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

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] Mikhail Shevelev, interview with authors, November 2014.

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] Tregubova, Baiki kremlevskogo diggera , 163–166.

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] Gevorkyan, Timakova, and Kolesnikov, First Person . 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] Putin visited Finland October 22–23, 1999. For details, see NTV reportage, 1999, www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYMng6H7WCo . 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] Alexander Chudodeev, “Inakomislyashchy” [Dissident], an interview with Pavlovsky, Itogi , December 12, 2012, www.itogi.ru/spetzproekt/2012/49/184673.html . 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] Gleb Pavlovsky, interview with authors, October 2014. 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] Tregubova, Baiki kremlevskogo diggera , 216.

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.