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

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] Larry Press, interview with authors, October 2014.

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] Vladimir Bulgak, interview with authors, August, 2014.

“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] The account is based on the authors’ copy of the indictment of the general prosecutor of the Russian Federation No. 18/6214–01 (the case of the attempt of the coup d’état), 158.

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] Gennady Kudryavtsev, who had fought so hard to expand the international phone lines into the Soviet Union in 1980, was named communications minister of the Soviet Union in March 1991 by Gorbachev. He was flying to Belgrade on August 19 when the coup attempt began. On his plane a crew commander told Kudryavtsev about the putsch. But he ordered the pilot not to change course. Kudryavtsev apparently decided it was not his fight—he was obviously not Yeltsin’s man, as he was a Gorbachev appointee, and the Union’s ministers were of higher status than members of the republican Russian government. Nor did Kudryavtsev want to support the putsch led by the KGB. As Moscow was gripped in uncertainty, Kudryavtsev remained far away in Belgrade. Kudryavtsev, Nepridumannaya Zhizn [Not Invented Life] (Moscow: self-published, 2009).

On the afternoon of August 21 Kryuchkov told Kalgin to stop the eavesdropping on Yeltsin and his people and destroy all the records. [20] Kalgin’s testimony before the internal investigation conducted by the KGB, published in: Urushadze Georgy “Izbrannie mesta iz perepiski s vragami” [Selected Passages from Correspondence with Enemies] (St. Petersburg: European House, 1995), 347.

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.