings of melancholy.
At 11:21 p.m., broadcasting from Moscow, TV Dozhd launched a special edition of their show Here and Now. The show was aired under the heading “The Third Term: The Next Twelve Years with Vladimir Putin,” and it opened with the words that the “castling” was over—a chess reference to a special move, allowed only once in a game by each player, in which the king is transferred from his original square to another. The announcer said ominously, “Putin returns to the presidency.” The guests on the show talked about illusions they held that Medvedev might have remained and how they lost these illusions. The mood at the studio was gloomy.
Elsewhere in Moscow emotions poured out on social media, a torrent of surprise and disappointment. “Well, the first twelve years went by fast,” wrote Yuri Saprykin, editor-in-chief of the magazine Rambler-Afisha. When his friend Svetlana Romanova pointed out that Putin could serve as president until 2024 and she would be Yuri’s age by then, he replied, “Svetlana, some spent all their lives under Ivan the Terrible, or under Stalin, twenty-nine years,” then added, “those who survived.”
Much of the disappointment was about symbols. The sense of loss was not about Medvedev personally—after all, he was part of Putin’s machine. But many felt they had lost a chance to exit the past toward something new and promising. There was also a vague feeling of being insulted, that it was wrong in a democracy for two guys to decide who would be in power, to have worked it all out in advance, as Putin had implied. Wasn’t it rather condescending of Medvedev and Putin to just declare who would be the next president of Russia? Weren’t the voters supposed to have a say?
On the same day Boris Nemtsov, a longtime leader of the opposition to Putin who had earlier been a deputy prime minister under Yeltsin, held a party congress in Moscow. It was a small party of three well-known politicians, and they were all critical of Putin. The congress was convened to decide what line the party should take at the upcoming parliamentary elections. Nemtsov heard of the news of Putin’s announcement when he was at the congress, and he was furious. “The form is mocking,” he declared of the Putin-Medvedev job swap. “The Russian people were just told that these two—whether Dolce and Gabbana, whether Socrates and Spinoza—thought it would be like that, period. In principle, it’s all about the arrogance and humiliation!” He claimed that Putin’s decision was the worst scenario for Russia.[13] Nemtsov was under constant pressure, and surveillance. In fact, a video had just recently been posted on YouTube of a meeting he held in a Washington, DC, coffee shop with an American rights activist and a Russian environmentalist. The video had been recorded just a few weeks earlier—and its appearance was an ominous signal that he was being watched, even on US soil.[14]
On September 25 a rally of the still-small political opposition to Putin was scheduled at Pushkin Square in the center of Moscow; it had been approved before Putin and Medvedev’s announcement. For five years the authors had attended almost all of these small rallies by the opposition in the city. Once again, on this day it seemed that we already knew all the participants. Only a few hundred people came. The leaders of the opposition sensed the mood of helplessness we all shared. Ilya Yashin, a twenty-nine-year-old opposition activist, declared somewhat desperately to the crowd, “Yes, there are very few of us. But yesterday the last romantics lost their illusions about the thaw, liberalization, or democratization, modernization…. Many people today are starting to think about how to leave the country. People are counting how old they will be in twelve years. People don’t want to spend their life under Putin. But I ask you, and your relatives and friends, not to leave our country. We should not give it to bastards!”
One of the few individuals who was not afraid to go public with criticism was Alexey Navalny, the blogger who had been trying to expose corruption in Russia and had gained a wide following, not the least for his courage. Navalny was blunt, posting on his blog evidence of all kinds of crooked and dubious deals. He called Putin’s party the “party of crooks and thieves.” The words went viral.
The scheduled December 4, 2011, parliamentary elections were approaching, and Putin’s United Russia Party was poised, once again, to take the lion’s share of seats. But something unexpected happened in November as the elections drew near. The progressive, urban intelligentsia, who had studiously kept out of politics for a decade, was angry about Medvedev being dumped and began to express disgust with the party of crooks and thieves. They knew there was no way the party could win the elections fairly. This impulse gave rise to a dozen or so online groups devoted to monitoring the December 4 elections to make sure they were fair and legitimate. These groups included Grazhdanin Nabludatel, or the Citizen Observer; RosVybori, or Russian Elections; Liga Nabludatelei, or League of Observers; and others. In Moscow alone eleven thousand people volunteered to be observers in parliamentary elections.
The loss of Medvedev was a spark, and more sparks followed. In earlier years the middle class had quietly accepted a broad trade-off: Putin brought prosperity, and the public remained passive and didn’t participate in politics. This began to shatter. Now the urban middle class was angry. However, they lacked experience and coordination; they needed someone to turn their anger into a national campaign for fair elections.
They found this person in thirty-year-old Grigory Melkonyants, a short, mercurial man who looked as Armenian as his name. A committed, restless workaholic who spoke a thousand words a minute, Melkonyants was deputy director of Golos, the nation’s only independent election watchdog organization.
Melkonyants had been waiting for this moment for years. He had been observing Russian parliamentary elections since 2003, patiently gathering and analyzing data about voting. He understood how the system worked and how to identify fraud. In the presidential election of 2004, which Putin won handily, he had arranged a special phone hotline to gather information about fraud from polling stations across Russia. Then, in the spring and summer of 2011, Golos upgraded the system. Most significantly, he created an interactive digital map to mark all questionable activity and violations in campaigns and during elections. All the data would be in one place and could easily be posted by volunteers. Melkonyants also decided to program a unique web platform to display and visualize the data rather than use an already-available commercial product. In the summer of 2011, when the map project was ready to go online, one of the largest websites in Russia, Gazeta.ru, offered to cooperate and put the map on their website, where millions of people could see the results. It first went up in September 2011.
The authorities noticed the map right away, and they were not happy. Realizing it was a simple tool that could make fraud at polling stations all too visible, they attempted to create their own replica of the map, but no one trusted their version. The pro-Kremlin hacktivists also tried to compromise the Golos map by feeding it false information. The attempt was rudimentary, however, taking existing reports of improper activity and just changing the name of the party and resubmitting it—so crude that Melkonyants caught it right away. Then, on the eve of the December 4 election Gazeta.ru came under pressure and took the map’s banner down from its website, but several other news organizations lent a hand to keep it visible, including TV Dozhd. The map remained up for millions of people to see.[15]
But the Kremlin still had a few tricks to play. The night before the parliamentary elections, at twenty minutes past midnight on December 3, Lilia Shibanova, the head of Golos, landed at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport on her way home from Warsaw. Her mood was grim. The previous day a court charged Golos with violating Article 5.5 of the Administrative Code, which forbids publishing voter polls less than five days before elections. Just a few hours earlier, as she was en route to the Warsaw airport, the NTV television channel, now a pro-Kremlin outlet, aired a program attacking Golos.
She went through passport control, and everything seemed normal. At Customs she selected the green corridor, with nothing to declare, and suddenly customs officials waved her into their room. They thoroughly searched her luggage and then announced that her laptop was to be confiscated for a search because there could be some sort of illegal software. Outraged, Shibanova started to make calls, and customs officials changed their explanation, telling her they were seizing her laptop “for collection of operative information.” Shibanova refused to give up the laptop without her lawyer present and spent the night in Sheremetyevo. The reason for this spectacle was clear to her and her people. Her deputy Grigory Melkonyants posted on his Facebook page:
I really hope that everything will be ok with Lilia Shibanova, she is at the airport (Sheremetyevo, F). Personal inspection, seizure of computer stuff. The task is clear, to divert attention from December 4.
Shibanova was able to leave the airport around midday the next day and was forced to leave her laptop with Customs.
Despite a cyber attack on December 4 intended to disrupt the project, the Golos map displayed massive fraud in the parliamentary election.
Ilya Azar saw it at firsthand. Working as a correspondent for the news website, Lenta.ru, he decided to go undercover in hopes of exposing the people engaging in election fraud by a method known as “the carousel”: the fraudsters would venture from polling station to polling station, stuffing the boxes for United Russia, Putin’s party. Forty people in Azar’s group were each given 10 ballots, already marked for United Russia, for each polling station, as well as a false identity document giving them the right to vote. They would then visit polling stations, show a simple tram ticket at each, which was enough to be given one ballot paper, fill that out, and then add the ten additional papers they had brought, stuffing about 3,080 ballots for United Russia by evening. Azar gained access to the group by a source he knew who was a courier in a small Moscow company. Azar was promised 1,000 rubles, or about $30, to take part.
When he witnessed the fraud at the first polling station, Azar blew the whistle, and police detained the fraudsters. He then posted a story to his website entitled “Carousel Is Broken,” and the whole scam fell apart.[16]
Azar’s story immediately went viral in Russia and caused a sensation. The revelation of such blatant fraud incensed the thousands of election observers who had volunteered, galvanized by their disgust over the dumping of Medvedev. Now they were really furious. At the same time, reports of fraud in the election poured in from most of the regions. Golos published seven thousand reports of infringements at polling stations across the country. The anger reached a crescendo when Russia 24, a state television channel, aired election results from the Rostov region in southern Russia. As expected, United Russia was in first place with 58.99 percent of the vote. The Russian Communists, who were quiet allies of Putin, got 32.96 percent. Then each of the other parties picked up a small piece of the pie as well, and when all the votes were tallied up, the sum was astonishing: 146 percent!
The day after the elections, December 5, anger boiled over into the streets. People were upset by the brazen stealing of the election and gathered at Chistie Prudi, a tree-lined boulevard in the center of the city. Thousands showed up, without any serious organizing. Lev Gershenzon, an editor of Yandex News, brought five colleagues from Yandex. They had all been election observers and spent hours and hours at the polling stations. They felt angry and cheated by the election. When they looked around at the crowds, they were surprised to see so many people in the same mood of fury and despair. “The mood was very depressed, this feeling of desperation,” Gershenzon said. “We did not expect that there would be so many people.”[17]
The police responded with arrests. More than three hundred people were detained, including the blogger Alexey Navalny and the political activist Ilya Yashin.
Navalny at once tweeted from the police van. “I’m seated with folks in an OMON bus,” he said cheerfully, referring to the riot police, notorious for their brutality. Navalny had been on Twitter for two years and had tens of thousands of followers.
