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

Putin asked what everyone at the table thought about the proposal. They all pretended to be surprised. Nossik raised his hand. “This is exactly why we are afraid of the government,” he said. “Like a magician, you pull out of your sleeve some government regulation, after which everyone can go home!” [22] Anton Nossik, interview with authors, August 2014.

A close friend of Nossik, Artemy Lebedev, a young website designer, arrived late to the meeting and took an empty chair, followed by his girlfriend, Marina Litvinovich, who worked for Pavlovsky. Lebedev, the son of a famous Russian writer, Tatiana Tolstaya, wore a bandana over his head, and was always carefully unshaven, with the manners of a creative type. Lebedev at once launched into an attack on the nongovernmental organization that was controlling the domain names. The director, Platonov, sat directly opposite Lebedev during the tirade. Lebedev accused the organization of unfairly setting prices too high for domain names.

Platonov, forty-five years old, was a nuclear physicist who had spent his entire career at the Kurchatov Institute. Sitting there, the target for a verbal attack right in front of a prime minister whom he just met for the first time, he was evidently confused. Platonov surmised that Lebedev’s angry speech was not accidental. The main topic of the meeting was state regulation and, in particular, the question of what to do with the domain .ru. For Platonov, the idea of state regulation of domain names—what Lesin was proposing—seemed “some sort of a racket: you have something profitable—give it to me.” And Lebedev’s attack in front of Putin provided the government arguments for why the status quo should be changed. Platonov responded emotionally. [23] Platonov, interview with authors, September 2014. The volume of the discussion and the cross talk soon became unmanageable, but it was clear that everyone at the table, both old and young generations, were dead set against the Lesin proposal.

Soldatov raised his hand again. When Putin nodded, he said, “I suggest we should have the project subjected to public discussion.”

Putin immediately responded, “Agreed. Let’s decide that this project, and all projects in the area of the Internet, will be subject to public debate.”

With that, the Lesin proposal was effectively killed off. The meeting had lasted more than an hour and a half.

Arkady Volozh, founder of the Yandex search engine and present at the meeting, though mostly silent, took with him a pencil from the White House, which his son put up for sale the next day on the online auction Molotok.ru for 2,500 rubles, with the description, “A pencil stolen from Putin’s meeting with the Internet professionals.” [24] See Anton Nossik’s LiveJournal.com entry, http://dolboeb.livejournal.com/2682401.html .

To Nossik, the meeting was pure theater. He was certain that Putin knew the script and how it would turn out. He concluded that the real purpose of the meeting was to improve Putin’s image as an advanced and liberal-minded leader of Russia. After all, Putin was, at the time, making parallel efforts to persuade Western businessmen that he accepted the free-market system and would be committed to Yeltsin’s path. Nossik also thought that the Internet crowd was summoned to show their support, and they delivered. “Thanks to me, thanks to all of us, Putin got what he wanted,” Nossik recalled. “He was supported by the most advanced part of society.”

Nossik never thought the Lesin project had a real chance of being implemented. But Soldatov believed the project was for real, and he felt great relief when they secured Putin’s promise not to sign anything without a public debate. For years the Kremlin kept this promise. “We got what we wanted,” Soldatov recalled.

For all of the Internet people who came to the White House that day, the encounter left the rules as they were. The status quo remained in place, and that was what they wanted.

Putin took away a different impression. In 1999 Putin was not very familiar with the brave new world of the Internet. He didn’t have e-mail, and he was given information from the Internet on printouts. As always, he tried to shape the people he saw into his understanding of the world, defined by his KGB background and his tough years in St. Petersburg in the early 1990s. And what he saw was that the most important figures in this new area were all closely tied to the Kremlin in one way or another—through his spin doctors or government agencies, many of them dependent on government contracts. He also saw, in Lebedev’s remarks, that these people could be easily manipulated. They could be divided and subdivided. This was a KGB method, but for now he didn’t need to do anything.

Three days later, on New Year’s Eve, Yeltsin announced he was resigning and then handed over his powers to Putin.

President Putin never forgot that Vladimir Gusinsky’s media empire had nearly broken the Kremlin. He was determined to seize control of broadcast television, by far the most pervasive and effective news media in Russia. But just as Putin went after television, the news media reached a turning point. People lost faith in traditional news sources and began to rely on digital outlets. A new wave was coming, gradually but with profound consequences, and it all started with a few independent bloggers.

Putin won the presidential elections on March 26, 2000, and took the oath of office on May 7 in a grand ceremony in the gilded and chandeliered Andreev throne hall of the Kremlin Palace. Four days later, on May 11, armed officers of the security services raided the offices of Media-Most on Palashevsky Lane in Moscow. A month later, on June 13, Gusinsky was detained and imprisoned in the Butyrka jail in the center of the city, placed in a tiny cell with six other inmates in the most notorious of Russian prisons. On the morning of his first day in jail, while meeting with his lawyer, Gusinsky wrote on a copy of his arrest warrant, “It is a political intrigue, organized by high-placed officials for whom freedom of speech poses a danger and an obstacle to their plans.” [1] Dmitry Pavlov, “Vzyali Vladimira Gusinskogo” [Gusinsky is Caught], Kommersant , June 13, 2000, www.kommersant.ru/doc/17059 . Soon he received a message from Mikhail Lesin, the Russian government’s press minister. Lesin wanted Gusinsky to sell Media-Most in return for his freedom. After three days in jail, Gusinsky agreed. He was released on June 16, and from the prison he went directly to the Media-Most offices and secretly recorded a video statement saying that he only agreed to sell the company under duress.

Gusinsky was put under house arrest. Over the next three weeks his lawyers hammered out the terms of the sale of Media-Most to the state-owned natural gas monopoly Gazprom. Gusinsky signed the agreement, and it was countersigned by Lesin in his capacity as minister. Then Gusinsky was allowed to leave the country. He fled to London and exile.

Despite the agreement, Gusinsky was reluctant to hand over the company. To pressure him, different law enforcement agencies, under guidance of the General Prosecutor’s Office, launched a massive attack on him personally and the media that were part of his empire. To turn up the heat, arrests, criminal cases, accusations, and visits from the FSB and tax police followed. The financial director of Media-Most, Anton Titov, was accused of fraud and sent to jail.

In January 2001 the General Prosecutor’s Office summoned Tatiana Mitkova, the top NTV anchor, for interrogation. Now the NTV journalists felt they needed to act on their own. Mitkova’s colleague, Svetlana Sorokina, the presenter who had first interviewed Putin a year earlier, addressed Putin during her program on NTV, saying, “Vladimir Vladimirovich, maybe you can find some time to meet us, the journalists of NTV?” The same day she got a call from Putin, and a few days later the president invited eleven journalists from the channel to a meeting at the Kremlin.