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

When the Ministry of State Security decided to launch the Marfino project in 1947, Mints was asked to lead it, but he declined. [2] Konstantin Kalachev, V kruge tretiem [In the Third Circle]. Kalachev worked as a researcher at Marfino from 1947 to 1996, and in 1999 he wrote a history of the Marfino project. When the authors of this book called the Research Institute of Automation ( http://niia.ru/eng.htm ), a successor to the sharashka that occupies the building in Marfino to this day, we were told that Kalachev’s book is the only authoritative source of information. The book was published and is available only at http://anmal.narod.ru/kniga/kniga.html . 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] The general was Foma Zhelezov, chief of the department in the security service in charge of developing various kinds of technology, from radios and weapons to listening devices. Lev Kopelev, Utili moi pechaly [Soothe My Sorrows] (Moscow: Novaya Gazeta, 2011), 234.

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] Editorial, “Ob Odnoy antipatrioticheskoy gruppe teatralnikh critikov” [About one group of unpatriotic theatrical critics], Pravda , January 28, 1949, www.ihst.ru/projects/sohist/books/cosmopolit/100.htm . 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] Kopelev, Utili moi pechaly [Soothe My Sorrows], 239.

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] Vladimir Fridkin, interview with authors, September 2014.

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.