Police kept detaining protesters and took them away to stations all over the city. Grigory Okhotin, a thirty-one-year-old journalist who witnessed the arrests, was stunned by the numbers of people hauled away, many of them friends who were completely unprepared for such an experience. He then went with his brother to a club nearby where there was free WiFi.[18] His detained friends began posting on Facebook about whom was arrested and where they were being held. Then Okhotin and his brother decided to drive around the city to see whom he could get released. He started posting what he learned on his own Facebook page, using the hashtag OVD, meaning, in Russian, the police station.
Soon, it looked like this:
#OVD-news: OVD Fili-Davydkovo: nineteen people
#OVD-news: OVD Yakimanka: eight people
#OVD-news: in OVD Dorogomilovo there are twenty-five people. Names of some of detainees: Bulgakov Anatoly, Bulgakov Dmitry, Shipachev Dmitry, Chernenko Artur… Ermilov Egor, Balabanov Victor, Lozovoi Dmitry, Polyansky Timur, Balabanov Igor, Yudin Sergei, Kapshivy Dmitry
Okhotin and his brother posted their first report on who had been detained that night on the website of the magazine Bolshoi Gorod. From that moment everyone concluded that Okhotin was in charge of detentions all over the city. “I started getting calls from complete strangers and was sent messages, ‘We are detained, we are here and there.’ And it occurred to me that all this information could be centralized,” he told us. Over the next two days the Okhotin brothers launched the website OVD-info, which became a public forum for sharing information about Russian citizens detained during protests.
The next day, December 6, the court sentenced Navalny and Yashin to fifteen days in jail. Muscovites went to the streets again, this time gathering at the Mayakovskaya Metro, on Triumfalnaya Square.
In the crowd was a slim, tall, twenty-four-year-old man with light-brown hair and gray eyes. He was already well known in Moscow creative circles: Ilya Klishin. He had come to Moscow from the provincial city of Tambov to study foreign policy at the prestigious Moscow State Institute of International Relations. However, he was soon deeply involved in social media and marketing.
In 2010 Klishin took offense at an article by a pro-Kremlin publicist attacking his generation for being idle “hipsters”—young people who were incapable of thinking about anything other than their iPhones, bicycles, and sneakers. Klishin wrote an article in reply, “Hipsters Strike Back,” claiming that his generation was indeed interested in politics. Then he and a friend launched a small website, Epic Hero, concerned with politics but cast in terms of the hipster subculture, which they both embraced. Epic Hero became very popular and gained such wide notice that even Medvedev’s staff had invited them to work on the effort to build a Russian Silicon Valley. On December 6 he went to the square to write about the new face of political protest. Among those in the crowd there was a rumor that the next big demonstration would be in four days and held at Revolution Square, very close to the Kremlin.
Very late that night Klishin got home and opened his laptop. He started searching for anything he could find about the next rally at Revolution Square. He found only a short news piece on another website that permission had been granted for a demonstration of three hundred people on December 10, but that was all.
Klishin went to Twitter and posted a question: “Is there any event on Facebook for December 10?”
A reader of Epic Hero wrote back, “No. Let’s start the event.”
Klishin launched his event—for a rally at Revolution Square—on Facebook, sending the link to his friends and journalists. Finally, exhausted, he went to sleep.[19]
The next morning, December 7, when he opened the computer, Klishin found that more than ten thousand people had RSVPed yes for the event.
At the same time, several other journalists and activists were also using Facebook to trade ideas about what should come next in the protest movement. Among them were Yuri Saprykin, a well-known columnist, and Sergei Parkhomenko, at this point a host on Echo Moskvy, the popular liberal radio station. In the 2000s Parkhomenko felt restless, as did many journalists of his generation. He had only his weekly Friday program on Echo Moskvy to run, and it was not enough for his energetic character.
He was among those who sat down on the evening of December 8 at a restaurant, Jean-Jacques, popular among the Moscow intelligentsia. Some opposition politicians were there as well as journalists and activists. All the discussion revolved around how to persuade the Moscow government to give a permit for a larger demonstration. Late in the evening they got a phone call from Nemtsov, who said the Moscow authorities were ready to talk—and someone should go to City Hall immediately.
Parkhomenko was the only one with a car, so he volunteered.[20] He brought with him Vladimir Ryzhkov, a former member of parliament who was also in the opposition, and two activists, who were formal applicants for the meeting. Parkhomenko brought with him his iPad so he could be in contact with the other group members, who were dispersed over the town, with some, like Saprykin, sitting in the office of Lenta.ru.
Parkhomenko and Ryzhkov were met at the lobby of City Hall and were shown to the fourth floor to a large office where they saw a tall man in a suit with his face strikingly reminiscent of a young Leonid Brezhnev—it was deputy mayor Alexander Gorbenko, in charge of information policy. The talks dragged on for hours. Parkhomenko was carrying an iPad and constantly posted updates on Facebook in a closed chat with his group. “My page on Facebook was my major instrument in the talks,” Parkhomenko recalled.
He showed the city officials that thousands more people wanted to attend the rally and demanded permission for them to attend. When a young woman, a club manager, wrote on Facebook that she was scared but would nevertheless go to the protests, her posting was rapidly liked by thousands. Parkhomenko showed it to the city officials. He told them he was not a leader of the movement, just a messenger. The people in Moscow who had become so agitated didn’t need a leader or organization to tell them what to do or where to go; they got it all from social networks. When, during the meeting, he saw that the number of people RSVPed to the event had hit twenty thousand, Parkhomenko showed the iPad to city officials.
Eventually they agreed to give a permit for thirty thousand for December 10 but insisted that the protest site be moved away from the Kremlin—it could not be as close as Revolution Square—and they offered Bolotnaya Square, not far away, but separated by the Moscow River from the Kremlin. Everybody agreed, and Parkhomenko took a photo of the document and posted it on his Facebook page around 10 p.m. on December 8.
Klishin immediately changed the location for the protest on Facebook.
In the months to come this decision was to be the constant source of confusion and mutual accusations. The most radical protesters argued that such a big demonstration didn’t need official approval, causing the protest to lose momentum when the leaders agreed to move the event to Bolotnaya, which was not so close to the Kremlin. The more moderate protesters were convinced that Muscovites were not ready for violent clashes with the police.
Bolotnaya Square is on an island. The Moscow River runs on one side, and a small canal on the other. The Kremlin is located across the river. On Saturday, December 10, more than fifty thousand people crowded onto the island. Nothing so large had been seen in Moscow since the dying days of the Soviet Union. Those who could not make it watched it live on TV Dozhd.
The protesters were the heart of the new Russian middle class, people who usually were found in the restaurants and cafés of Moscow but were now on the island with placards and slogans. The crowd was also sprinkled with the usual assortment of radical anarchists, journalists, and human rights campaigners who had attended demonstrations and marches over the years. But this time they were swallowed up in the mass of completely new faces, most of whom were attending a protest for the first time in their lives. Many of them held placards such as “Get our elections back” and “Putin must go.”
Lev Gershenzon, the head of Yandex News who had earlier stood up to Kremlin efforts and who brought his colleagues to the first protest after the fraudulent vote, took with him his seventeen-year-old daughter, Liza, who had with her a placard with big red words on a white sheet: “Give us back our voices,” it demanded.
The protest on Bolotnaya Square marked something completely new in Russian society. It was not political parties, trade unions, or charismatic leaders that drove Muscovites to demonstrate by the tens of thousands; those who went to Bolotnaya were not ready to support any political group or party. The crowd responded enthusiastically to popular thriller writer Boris Akunin who, in a speech, called only for the restitution of Muscovites’ right to elect their mayor and a rerun of the election in the capital.
The protesters were galvanized by anger over the election fraud, which had been exposed by new technologies on the web, and they were mobilized through social networks. In a country that was for centuries defined by hierarchical order, by a power vertical, it was remarkable to see citizens united by horizontal methods.
The protesters had also enthusiastically embraced a symbol: the white ribbon. It was originally proposed by a user on LiveJournal, Russia’s top blogging platform, and it went viral, with thousands taking it up—white ribbons appeared on user pics on users’ blogs and social media. Soon people took the white ribbon offline and began displaying them on their cars too.
This new experience also led to something very unusual for Russia: the protesters demanded transparency, which the Internet made possible. The activists posted the results of their talks with city officials immediately, and the organizing committee of the protests, formed after Bolotnaya, broadcasted its discussions online. The leaders reported all their moves—from choosing the new place for the next protest to collecting money—openly online. Navalny and Yashin were not at Bolotnaya because they were still sitting in jail, but crowds of people visited them every day, singing songs outside the police stations. Navalny’s charisma and optimism changed people’s attitudes to such detentions; it became almost fashionable among hipsters to be detained.
For Putin and Medvedev, the rally at Bolotnaya Square was just what they had feared—a mass protest just outside the walls of the Kremlin. And it was facilitated by Facebook and Twitter, technology made in the West.
Many protesters on Bolotnaya Square were puzzled by the sight of an unfamiliar aerial vehicle with propellers circling overhead—some even thought it might be a UFO. The mysterious device was a radio-controlled aircraft, manned by Stanislav Sedov, a thirty-five-year-old drone enthusiast and highway engineer by training. A few days before the protest he had suggested to a friend, Ilya Varlamov, a well-known blogger who founded an agency for citizen journalism called Ridus, that they try to film the crowd from a drone. They got unofficial permission to launch the drone with a camera.[21] How they secured this permission is not clear, but it was widely reported that Ridus was itself set up with the approval of the presidential administration. Perhaps the Kremlin wanted to get evidence of how few people went to protests.
On Bolotnaya, Sedov launched the little device from a protected police site. The police even chased away curious observers so they didn’t get in the way of the launch. When Sedov had his drone in the air, it became clear immediately that many more people had come to the demonstration than expected. The photographs became the very best evidence of the enormity of the crowd.
Almost immediately the pictures from the drone were posted online. The revolt of the wired was under way.
