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

In the 1990s Pavlovsky had not been very successful, always close to many promising projects, but he had never really come out on top. His Postfactum news agency had closed in 1996, and although he had been on the board of Kommersant , the most successful Russian business daily, somehow Pavlovsky was always distracted with minor public relations projects throughout the 1990s. Now Putin’s campaign offered him a new route to success. But he knew the rules: you should have something behind you to be useful, either a reputation—which Pavlovsky lacked—or a TV channel or a newspaper, like the tycoons had; he did not have those either. The one thing he did pay attention to was the Internet. The meeting between Putin and the Internet entrepreneurs could prove to the Kremlin that Pavlovsky was in command of the Internet and, thus, enhance his prestige.

Pavlovsky called Anton Nossik, the then thirty-three-year-old editor-in-chief of a new online media outlet, Lenta.ru, and invited him to attend the meeting with Putin. Nossik had few illusions about Putin and his KGB past. His family was a part of rebellious liberal-minded Moscow intelligentsia who didn’t like official Soviet policy regarding art. Nossik was quite certain that his generation was smarter and had brighter prospects than the old Yeltsin elite. It didn’t help that a week before the scheduled meeting, on December 20, Putin went to FSB headquarters on Lubyanka Square to celebrate the Day of Security Organizations and made a famous remark: “Dear comrades, I can report that the group of agents you sent to infiltrate the government has accomplished the first part of its mission.” This was followed by approving laughter from FSB officers. [16] Putin’s statement at the FSB headquarters, December 20, 1999, YouTube (in Russian, with English subtitles), www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qb63vKtCvRo .

Nossik wasn’t surprised by the invitation; his new project was part of Pavlovsky’s collection of online media. “I had known Anton for long, over ten years maybe, and I invited him to launch Lenta.ru,” said Pavlovsky. And Nossik recalled that “all our projects then were with” Pavlovsky. Nossik’s office was located in the hulking building of the state-owned news agency RIA Novosti on Zubovsky Boulevard that also housed Pavlovsky’s online media.

Pavlovsky asked Nossik and Marina Litvinovich, a young online journalist well connected in Moscow’s Internet subculture and working in Pavlovsky’s foundation, to select people for the meeting with the prime minister. Nossik selected his young friends, most in their twenties, including colleagues at Pavlovsky’s organization, and people who had websites and online media.

But the preparations took time, and word of the meeting filtered over to the offices of the Russian government, the formal structure of ministries and agencies, led by Prime Minister Putin. One of those who heard about it was Oleg Rykov, a veteran adviser to the government on information technology. [17] Oleg Rykov, interview with authors, August 2014. In the 1980s he had been involved in a top-secret, ambitious, and very expensive program, supervised by the KGB, to build a system of managing the Soviet Union during war with underground city bunkers built all over the country as well as powerful computer centers burrowed deep underground. He knew a lot about computers and hated secrecy; he was sure that in most cases it just covered up incompetence. He was also very skeptical of government intrusion into the Internet.

Rykov became alarmed when he heard of a plan drafted by Mikhail Lesin, then minister in charge of the news media, that would effectively hand over the distribution of domain names from the nongovernmental organization based at the Kurchatov Institute to the government. For him, it meant only one thing. “Lesin wanted to take away the entire Internet,” Rykov said later. [18] The nongovernmental organization was the Russian Institute of Public Networks (ROSNIIROS). Rykov learned that Lesin would present the plan at the meeting with Putin that, if approved, would effectively put the Russian Internet under direct control of the state, determining who used which domain names.

Rykov immediately called Alexey Soldatov and warned him about Lesin’s worrisome plan. Officially the Information Department of the government was tasked to select the meeting’s participants, so Rykov lobbied to include his government department, the Department of Science, as one of the official organizers. Finally it was agreed that both departments would jointly select the twenty attendees. Rykov and Soldatov huddled to make choices for their slots, choosing mostly veterans of the Internet of the early 1990s.

Simultaneously Soldatov, seeking to build a united front against Lesin’s initiative, called Anatoly Levenchuk and asked him to find Nossik. Levenchuk put all his energy into it and tried for two weeks to locate Nossik, but without success.

When the date of the meeting was announced, Soldatov gathered his group at the offices of Relcom, still next door to the Kurchatov Institute, to establish their strategy. They decided that Soldatov was to speak first and that they would try to kill the Lesin proposal.

On December 28, 1999, two groups of people went separately to the White House. Eight years after Yeltsin and his supporters had barricaded themselves inside and seven years after the violent confrontation with hardliners in 1993, when it was shelled by tanks, there were no visible traces. The building was now renovated and surrounded by high fences and checkpoints, and demonstrations were prohibited near the building.

The two groups saw each other for the first time in the lobby, then took the elevator to the fifth floor, to the so-called central zone of the Dom Pravitelstva , or house of government. As they waited outside the conference hall on the fifth floor, they didn’t talk much to each other.

They looked as different as they felt. The younger ones were dressed casually, whereas the older generation wore suits. The younger group “was another crowd,” recalled Alexey Platonov, a director of the nongovernmental organization that managed domain names and a friend of Soldatov. “We were dealing with the infrastructure,” Platonov said. “There are several levels of the Internet, and ours was the low and the middle levels, and then on the top there is the add-on that became known as ‘the Internet.’ They then considered themselves the elite, and they called us communication people, plumbers.” [19] Alexey Platonov, interview with authors, September 2014.

Finally the participants were shown into the large conference hall with a long horseshoe-shaped table with chairs lined up shoulder to shoulder. They sat as they wished. Putin was at the head of the table, along with a deputy and two ministers—Lesin and Leonid Reiman, who was minister of communications. Soldatov sat to the right of Putin, and Nossik sat opposite him. Pavlovsky, who had thought up the idea of the meeting, did not attend.

Putin made a brief introduction. Soldatov immediately raised a hand. [20] Alexey Soldatov, interview with authors, July–September 2014. He delivered a lecture, speaking somewhat slowly and clearly, about the history of the Internet in Russia. Then, following a plan agreed beforehand, Soldatov turned to Mikhail Yakushev, a well-known jurist, who explained with equal care how the Internet was regulated.

Putin nodded and then suddenly produced a file. Inside it was a description of the Lesin plan to take over the domain names, agreed upon with Reiman. It had two chapters, titled, “On Ordering the Allocation and Use of Domain Names” and “On the Establishment of a National System of Registration of Domain Names.” Taken together, they would deliver control over the domain .ru to a government body and to make all kinds of organizations, from joint-stock companies to media to schools, use these domain names and launch their corporate sites by December 31, 2000. [21] The text of the draft is available on the site of libertarium.ru, www.libertarium.ru/gvt-names .