Андрей Солдатов: The Red Web: The Struggle Between Russia's Digital Dictators and the New Online Revolutionaries

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] Larry Press, professor of computer information systems at California State University, has posted these messages on a website at the California State University, Dominguez Hills. See som.csudh.edu.

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.