The first attack came surging through the Internet on the evening of December 3, 2011, just before the parliamentary election. The target was LiveJournal, Russia’s top blogging platform. Along with Facebook, LiveJournal was the favorite place for protesters to find political news and discussion. With an austere and simple design, LiveJournal had been used widely by Russian bloggers and journalists, and it featured well-established figures with thousands of followers. When the attack came, Anton Nossik, who was media director at SUP Media (which owned LiveJournal), was in Moscow, monitoring the servers based in Nevada. They were hit with a distributed denial-of-service attack, or DDOS, in which a server is so overwhelmed by requests for access that it simply shuts down. The method is crude, like jamming a radio broadcast, but can be effective. At 8:12 p.m. Nossik wrote on his blog, “The pre-election DDOS-attack on LiveJournal continues. At this minute our servers are bombarded by dump requests with the speed of 12–15 Gbits per sec. The goal of the attacking is clear. It’s banal Soviet jamming, and it has the same task: to prevent the uncontrolled exchange of information.”[1]
The next morning, on Sunday, December 4, beginning shortly after 6:30, the onslaught expanded to fourteen independent Russian news media outlets. Hackers went after websites of the radio station Echo Moskvy, the newspaper Kommersant, the news website Slon.ru, TV Dozhd, and, inevitably, Golos, the election monitor. The radio station’s servers remained offline for the entire day.[2]
The attack on Slon.ru, the website of Natalia Sindeeva’s media empire, began at about 7:30 on Sunday morning, but it was not until 9 a.m. before the website’s programmers reacted to it.[3] At first they tried to solve the problem themselves by asking the hosting provider to cut off foreign Internet addresses trying to access the site. This fixed the problem for a short time, but then the volume of traffic increased and the attackers changed tactics, and the server went down again. The Slon.ru programmers then turned to a protective system, known as Qrator, designed to mitigate such DDOS attacks by monitoring traffic and filtering it.
The Kremlin had tried to pressure Golos and others, repeatedly, not to report election violations to the public. Once they did so, a wave of cyber attacks began, apparently intended to stop the information from spreading. The attacked sites responded by quickly migrating elsewhere. Slon.ru, Bolshoi Gorod, TV Dozhd, Echo Moskvy, and Golos all switched to Qrator’s servers, where they were shielded somewhat from the DDOS attacks. Still, the active attack phase continued into the evening of December 4, and Slon.ru alone was bombarded by 200,000 to 250,000 bots: an attacker would use a botnet, a network of zombie computers, to send a high volume of fake requests to the targeted sites with the aim of producing a server overload, which would then cause the site to crash.[4]
On December 5 the initial wave of attacks subsided. But Echo Moskvy was still bedeviled by the hackers, who shifted to a different tactic, poised to strike again. The attackers aimed to seize the moment when the site would start to fail and possibly emerge from its protected state. About one hundred bots attempted to send difficult requests to the Echo Moskvy site, still under protection at Qrator. Under constant bombardment, Echo Moskvy and Golos distributed their news and other content on LiveJournal.com. But at the same time, LiveJournal remained under attack too, and Melkoniants, the brains behind Golos, switched to Google Docs to publish the Golos data on electoral violations.
On December 6 Ilya Klishin’s Epic Hero site was attacked, apparently for announcing the demonstration at Chistie Prudi Boulevard. On December 7 a DDOS attack then shut down our website, Agentura.ru. Our technical staff were forced to reset the site’s server every fifteen minutes, but it didn’t help: we were down for the most of the day. On December 8 an attack temporarily crippled the website of the newspaper Novaya Gazeta. The assaults on Epic Hero, Agentura.ru, and Novaya Gazeta were part of a second wave. This phase had a different objective than the first: instead of suppressing information about election fraud, the goal was to eliminate reporting about street protests.
Who was behind the take-downs? The phenomenon of crude DDOS attacks was not new; it first appeared in Russia in January 2002, when hackers paralyzed, for a day, Kavkaz.org, the website of Chechen separatist fighters. In that case the perpetrators were students in Tomsk, a medium-sized city in Siberia. Evidently the local FSB branch was fully aware of the attack, putting out a press release that defended the students’ actions as a legitimate “expression of their position as citizens, one worthy of respect.”[5] Since then Russian “hacker patriots,” as they are called in the press, have launched similar attacks aimed at the websites of independent media in Russia as well as at government agencies in Estonia, Georgia, and Lithuania. Russian government officials always deny responsibility for these attacks, but in December 2011 Konstantin Goloskokov, one of the “commissars” of the pro-Kremlin Nashi youth movement, admitted to the Financial Times that he and some of his associates had launched cyberstrikes on Estonia in 2007 after Estonia had angered the Kremlin with a decision to move a Soviet war memorial out of the center of Tallinn.[6] It seems entirely plausible that DDOS attacks aimed at Putin’s adversaries were organized not by the security services directly but by hacktivists encouraged by the Kremlin.
The most prominent Russian expert on cybersecurity, Eugene Kaspersky, might have been expected to lend a hand to find out who carried out the attacks, but at the outset he didn’t seem interested. In fact, he denied that attacks on the media the day of the elections had ever occurred. On December 5 Kaspersky wrote a blog post suggesting that some of the websites could have been “victims of their popularity” and had failed to cope with tens of thousands of simultaneous requests from people who are interested in politics. He repeated the same point a day later. But then, on December 16, he disclosed that he had been given log files from New Times magazine, one of the targets. Looking at these, he finally acknowledged the fact of the massive DDOS attack but claimed, rather ambiguously, “Something tells me that neither the opposition nor the Kremlin-Lubyanka are interested in such attacks.”[7]
Kaspersky has never denied his KGB background, and the picture of him as a young officer in uniform is available on the Internet. He grew up in the small town of Dolgoprudny, north of Moscow, where he excelled in math and physics at school. Instead of entering the prestigious Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, located in his hometown, he joined the High School of the KGB to study cryptology. After leaving the KGB, he built his company, Kaspersky Lab, from scratch, and has constantly cooperated with the FSB in investigating computer crimes. When thugs kidnapped his nineteen-year-old son in 2011, it was the FSB that helped release the young man in five days without harm.
The early December cyber attacks were ferocious—but ultimately proved futile. Alternative pages for posting information about the electoral violations were quickly established on social networks. When LiveJournal, the most popular blog platform in Russia, suffered an unrelenting assault, users turned to Facebook, which became a central clearinghouse for collecting information related to the protests.
As a tool for spreading news about the protests, Facebook was more popular than the local social network, VKontakte, a Russian replica of Facebook. For the protest on Bolotnaya Square on December 10, Facebook got more than thirty-five thousand people signed up, compared to some sixteen thousand who signed up on VKontakte. Facebook was simply the first network the Russian intellectual elite, experts, and journalists joined to be in contact with their friends and colleagues abroad. VKontakte, though enjoying great popularity, lacked this elite appeal.
But VKontakte did not escape the authorities’ attention. Alexey Navalny, the popular anticorruption blogger, led a user group of protesters on VKontakte, and on December 7 Edward Kot, a moderator of the group, discovered that their group seemed to be blocked, with no new posts allowed. When he complained to VKontakte, he got a reply an hour later from Pavel Durov, the somewhat mysterious founder of VKontakte. Durov, then twenty-seven, explained to Kot that Navalny’s group had reached a set limit of 1,634 posts in a single day, then added that VKontakte’s technical team was, at that moment, changing algorithms for them.
Twenty minutes later the group was unblocked. Kot was so impressed that he posted a thanks to Durov. Durov replied, “Ah, all’s fine. In the last days the FSB has been asking us to block protest groups, including yours. We didn’t comply. I don’t know how it will all end for us, but we are up and running.”[8]
When Kot asked whether he could post this, Durov agreed. Kot published a post on his page on LiveJournal. The next day, December 8, Durov published a scan of the original written FSB request. In the document a general, chief of the FSB branch in St. Petersburg, asked Durov to “cease the activity” of seven online groups related to the protests. The day after revealing the document, Durov was summoned to the St. Petersburg Prosecutor’s Office. He refused to come, posted information about the summons to the prosecutor’s office, and again refused to close down the groups.
Next, the 1990s technique of kompromat was tried against the protest movement. On December 19 audio files of nine tapped phone calls of Boris Nemtsov were posted on the pro-Kremlin website Lifenews.ru. The tapped conversations were very candid assessments of the other opposition leaders, and they were embarrassing. Nemtsov told us that the conversations had taken place in the run-up to the December protest rallies. “Their goal was simple,” he recalled. “They wanted to divide us in the run-up to the rally, but the opposition didn’t fall for it.”[9] The episode didn’t have any lasting impact on Nemtsov’s standing inside the opposition.
All these gambits—the first Kremlin counteroffensive—largely flopped. The combination of intimidation and direct pressure from the security services, deployment of the Kremlin’s youth movements, DDOS attacks, phone tapping, and everything else simply didn’t work in the new circumstances of tens of thousands of angry citizens linked together by social media.
Five days after the demonstration on Bolotnaya Square, on December 15, Putin held his annual television call-in show, called the Direct Line, broadcast live by three Russian television channels and by Russia Today in English as well as by three major radio stations. The call-in show was aimed to demonstrate Putin’s confidence that he would win the upcoming presidential election. He answered questions for an unprecedented four and a half hours, displaying a relaxed, self-confident mood. He smiled and laughed a lot during the long hours of the broadcast. He was on stage in a large hall; the audience was stacked with his supporters, members of his United Russia party, and the like.
When he was repeatedly asked about the protests, Putin seemed a little annoyed, but he never lost his cool. He came to the show prepared. Rather than take any personal responsibility for what had inspired the protests, he blamed them on self-centered political jockeying for the upcoming presidential elections. Then he offered to install real-time online video cameras at all polling stations to deter violations in the future. Both answers were intended to tamp down the protesters’ fervor. But Putin showed that he completely misunderstood why the people were protesting. “You know the thing about the fraud, about the fact that the opposition is dissatisfied with the election results, here there is no novelty,” he declared. “The opposition exists for that purpose. It struggles for power!” In other words, all the complaints about fraud were just critics whining and pursuing their own interests.
Alexey Venediktov, the editor-in-chief of Echo Moskvy, who had been at Bolotnaya Square, fired back, “You are speaking about the opposition, but, believe me, there was not only the opposition on Bolotnaya. You are replying to the opposition in your answer, but what could you tell to these newly outraged people, angry with the unfairness—they believe their voices got stolen?”[10]
Putin didn’t understand what Venediktov had told him. His mindset, formed in the Soviet KGB, led him to think that political dissent can only exist because of an organization, and an organization requires ringleaders and money. Putin said that according to his information, the protesters were students who had been paid to attend, and then he blamed the West for sending them and recalled the popular uprisings elsewhere, the dreaded color revolutions. “We know the events of the Orange revolution in Ukraine,” he said. “By the way, some of our opposition leaders at that time were in Ukraine and officially worked as advisers to the then-President Yushchenko. They are transferring this practice to Russian soil.” Again Putin sought to portray the opposition as some kind of external, self-interested conspiracy: making allusions to Boris Nemstov, who had served as an adviser to Yushenko in the mid-2000s.. What he failed to see was that the demonstrations were not driven by a plot but were the result of a spontaneous, independent, popular movement.
