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

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] Mikhail Elistratov, interviews with authors, October 2014.

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] Joint order of the MGB, MVD, SVR, GUO No. N165/211/29/81, “On Approval and Enactment of the Temporary Instruction on the Organization and Tactics of Operational and Technical Measures,” June 22, 1992; also, Order of the Communications Ministry No. 226, “On the Use of Means of Communication for Search Operations of the Ministry of Security of the Russian Federation,” June 24, 1994. 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] Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan, The New Nobility: The Restoration of the Russian Security State and the Enduring Legacy of the KGB (New York: PublicAffairs, 2010). 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 prosecutor’s jurisdiction was limited by a stipulation in a February 1995 law, “On Organs of the Federal Security Service in the Russian Federation,” Article 24: “Information regarding people who provide or have provided FSB organs with confidential assistance regarding the organization, tactics, methods, and means of implementing the activity of FSB organs shall not be subject to oversight by the prosecutor’s office.”