Finally Putin made a striking comment on the symbol of the protests, the white ribbon. “Frankly, when I looked at the television screen and saw something hanging from someone’s chest, honestly, it’s indecent, but I decided that it was propaganda to fight AIDS—that they had hung, pardon me, a condom up.”
If he thought that would discourage the protesters, Putin clearly miscalculated.
What happened at Bolotnaya Square injected enthusiasm and drive into the protest movement, which then solidified and gained new leadership. Activists, journalists, and opposition politicians formed an organizing committee. There would be more protests. One of the leaders was Olga Romanova, forty-five, who had worked as a journalist for twenty years. Romanova, an attractive blonde, was remarkably versatile, able to talk equally to an intelligent Muscovite professor or an ordinary, everyday person from a nearby shop. She was prominent in the 1990s when she had covered the Russian economy in the newspaper Segodnya. Since then, her career had risen, and in 2004 she won the Taffy, the most prestigious television award in Russia, for her work as a presenter. Her fortunes changed in 2007 when her husband, Alexey Kozlov, a businessman, was prosecuted on a fraud charge that he and his wife described as a vendetta by a well-connected former business partner. Olga tried desperately to win her husband’s release, forming the organization Rus Sidyashaya, or Russia Behind Bars, which united relatives of businessmen in jail. She spent her time visiting prisons all over the country and wrote a blog named after the Butyrka prison in Moscow, detailing harsh conditions in Russia’s prisons. She became the Federal Penitentiary Service’s worst nightmare.
Now she volunteered to open an account in her name at Yandex Money, the largest online payment service in Russia, in order to collect donations to support the protests. The organizing committee agreed. With Romanova in charge, it meant that nobody would question where the money went, given her unblemished reputation for integrity. The money would be safe from government pressure too; any attempt to intimidate Romanova would clearly be futile. The account at Yandex Money became known as Romanova’s Purse.[11]
On December 20 Yandex published on Facebook a new application that facilitated crowdfunding through Facebook for Yandex Money. Yandex said it was pure coincidence that the new crowdsourcing app was rolled out at the same time as protesters were raising money for the next rally.
The next big protest rally was scheduled for December 24 on Prospect Sakharova. Ilya Klishin renamed the main protest event page on Facebook, with the cover photo depicting a wide image of the Bolotnaya crowd and the slogan, “We Were on Bolotnaya and We Are Coming Back,” and on the side carried a picture with the words, “We Are for Fair Elections.” Organizers announced they needed 3 million rubles, about $100,000. Romanova soon collected more than 4 million rubles online and immediately posted a detailed report of how the money would be spent.
Meanwhile Grigory Okhotin’s OVD-Info, the project to track detentions, got its own website, two hotline phones, and help from the opposition movement Solidarity and the oldest Russian human rights group, Memorial, which provided lawyers to visit police stations, offer legal support, and collect information. “In two days, I along with my friends made a simple website to gather all information about the detainees and their whereabouts. We also found ten volunteers to monitor the situation,” Okhotin said.[12]
Now if a protester was detained, he knew where to call to get legal help and support.
Prospect Sakharova is an eight-lane urban thoroughfare in the center of Moscow, originally built for the 1980 Olympics, with unusually wide sidewalks. In later years stark Soviet-style office buildings were erected along the thoroughfare, dominated by the sixteen-story semicircular complex of Vnesheconombank, with cold, white walls and brown-tinted windows. There, on December 24, the air was frigid, but the wide street was jam-packed with demonstrators, over one hundred thousand people, shoulder to shoulder. Just as with Bolotnaya, the crowd was made up of the intelligentsia and urban middle class. This time many carried stylish placards and posters that had been printed for the occasion. Some bore posters depicting Cheburashka, a beloved, furry Russian cartoon figure who in these posters was in demonstration mode. Other posters featured the reviled head of the Central Election Commission in a wizard costume, manipulating ballot papers. There were also new protesters, middle-aged men in dark jackets suggesting that the demonstrations’ audience was growing.
Novelist Boris Akunin, author of popular nineteenth-century detective stories, addressed the crowd. “Do you want Vladimir Putin to become president once again?” he asked the crowd. “No!” they roared back. Sergei Parkhomenko was also on the stage, taking photographs. He was particularly impressed by a surprise arrival, Alexey Kudrin, a former finance minister and deputy prime minister, who had resigned only in September but remained close to Putin. Parkhomenko posted on his Facebook page that Kudrin had stood on the stage for three hours in the bitter cold to have a chance to address the crowd. He spoke out against the election fraud, and for a moment the protesters seemed to glimpse their first defector from the Kremlin team.
The crowd eagerly waited for Alexey Navalny, who had been released from jail three days before. Widely known for his blog, few were familiar with him as a public speaker. In a black trench coat and a gray scarf, he at first held back on the large stage, standing under the broad banner declaring, “Russia Will Be Free.” Finally, Romanova announced Navalny. Navalny was excited by the numbers of people who came, but he was also very angry. He went to the edge of the stage and grabbed the microphone in the manner of a rock star. His face was projected on the large screen on the right of the stage.[13]
In his remarks, Navalny savagely attacked Putin as a “small, cowardly jackal.” His voice rising to a howl, he said, “I can see that there are enough people here to seize the Kremlin. We are a peaceful force and will not do it now. But if these crooks and thieves try to go on cheating us, if they continue telling lies and stealing from us, we will take what belongs to us with our own hands.” He led a chant: “We are the power!”
The crowd had been curious about Navalny, but they were taken aback by his aggressive rant. Faces were creased by confusion. The crowd had been full of anticipation before he spoke, but his blasts left them uncertain. They may have agreed with the substance of his criticism, but his tone was unexpectedly harsh, puzzling more than a few in the audience.
Navalny didn’t notice. He had never seen such big crowds before; he had missed Bolotnaya Square because he had been in jail. He was, primarily, a creation of the Internet and his sharp skills as a blogger. His only real experience speaking to rallies up to this point had been the annual Russian nationalist marches, to five or six thousand people at most, and it was there he had developed his shrill voice. He shouted into the microphone, “Watching Bolotnaya on TV in jail, we feared that you would never come again. But you have come! You’ve come! And next time there will be a million!”
On December 27 Vladislav Surkov, Putin’s gray cardinal and first deputy chief of the presidential administration, was ousted and replaced by Vyacheslav Volodin. For years Surkov had been in charge of dealing with the opposition, either through the informal pact with the middle classes, micromanagement of media, and pressure on Internet companies, or through funding of pro-Kremlin youth movements. Surkov’s strategy had failed to stop the protests.
Volodin, forty-seven, stocky and tense, with high cheekbones and a scowl that rarely turned to a smile, was different from the smooth gray cardinal. Unlike Surkov, he was not trained by the oligarchs, and he didn’t pretend to play the game of politics. Surkov loved to present himself as a skillful, worldly master of intrigue who in his spare time wrote songs for rock bands and a book under a pseudonym and then made sure everybody knew the real author. By contrast, Volodin built his career on the rules of the Soviet bureaucracy. He was active in the Saratov Institute of Mechanization of Agriculture in the 1980s, joined the Communist Party, and married the daughter of the former first secretary of the local party committee. In the 1990s he quickly rose through the ranks of Saratov’s administration to the position of deputy governor and then moved to Moscow. In 2003 he was made vice speaker of the State Duma from the pro-Kremlin United Russia party. He was known to be tough and ruthless.
On December 31 the protest organizers announced plans for the next big rally, to be held on February 4, 2012. The FSB once again tried its old methods. On January 4 an FSB officer called Ilya Klishin’s mother in Tambov and summoned her to an interrogation. The same day his father got a call from the local branch of the Interior Ministry’s department for countering extremism. Klishin urged his mother not to go to the interrogation and posted information about the summons online. His father had received a written request, so he went to talk to the Interior Ministry, meeting a police colonel there who told him that his son could face criminal charges of inciting ethnic hatred because, a week earlier, he had been in Kazan, the capital of the republic of Tatarstan, where Klishin met with local activists. “In a way my parents were, if not depressed, but shocked by all that, and their first reaction was to advise me to keep away from all political affairs. But I tried to explain to them that it was meaningless, and all I did was absolutely legal, so I had nothing to fear,” recalled Klishin.[14] After that, the security services never called Klishin and his parents again.
The presidential elections were set for March 4, 2012. The opposition called for demonstrations, and although some were held, they seemed to be losing momentum. The opposition had no candidate for the presidential elections, but this was only part of the problem. However much the United Russia party was unpopular and fraud was used on its behalf during the parliamentary elections, Putin personally was popular—the most popular politician in the country. The Kremlin wanted and expected to be able to secure a fair victory, so there was no point in mobilizing protesters to join as election observers, as was the case in December. The video cameras Putin had promised were duly installed at polling stations all over the country.
On the night of elections Navalny was based at a club, Masterskaya, the same place where, four months earlier, Grigory Okhotin had launched the OVD-Info website.[15] When we arrived that evening it was already dark outside. Putin had won election to a third term on the first ballot by 63.6 percent. On our way to the club we passed by groups of drunk strangers clearly unfamiliar with Moscow’s streets, probably heading to Putin’s victory rally near the Kremlin. It was known that pro-Kremlin movements bussed people from the regions to the city to cheer their winner.
At the first floor of Masterskaya two muscled and forbidding guards dressed in black stood, their arms crossed over their chests. When we said we were journalists from Agentura.ru, they waved us in, to the second floor. Masterskaya occupied a building of the former Soviet public baths and had two large rooms with high ceilings on the second floor, previously the baths for women and men. On this night one of the rooms was for Navalny’s personal use, and the second was filled with journalists and activists; nearby a small theater hall had been turned into a makeshift television studio. The mood was downbeat. Navalny avoided answering questions from journalists that evening and just issued brief statements.
Barely two hundred meters from the club Putin took to the outdoor stage near the Kremlin to savor his triumph. He started thanking the cheering crowds for support, and a tear appeared in his eye.
The next morning came a new type of cyber attack. According to the Internet security firm Symantec, experts suddenly identified a surge of spam e-mails, widely disseminated. The messages seemed to be promoting a rally against Putin, but they were also carrying malware, disguised as an attachment. The body of the e-mail had just one sentence, indicating the attached document: “Instructions for your actions in the rally against Putin.”
Symantec detected the malicious document as a Trojan, a disguised weapon. In this case the attachment contained malicious macros that dropped onto the user’s computer and loaded a hidden piece of software, called Trojan.Gen. It then would overwrite any files with the common extensions of .doc or .exe or .zip. Once it had destroyed all such files, the software would run code to cause the computer to crash.
The attack, however, was far from successful. The e-mail looked odd to many recipients, so they didn’t open it. And they knew that real news about the protest movement was spread on Facebook, not by a randomly arriving e-mail.
Two weeks later the first deputy director of the FSB, Sergei Smirnov, admitted that the authorities had not yet found a means to deal with protest activity organized through social networks. At a meeting of the regional antiterrorist group operating within the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which includes Russia, China, and other nations in Central Asia, Smirnov referred directly to the challenge: “New technologies [are being] used by Western special services to create and maintain a level of continual tension in society with serious intentions extending even to regime change…. Our elections, especially the presidential election and the situation in the preceding period, revealed the potential of the blogosphere.” Smirnov stated that they needed to develop ways to react to such technologies and confessed that “this has not yet happened.”[16]
Putin’s victory left the protesters feeling depressed. Their leaders decided to go to the streets the day before Putin’s inauguration, May 7. The protest was called the “March of Millions,” reflecting the organizers’ ambition and desperation. Some protest leaders went to Russia’s regions, seeking to recruit as many people as possible for the march. But this was different from previous protests: the organizing committee was disbanded, Akunin and Parkhomenko were not among organizers, and Romanova did not collect money for the march.
Nevertheless, on May 6, thousands turned up and marched down Yakimanka Street to Bolotnaya Square. But then it turned ugly. To get to Bolotnaya Island from Yakimanka Street requires a right turn. The rally was sanctioned by the authorities, which meant that the crowd was required to pass through security gates manned by policemen, always a bottleneck for every Moscow demonstration, but this time it was worse because the number of security gates was unusually small. The way forward was limited by a line of heavy trucks across Yakimanka Street, and there was no way out; the only option was to wait in long lines for the security check. Soon the protesters found themselves clamped between the police trucks, the line of security gates, and the Moscow River, pressed from the rear with nowhere to go. Muscovites loved to bring children to the protest rallies as a way to show it was all peaceful, and May 6 was no exception. Sergei Lukashevsky, the director of the Sakharov Center, took his three children, daughters of eight and thirteen years old and his fifteen-year-old son along with two of his son’s classmates.
The organizers tried to talk the police into relieving the congestion, to widen the passage ways, but to no avail. We stood on Bolotnaya Square, close to the stage, when someone started shouting, “Sit down, sit down, it’s a sit-down strike!” It was a desperate move by the organizers. Navalny sat, along with Nemtsov, his friends, and supporters. The police considered it a provocation. Soon we saw some people move around the security gates. Fighting started, and the crowd poured through yellow portable toilets next to the gates. Lukashevsky saw that it was clearly not the place to be with children and hastily retreated to a bridge nearby. We took to another bridge, where we met our friend, journalist Mikhail Shevelev, who in 1995 had helped publish Parkhomenko’s story in Moskovskie Novosti. Usually an easygoing fellow with a sense of irony about any trouble, now he was deadly serious and afraid—he had brought with him his thirteen-year-old son.
Finally Navalny broke through the security gates and made it to Bolotnaya Square and then to the stairs leading to the stage. From the stage Sergei Udaltsov, another protest leader, chanted “We won’t leave, we won’t leave!” Policemen went after him and grabbed him almost immediately. Navalny saw it and asked for a megaphone. Someone handed him one, and Navalny started to check it. Two policemen approached him, declaring, “We are taking you.” Navalny shouted, “What? Why take me? I didn’t do anything! Just a second!” He tried to climb the stairs to the stage, and at once the policemen grabbed him. “Why are you taking me?” he asked, then he turned to the crowd and shouted, “Don’t disperse! All stay here!”
As it happened, Navalny was wearing a microphone and being shadowed by a camera crew for a possible television documentary. When he was detained, the microphone was transmitting and caught his words with the police. The conversation was tense. The policemen twisted his arms behind his back and raised them high and hard to make him bend over, the way dangerous criminals are transported within Russian prisons. Navalny told them it was extremely painful and in a quiet voice said, “You are breaking my arm!” The policeman agreed that he was indeed going to break Navalny’s arm, and Navalny said, through clenched teeth, “I’ll send you to jail then.” Navalny was then forced into a paddy wagon.
The whole thing was transmitted from the microphone he was wearing and soon posted on YouTube, which inflamed the public.
The Kremlin responded forcefully to the protest. Twenty-seven people were arrested and accused, more than two hundred investigators were deployed. The police searched the protest leaders’ apartments—Navalny, Udaltsov, Kseniya Sobchak, Boris Nemtsov, Ilya Yashin, and Pyotr Verzilov.
Putin was inaugurated as planned on May 7 in a grand ceremony at the Kremlin. For the protesters, the clashes the day before proved a disaster. Mutual accusations and arguing followed. The Kremlin blamed the opposition for inciting violence on Moscow’s streets. The protesters did try other options: the famous Russian writers—among them Akunin, Ludmila Ulitskaya, Dmitry Bykov, and Lev Rubinstein—invited Muscovites to “a walk with writers” on Moscow’s boulevards, and thousands joined them, protesting how the Kremlin had responded on May 6. Navalny launched the Russian version of the Occupy movement idea—he took his supporters to Chistie Prudi, and they occupied space near a monument to the Kazakh poet Abay. They lasted only five days: on May 15 police pushed out dozens of the most committed activists. By then the protests gathered no more than a few thousand supporters.
A month after Putin took office for a third term, the Kremlin finally found a way to crack down on social media. On June 7, 2012, four members of the State Duma, the lower house of parliament, introduced legislation to begin a nationwide system of filtering on the Internet. The pretext was to protect children. It included a single register of banned sites, which was really, in simple terms, a blacklist.
The principle of Internet censorship was hardly a new one for the Russian authorities. For five years regional prosecutors had been busy implementing regional court decisions requiring providers to block access to banned sites. But this had not been done in a systematic, nationwide way. Websites blocked in one region remained accessible in others. The arrival of a single register made it possible to close down sites across all of Russia, all at once.[17]
Irina Levova worked as an expert for the Russian Association for Electronic Communications, the only organization the Ministry of Communications and Internet companies trusted as a negotiator. She had fought vigorously against the blacklist. When the law passed a second hearing in the Duma, on July 10, she urged Stas Kozlovsky, a leader of the Wikipedia community in Russia, to stage an online protest. Kozlovsky conducted surveys with the Russian Wiki community, and when he polled, 80 percent of them voted for the protest. For the whole day the work of the Russian Wikipedia was suspended, its pages went blank, and the main page of the site carried a banner with the claim that if the law is approved, it “could become the basis for real censorship on the Internet.”
Unfortunately the protest had no impact. The legislation was quickly passed, and Putin signed it into law July 28, to take effect November 1.
The new blacklist panicked Internet companies, and on August 2 they got an invitation to meet with the presidential administration. Among those who came were three high-ranking managers of Yandex, including the CEO, Arkady Volozh, and Marina Zhunich, a government relations director for Google Russia, along with Levova. They walked into the complex of the buildings on Staraya Ploshad, to a building right on the square, a big six-story neoclassical edifice with giant windows, the same building Velikhov had visited in 1982 to talk to Yuri Andropov about the personal computers. It had housed the Central Committee of the Communist Party in Soviet times and now was occupied by the presidential administration, a powerful bureaucracy.
They were shown to the fifth floor. The building had been expensively renovated, but the Soviet grand style was carefully preserved, with carpets in the corridors, wooden panels on the walls, and Soviet-style white telephones in the elevators. The Internet-industry representatives were brought into a large room with four monumental chandeliers. The curtains had been carefully drawn across the windows. Vyacheslav Volodin, the gruff-talking first deputy chief of the administration, personally greeted the gathering, along with officials from the State Duma and the Council of Federation.
The Internet companies had rushed to the meeting because of the technicalities of the new law, which stipulated that websites must be blocked at the level of an Internet protocol address. As thousands of sites can use the same Internet protocol address, the companies wanted to explain to the authorities that this idea was not wise. Volodin declared at the start of the meeting, “In present circumstances the filtration is necessary and inevitable, but we should work on details with the industry.” He made sure from the beginning of the meeting that the question of filtering was not open to question or debate.
It didn’t take long for the Internet companies to abandon the uncensored Internet and cross the line into accepting a censored Internet in Russia. Facing a fait accompli, they focused on specifics. Zhunich had a good reason to be worried: blocking an IP address meant that any video found inappropriate on YouTube, for example, could lead to blocking the entire service. Soon the talk turned to technologies that allow blocking of particular pages, not sites, and Volodin suggested forming a working group to talk technicalities. The Internet companies were passive, just as they had been when SORM was introduced more than a decade earlier.[18]
After the meeting Levova hastened back to her office and immediately started to search for technologies that could block pages instead of sites. The answer she found enraged her. The only choice, it appeared, was “deep packet inspection,” a very intrusive technology, which allows an outsider to filter Internet traffic but also gives that outsider a way to penetrate into the content and effectively conduct surveillance.
Most digital inspection tools only look at the “headers” on a packet of data—where it’s going and where it came from. Deep packet inspection, or DPI, allows network providers to peer into the digital packets’ message or transmission over a network. “You open the envelope, not just read the address on a letter,” said an engineer dealing with DPI. It allows ISPs not only to monitor the traffic but also to filter it, suppressing particular services or content.
In late August 2012 the Russian government’s Ministry of Communications, along with some of the Russian Internet companies, concluded that the only way to implement the blacklist was through DPI. “As an example, they spoke of YouTube, to be sure that the particular video could be blocked, instead of the entire YouTube service. And they agreed on this mechanism. It was DPI,” Ilya Ponomarev, a member of the State Duma who enthusiastically supported the introduction of the blacklist, told us.[19]
DPI drew concern from leading privacy groups over how governments would use this highly intrusive technology. Eric King, head of research at Privacy International, the leading British nongovernmental organization in the area of privacy, declared, “DPI allows the state to peer into everyone’s internet traffic and read, copy or even modify e-mails and web pages: We now know that such techniques were deployed in pre-revolutionary Tunisia. It can also compromise critical circumvention tools, tools that help citizens evade authoritarian internet controls in countries like Iran and China.”[20]
The system in Russia was tested in September, even before its official launch in November. Several prosecutors requested that access to a controversial video, “Innocence of Muslims,” be blocked in different Russian regions.[21] On September 27 the three largest mobile and Internet service providers—MTS, VimpelCom, and MegaFon—restricted access to the inflammatory video. VimpelCom blocked access to websites that posted the video, which made YouTube as a whole inaccessible in seven Russian regions.[22] But MTS and MegaFon succeeded in blocking access just to the video itself thanks to DPI that had been already installed on their systems.
For a number of years the ground had been carefully prepared to reach this point. For commercial reasons, DPI technology had been introduced in Russia in the mid-2000s. It was needed then to control torrents—streams of data often used by pirate file-sharing—which can hog all available bandwidth. DPI technology helped mobile operators in Russia resist those users who would take up so much bandwidth. In a few years all the biggest DPI technology vendors had a presence in Russia: Canada’s Sandvine, Israel’s Allot, America’s Cisco and Procera, and China’s Huawei. By the summer of 2012 all three national mobile operators in Russia had DPI at their disposal: Procera was installed by VimpelCom, Huawei’s DPI solutions are in use in MegaFon, and MTS bought Cisco technology.[23]
At the same time, the Russian authorities didn’t miss the remarkable capabilities DPI would open up for surveillance. On September 27 Russia’s largest information security conference, held at the international exhibition center Krokus Expo, featured a panel on “SORM in the Environment of Convergence.” The talk was intended for professionals, and the room was filled with the chiefs of SORM departments at mobile operators and the Moscow city phone network as well as representatives from surveillance equipment manufacturers. DPI quickly emerged as one of the hottest topics of the discussion. Many in the room seemed certain that the only way to guarantee legal interception in the new era of cloud computing and communications was DPI technology.
However, there was a legal issue. DPI devices are manned by the employees of the Internet providers or mobile operators—private companies. But the SORM boxes are at the full disposal of the FSB. Still, the idea of connecting SORM with the operators’ DPI seemed not to bother anybody in the room.[24]
Television remained a battleground over the protests. The government’s channels bombarded audiences with special programs attacking the opposition. Several of them were titled, in serial, “Anatomy of the Protest.” One, aired in October 2012, accused one of the leaders of the opposition, Sergei Udaltsov, of preparing a coup d’état. Udaltsov’s apartment was searched, and a criminal prosecution was launched against him.
But television brought a new approach to the opposition as well. Back in June the protests’ organizers had promised to create a council of the opposition that would represent all political forces opposed to Putin and would be a vehicle for carrying out discussions with the Kremlin. On September 21 Leonid Volkov, Navalny’s chief lieutenant, and Yuri Saprykin, both deeply involved in the protest activities, paid a visit to Mikhail Zygar, the editor of TV Dozhd. The council was to be selected by democratic means—an election—on October 20–22. Volkov and Saprykin suggested organizing a series of debates on TV Dozhd—online and uncensored.
Zygar was struck by the idea. “We didn’t have then the feeling of danger, we thought we need to respond to the expectations of people,” he recalled. He worried whether it would at all compromise the television channel’s principles and whether it would be seen as propaganda for a political force. But he answered his own questions by saying there were so many different people from so many different forces that it would be impossible to be captured by any one of them. The opposition ran from liberals to nationalists. Zygar decided they would broadcast the debate at midnight, far from prime time, so only really committed people would watch it. The debate project came together very quickly—in a day or two.[25]
The debates on TV Dozhd started on October 1 and lasted for almost three weeks. It proved to be a huge success for the channel. “Our evening news traditionally got the highest rating. And now we saw, wow, our rating rise higher at midnight,” said Zygar. Saprykin, who was a cohost on air, recalled that there was a chance that all hell would break loose with so many different views. But contrary to that fear, the opposition was allowed a voice on television, “and nothing awful happened,” he said.[26] Russians got their first political debate since the 1990s.
The Kremlin seemed to ignore both the shows and the opposition council.
Then, on November 1, the Ministry of Communications launched the single register of banned websites—the blacklist. And then even more pressure was put on the activists. Nossik was summoned for an interrogation on November 16 because he had helped launch the website of the opposition council’s elections; in response, in November he left LiveJournal. The same month Lev Gershenzon left Yandex.ru, explaining that he was in charge of Yandex News and for years tried to improve the algorithms of selecting the news while also fighting the pressure from the authorities. But by the end of 2012 he realized that algorithms, however sophisticated and clever, could not resolve a new problem—that it had become increasingly difficult to see differences among the various reports of various media, most of which had started to present a uniform and identical picture. Here the technology was helpless.
The protests convinced the Kremlin that the approach to the Internet developed in the 2000s, a combination of DDOS attacks and trolls, didn’t work when tens of thousands of people went to the streets. So the Kremlin decided to put the Internet under control by technical means, through filtering. It was essentially a nationwide censorship, but the Kremlin didn’t copy the Soviet example, when censorship was conducted by a government body, Glavlit, with representatives in every Soviet publication.
The actual day-to-day business of Internet filtering was not assigned to FSB officers nor to the officials of Roskomnadzor, a relatively small government agency with no more than a few dozen personnel tasked to deal with the Internet. Roskomnadzor selected what should be censored, but it fell to ISPs and telecom operators to implement the blacklists. To make the system work across the country, the filtering system required a lot of people, and there are thousands of ISPs in Russia. The specialists needed technical training, had to comply with orders, no questions asked, and they had to protect the secrecy of operations because Roskomnadzor deemed the blacklists of banned websites secret.
Russia had plenty of such specialists.
On the evening of May 27, 2011, a soccer match was about to be held in Moscow between Anzhi, a visiting team from Dagestan, and Lokomotiv, a popular Moscow team. The game was set for early evening so fans could come after work to the modern Lokomotiv home stadium that accommodates twenty-eight thousand in the east of the city. The visiting team, Anzhi, was generously funded by a wealthy oligarch and enjoyed crowds of enthusiastic fans. More than fifteen hundred of them arrived at Lokomotiv stadium that evening from Dagestan to see their team play. They were almost entirely men in their twenties and thirties who wanted to sit together, and they were required to use a separate entrance with high security. They arrived at the gate, holding tickets, and approached what looked to be a rather unremarkable metal detector and some city police. The visitors were from the North Caucasus, where Russia had fought two wars against rebels in Chechnya, so their arrival in Moscow was met with a apprehension and scrutiny. The police routinely patted them down, looking for weapons.
The fans coming through paid little attention to a camera sitting on a tripod aimed at each of them as they stepped up to the metal detector. The lens was aimed at their faces. The camera rapidly attempted to capture each face into a green digital frame and then identified different characteristics of the face, including such distinctive features as distance between the eyes. Then the camera went to work, snapping several photographs of each face. A computer connected to the camera then evaluated each person based on a complex algorithm, and within seconds the person’s name was established and they were given a unique number. They may have all come to see a soccer match, but they had also just walked into a modern and potentially powerful system of face recognition. Originally invented to help spot criminals, face recognition had expanded in the hands of security services to be a tool for surveillance of all kinds of people at any kind of public event and in public places.
Near the metal detectors sat an operator with a laptop who worked for a company called Ladakom-Service, and he monitored every face closely. One window on his screen showed the live camera acquiring the face images, another part of the screen showed the captured images, and a program was constantly running to match the captured images with people in a government passport database, one of the biggest in the country. When the match was successful, a photograph just taken appeared along the bottom of the screen with the person’s full identity. The government had obtained a current picture and identification of thousands of people that could be used for almost any purpose in the future.
It happened not only at sports events. The same company in 2011 had installed this technology in the entrance hall of one of the busiest metro stations in the city. The station, Okhotny Ryad, is located a stone’s throw from the Kremlin and around the corner from the Russian lower house of parliament, next to one of the most heavily traveled streets in Moscow. As people stepped on the subway escalator, their faces entered a frame and were captured by video cameras. The images were rapidly linked to their identity in security service databases. There was no notification to anyone that they were being recorded.
The system was so advanced that a scan of 10 million images would take no more than seven seconds. The facial images and video are sent to the Metro system’s situation room, the Interior and Emergencies Ministries, and to the FSB.
The facial recognition system is a glimpse into a large and mostly hidden phenomenon that was a profound legacy of the Soviet experience: the use of engineering to build systems for the security services to control information and populations. These systems were invented and developed by engineers who knew what the systems could do but rarely if ever questioned the purpose of control for which they were used.
The Soviet Communist Party held a monopoly on power and did not want competition. It imposed rigid conditions on all kinds of people; for engineers, there was pressure to conform to the goals of the party-state and to fulfill its technical needs. To succeed meant to work on projects without questioning the big picture. For many decades Soviet engineers were schooled intensively in technical subjects but rarely if ever had exposure to the humanities; the breadth of their education was exceedingly narrow. Unlike medical doctors who were trained in ethics, engineers were not. They were taught to be technical servants of the state. As a result, generations of engineers were trained and worked their entire lives with little understanding of politics or trust of politicians and were suspicious of public activity as a whole. These engineers were focused on the immense technical needs of the Soviet Union and were comfortable with the concept of strict order because it suited their understanding of the mechanical world better than the often-unruly reality of freedom.
When Stalin’s security services in the 1930s and 1940s needed to conduct secret research in particular areas, they arrested scientists and engineers and sent them to special installations, the sharashkas, which were closed off from the outside and heavily guarded. The scientists and engineers were motivated to produce quick results under the threat of being sent to labor camps if they failed. But in the years after Stalin’s death in 1953 this system evolved into a far-reaching system of research institutes, not all of them closed. A result was that many thousands of Soviet engineers were working in security or military research.
The sharashka in Marfino, east of Moscow, was especially important, and by 1948–1949 it had become a relatively large research effort, with 490 personnel, of which 280 were prisoners, divided into twelve research groups, including the acoustic laboratory of Major Abram Trakhtman.[1]
Marfino’s main task was to develop a special kind of secure telephone system that would allow Stalin to speak on the phone without interception. To accomplish that, the voice on the phone would have to be split into pieces, coded, and then reassembled. The problem was not only how to code the pieces but also how to repair the speech in a way so that the speech and speaker would be instantly recognizable. For months Marfino’s acoustic laboratory tried to make the decoded speech recognizable. The effort required the focus of both inmates and their superiors. They worked under the guidance of Trakhtman, but the real brain behind the research effort was Lev Kopelev, an inmate. He was considered the top expert on recognizing speech, with an unerring ear for accents and a deep grasp of the physics of sound waves.
In the late autumn of 1949, at the yard of Marfino, Kopelev approached his closest friend, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a fellow inmate, to share with him a state secret. Kopelev had successfully listened to and identified a caller who gave sensitive information to the US Embassy about the atomic bomb.[2] Kopelev was incensed.
Although he had been convicted and sentenced for expressing his disapproval of the Soviet troops’ harsh treatment of the German population in 1945, Kopelev remained a devoted Communist and Soviet patriot, and he was outraged to listen to someone who had just betrayed such a big secret to the Americans. He was given four audio tapes—it turned out the speaker tried three times to reach the US Embassy and then gave up and called the Canadian Embassy once. The security services intercepted and recorded all the conversations. Kopelev was also given samples of phone conversations of three suspects. With his considerable skills and talents, Kopelev pointed the finger at one of the recorded voices, leading the authorities to a certain foreign ministry official, who was arrested. It was a major—and unexpected—victory for the sharashka. Excited, Kopelev couldn’t help but tell his friend Solzhenitsyn what he had done. Kopelev coined the term phonoscopy for the new scientific discipline of recognizing the identity of a speaker on the phone, one that would be very valuable to the security services for many years to come.[3]
In July 1950 the secure telephone technology for Stalin was finished, as was the main assignment for Marfino. For the next two years Marfino created a manufacturing line for the equipment they had invented. When that was completed, the sharashka was essentially divided in half. The specialists on secure telephony were left there, and it was renamed to become the top-secret National Research Institute No. 2, working on the protection of Kremlin telecommunications, as it does to this day. The other half of specialists, who had worked in the acoustic laboratory, including Kopelev, were moved to Kuchino, another sharashka located outside of Moscow.
This was a fateful move that established the KGB’s central role in research and development of listening devices and eavesdropping for the next half century. The transfer to Kuchino meant that the secret services would do the research on speech recognition technology in the same facility—and guided by the same people—as those working on wiretapping. They wanted to make sure they could not only intercept a conversation but also have the means to identify those who spoke on the phone. The KGB wanted full control of telecommunications, and from this time on, identifying a speaker was considered a legitimate part of Soviet surveillance.
Kuchino, surrounded by high walls seventeen miles east of Moscow, was the main research facility for Stalin’s secret services in the area of special, or “operative,” equipment—ranging from weapons to radio sets to, most importantly, listening devices. In one of their most ambitious and successful exploits, the experts at Kuchino planted a listening device inside a large replica of the Great Seal of the United States and presented it as a gift to the US ambassador in August 1945, and it was hung in the ambassador’s study. The device transmitted sound waves out of the ambassador’s study to the Soviet secret services until it was exposed in 1952.
Kopelev left Kuchino in 1954, a year after Stalin died, never to return to his research in phonoscopy. He went on to become a dissident. But he left his archives behind in Kuchino, and they were carefully preserved. For a time the security services didn’t know what to do with them; it seemed that the technology Kopelev invented was based on his knowledge alone and wouldn’t work without him. In other words, without Kopelev’s unique skills, it was useless to try to identify a speaker on the phone.[4]
But other research began to show that there was a method behind Kopelev’s success. The first evidence came in 1960 when a Swedish scientist, Gunnar Fant, published a monograph, The Acoustic Theory of Speech Production, based on his research at MIT.[5] He had found a way to slice up a voice recording into samples and then identify them using mathematics and physics. This meant that there was a more reliable and verifiable scientific method instead of relying on Kopelev’s skills. Fant’s discovery, translated into Russian in 1964, led to a surge of secret research into the topic inside the Soviet Union.[6]
While the scientists pursued his theory, Fant began to be concerned that law enforcement would abuse speech recognition technology. Fant’s concerns were confirmed in 1970, when FBI director J. Edgar Hoover went to Stockholm and gave an interview to the local newspaper Dagens Nyheter about shining prospects for using voice samples for identifying terrorists. When the newspaper asked Fant for comments on Hoover’s remarks, Fant cautioned that the method he had developed was imprecise and it was premature to use to identify anyone. His rebuttal was so surprising that the newspaper printed on the front page photographs of Hoover and Fant opposite each other, presenting him, as Fant put it later, as a “possible FBI enemy number one.”[7]
Soviet scientists had no such reservations. Research centers working on speech recognition opened in many cities, and the section on acoustics at the Academy of Sciences coordinated the nationwide research. But everybody knew that the true boss was the KGB.
An instrumental part of the research was in Leningrad, the Scientific Research Institute of Dalny Svyazi, or of long-distance communications, known as Dalsvyaz. This is the facility where Sergei Koval, a graduate of the physics department of the University of Leningrad, began work in 1973 on acoustics. He was always interested in the science of sound, but what was also attractive was a promised monthly salary bonus of 15 percent. He was unconcerned that the institute was shrouded in secrecy. The offices of his applied acoustics unit were always guarded by men with automatic weapons. The institute, with more than ten thousand personnel, was overseen by a ministry for industrial telecommunications, but its real purpose was to work for the military. The applied acoustics unit of three hundred people that Koval joined was not under control of the institute at all but was instead run by the KGB, who paid these additional personnel the bonus. It was a classic Russian matryoshka—secrets within secrets—applied to research.
Koval soon realized the reason for such secrecy. His colleagues told him that this unit was in fact the Marfino sharashka that had been transferred to Leningrad. One day he was pointed to a bespectacled engineer who worked at a neighboring laboratory. His name was Valentin Martynov, and he had once served in Marfino along with Kopelev and Solzhenitsyn (and featured in Solzhenitsyn’s novel The First Circle under the name “Walentulya” Pryanchikov). Koval recalled that Martynov was “meticulous and stubborn.” A young, enthusiastic engineer of the late 1940s, Martynov had remained devoted to speech recognition for decades. He went so far as to defend a thesis for a degree on the topic. Although he was free now, he still walked every day into the territory guarded by the men with automatic weapons and dogs to do research for the same secret services that had once sent him to prison. Koval never tried to ask him why: “It was a generation that was much more mature. It was not suitable to talk about the past.”
By the 1970s Koval’s applied acoustic unit became the main coordinator of research funded by the KGB in speech recognition. He recalled, “There was a section of applied problem-solving at the Academy of Sciences. This section took orders and research commissions on prospective research from all the agencies, from the Ministry of Defense and from the KGB. The section demanded money, and it always got the money. The scheme was wonderful: the money then was allocated to the applied research departments belonging to the KGB, like our department. So we were able to distribute this money right across the different academic institutions as we saw fit. We could effectively sponsor any project we wanted. I myself was the curator of the scientific program, where forty universities were involved.”[8]
What began in the 1940s with seven people in the acoustic laboratory in Marfino had, by the 1970s, become a sprawling, well-funded empire of secret research. There was no clear line between KGB-sponsored research and civilian research; it was all part of the same empire. The secrecy touched everyone—numbering millions of people. It showed up in the most unexpected places. For example, the Computation Center of the Academy of Sciences on Vavilova Street in Moscow, which Ed Fredkin loved to visit in the 1980s to talk personal computers, was one of the research institutes quietly working for Koval’s unit.
Vladimir Chuchupal joined the section of voice recognition of the Computation Center in 1980. He was told that the main task of the section was to apply computers to speech recognition. Chuchupal was warned that it was strictly prohibited to mention to anyone outside the Center the name of their main “customer”—the Dalsvyaz and the KGB. He was put in direct contact with Kuchino almost immediately. Chuchupal knew exactly what they worked on—one day his chief described how he was given notes from the legendary Kopelev to study.[9]
Thanks to the generous funding provided by the KGB, in the early 1980s Chuchupal’s section got its first personal computers, some Soviet-made machines and a few IBM PS2s. When they arrived, the issue of speech recognition opened up a vista for surveillance the KGB had never imagined possible—applying computer technologies to phone tapping meant that not only could a speaker be identified but that what he said could be used to trigger the interception system (the surprising byproduct of the project was the computer game Tetris, designed on one of the KGB computers). That, at least, was the theory. The KGB came up with the idea of using key words so that mention of “the bomb” or the “Communist Party,” or anything else chosen by the KGB and put in the system would automatically initiate interception of the phone line. This option could have changed the KGB’s modus operandi completely—in most previous cases the KGB needed to know the identity of the suspect to start eavesdropping on his phone; now the technology would provide the suspects. But it was also very challenging; the keyword system was an ambition, but making it a reality depended on more computing power than was available.
The Soviet research empire into speech recognition along with Dalsvyaz and the unit at the Computation Center worked actively on the issue for years. Once again, there was no clear line between the civilian and KGB research.
This empire cracked with the collapse of the Soviet Union, but it didn’t go away. Initially the KGB cut its research programs. “In 1990 our funding stopped,” Koval recalled, who himself left Dalsvyaz. “Two-thirds of employees quit immediately.” But he did not leave the field of research. With his laboratory chief, Mikhail Khitrov, and five colleagues, he founded a private company that in 1993 became the Speech Technology Center, trademarked in the United States as SpeechPro. Each of eight founders got an equal share of 12.5 percent of the company. The speech recognition scientists tried to succeed with civilian contracts; for example, they developed a talking book for the Society for the Blind.
But soon their old friends, the security services, returned. Koval’s company got its first contract from the Interior Ministry to build a system of using phonoscopy for chasing criminals. Then the FSB offered a contract to make a system that would separate voice from background noise. In the 2000s the company employed up to 350 people—roughly the size of the original Soviet department in Dalsvyaz. “I cannot say what kind of work we do for them,” Koval said of the security services, “but it all continues, it’s the same—what we did then, we do now.”
The company has developed technology they consider unique in its capability and reach. It is able, for example, to store many millions of items of biometric data, such as voice samples and photo images, and match them to individuals by searching the world’s communication channels, including video files. The voice recognition technology can identify the speaker, regardless of language, accent, or dialect, based on physical characteristics of the voice.
In 2008 the company completed its first national voice recognition project in Mexico. The system was able to use state records of human voices and biometric details—voice, face, and other characteristics—to identify individuals, and to do it from fragments of speech alone. Mexico’s national database of voices was made up of speech fragments recorded from criminals, law enforcers, and many law-abiding citizens, who are obliged to supply vocal samples for state regulated activities, such as obtaining a driver’s license. Thus, Kopelev’s 1949 dream of creating the system that “would allow recognition of the voice in all circumstances out of any amount of voices” was realized in 2010 in Mexico. Koval was personally in charge of implementing the ambitious project. “I’ve been traveling to Mexico for seven years!” he exclaimed.
On a cold and snowy day in January 2012, in an almost empty café near Chernyshevsky Metro Station in St. Petersburg, Koval enthusiastically recalled to Andrei the story of his company. Koval proudly listed countries where his company’s speech-recognition technology was already in use: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Belarus—all repressive authoritarian regimes in the former Soviet Union—as well as Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Yemen, and Turkey.
Andrei asked Koval what he thought about the ethics of his work and the fact that regimes around the world were using his technology to suppress dissidents. He replied emotionally and with certitude and self-confidence. “All this talk about technology catching dissidents is just bullshit,” he insisted. “It’s typical of the kind of psychological warfare the Americans use against their opponents. I think all these arguments about human rights are completely hypocritical.” He expressed no reservations about the use of his technology against journalists, dissidents, and human rights campaigners. “What can we do about it?” he said. “We just come up with the hardware. It’s just technology that is developed with law enforcement in mind. Sure, you can use it against the good guys just as easily as you can use it against the bad guys. One way or another, these governments will be able to use surveillance technology, whether we supply it or not. Take, for example, face-recognition technology: you can film a demonstration, and with that film you can identify the journalists, the drug addicts, the recently released prisoners, or the nationalists. It’s all the same technology. I can’t think what can be done about that! If governments listen in on people’s conversations, it’s not the microphone’s fault!”
These exact words have been repeated over and over again by engineers who willingly served the Soviet state and then did the same thing in Russia. They believed it was not their fault. Koval’s confidence had recently been bolstered by an investment from a source even closer to Putin than the secret services could provide. In September 2011 Gazprombank acquired 35 percent of SpeechPro. Gazprombank is also part of the vast business empire of Yuri Kovalchuk, a close friend of Vladimir Putin.
The Russian system of secret research appears to be reestablished completely. In Moscow, Chuchupal, now the chief of the sector on speech recognition at the Computation Center of the Academy of Sciences, continues to work on speech recognition, and Kuchino is among his customers. Both Koval’s and Chuchupal’s organizations are still working on the issue of “key words.”
Koval’s odyssey was repeated over and over again by other Soviet scientists and engineers, and it created a mindset among many of them. Loren Graham, a preeminent historian of Soviet and Russian science at MIT, told us, “Russian scientists and engineers are, on the whole, less interested in the ethical and moral problems of their work than many of their counterparts in Western countries.”[10]
“Why is this so? I see two reasons,” he added. “In the Soviet period Russian scientists and engineers learned early on that if they raised ethical and moral issues that this was seen by the authorities as ‘political opposition,’ and they would be punished for raising such issues. Therefore, they learned to stay silent, and after a while this silence became ingrained and even a part of their professional definition. Of course, the Soviet Union is long gone, but these attitudes have largely continued.”
Second, he said, “Engineering education in Russia has been focused on technical issues, with very little attention to larger human, ethical, and moral questions. Although engineering education in the US has some of these characteristics also, it is worth noticing that at top engineering schools in the United States, such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—my university—every student during four years of engineering study is required to take eight courses, usually one each semester, in the humanities and social sciences. These courses open up deep questions of ethics and ‘meaning,’ which are not considered in technical courses.
“This is an important part of engineering education in the best universities in Western countries,” Graham said. “It has important effects, leading to questions about the social responsibilities of scientists and engineers. And many of the best engineering schools in the United States also have departments of Science, Technology and Society [STS], where these problems are studied.”
Anatoly Levenchuk, an engineer himself who, in the early 1990s, helped launch Relcom, told us that “I tell my students not to apply system engineering when you work for the government.” Why? “It could be very dangerous. You need to know humanities to deal with the state. If you apply only engineering, you will build a prison as a result. Say you are tasked to address threats, in this case the best way to address them as engineer is to build a box, a prison, you just close everything off.”[11]
Levenchuk himself ceased to cooperate with the government in 2006 and focused on teaching engineering at Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, the major university for training engineers for the Russian nuclear industry. Levenchuk sought to present new ideas in his classroom, challenging the traditional rigid approach and urging students to be more open-minded and aware. He was soon attacked. In April 2013 he was confronted with an old and nefarious Soviet practice—a public denunciation. An open letter was published on LiveJournal.com, accusing Levenchuk of teaching “fascist” philosophy and values. Levenchuk was accused of systematic destruction of “the Soviet school of design.” The denunciation then went on to demand that members of the State Duma to initiate a request to the General Prosecutor’s Office to check whether Levenchuk is a foreign agent, as “pro-Western ideas” are detected in his lectures. The request was duly sent, and the institute was forced to write an official reply, protecting Levenchuk.[12]
The denunciation showed that Soviet engineers’ mindset—the rigid adherence to the technical—was resurging under Putin.
Sergei Koval, so dismissive of concerns about dissidents and human rights, took his approach overseas in 2009. It was one thing to loyally and unquestioningly serve the state in the former Soviet Union, but it was quite another to deliver the same approach to other countries and security services. Koval’s journey abroad took him to Colombia. There, on September 21, 2009, the secret police, Departamento Administrativo de Seguridad, or DAS, a hybrid of intelligence and law enforcement, held a press conference in Bogotá.[13]
For a year DAS had been under constant criticism, accused of illegal wiretapping of journalists, opposition politicians, human rights groups, and even Supreme Court justices. The scale of the scandal caused journalists to coin the term “Colombian Watergate.”[14]
In the announcement of the press conference DAS promised to present some new crucial evidence to address the question of illegal wiretapping. The DAS director, Felipe Muñoz, a thirty-nine-year-old energetic technocrat, trained at the London School of Economics and Colombia University, appeared at the press conference with Koval sitting alongside.
Muñoz announced that DAS had conducted the internal investigation and invited an independent expert from Russia, with more than thirty years experience in the field, to examine leaked recordings of intercepted calls and compare them with the recordings made by DAS legally. He tried to prove that the agency was not involved in illegal wiretapping. Then he presented Sergei Koval.
Koval stated that he had applied more than twenty various audio characteristics in the course of examination, and the analysis showed that the recordings had been made using completely different types of equipment. “The conclusion was unequivocal: these wiretaps were not registered with this type of equipment,” Koval added.[15]
If true, this would absolve the security service from having made illegal wiretaps. Koval claimed the Colombian secret service didn’t have the necessary equipment to produce the type of recordings leaked to the media. Muñoz, in turn, was happy to point a finger to some private unidentified spies, “We have sufficiently strong preliminary evidence to say that there is a market for mobile equipment interception which lacks control.”
Koval had come halfway around the world to speak up for the Colombian secret police. And it turned out these public declarations were wrong. A few months later a prosecutor in Colombia declared that he had proof that a DAS team had spied on public figures with the knowledge of officials in President Álvaro Uribe’s office.[16] Eventually some DAS officials confirmed that it was indeed the DAS that had conducted illegal wiretapping. One employee admitted he had received orders directly from the DAS director, Maria del Pilar Hurtado, and the intended recipient of wiretap transcripts was President Álvaro Uribe.[17] In late 2011 the agency was finally disbanded, and the expert on speech recognition was long gone from Bogotá, back to Russia, and then on to Mexico.
On the outskirts of St. Petersburg, in a glossy new business center, there is a small company named Protei. The company’s office was a bit chaotic in 2011—they had just moved in—with tables and wires all over the place. The computers had yet to be installed, but Protei was already making something highly desired outside of Russia: the equipment for making sure that the black boxes—the SORM technologies—would work in countries like Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, where authoritarian rulers with miserable human rights practices and intolerant of democracy and dissent were eager to use the technology to control the Internet. The company produced all kinds of technology from SORM-1 to SORM-3, from phone eavesdropping to Internet intercepts. In December 2011 WikiLeaks and Privacy International launched the Spy Files project, a database on companies that sell such surveillance gear around the world.[18] Although most of the vendors are British, Israeli, German, and American companies, it also included Koval’s SpeechPro and Protei.
We went to see another engineer who had made it in the world of secret services and secret surveillance. Vadim Sekeresh was head of the SORM department at Protei. A phlegmatic, forty-year-old graduate of the applied mathematics department of St. Petersburg University, he seemed unruffled by the WikiLeaks disclosure. Like so many other engineers, he did not ask deep moral or ethical questions about how his products were being used. “I didn’t pay any attention to it,” Sekeresh said of the report. “I didn’t really look into it because the whole thing doesn’t bother me. After all, we are not producing the listening devices, or bugs. And… we aren’t the only ones producing such tech anyway.”[19] A few months later he told Andrei in an e-mail, “Lots of crimes are solved thanks to technology. It’s obvious that everything could be used to harm, but it’s not related to the producers.”
In other words, it is not the engineers’ fault.
In 2012, the year Internet filtering was introduced in Russia, Protei developed a product based on DPI technology to implement the censorship of Roskomnadzor. In March 2015 Protei announced that the company had successfully deployed an Internet-filtering system based on DPI on the network of Kyrgyzstan’s telecom operator MegaCom, one of the largest in the country. Russian engineers, once again, developed the hardware that brought one of the world’s most intrusive Internet-filtering technologies to Central Asia.