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

In May 2008 Putin turned the presidency of Russia over to Dmitry Medvedev, and Putin became prime minister. The mild-mannered Medvedev, then forty-three, who had first worked with Putin in St. Petersburg, was presented to the public as a liberal-minded politician with an interest in the Internet and technology. But he was still close to Putin. He was the same Medvedev who had been chief of Putin’s campaign staff in the Alexander House back in 2000.

One of Medvedev’s early moves was to recruit Alexey Soldatov, who had done so much to bring the Internet to Russia at the Kurchatov Institute, to become deputy minister of communications, responsible for the Internet. Alexey agreed to take the post. The joint venture of Relcom, his company, and FAPSI had come to nothing, and the company had struggled to survive for years in competition with big telecom holdings that also had their own landlines, an advantage Relcom never had. In a last desperate move the teams of Relcom and Demos tried to unite, but the attempt failed, and the national network of Relcom ceased to exist.

Andrei and Alexey Soldatov’s relationship was strained again, and Andrei learned about his father’s appointment when he got a call from a wire service correspondent. At that moment he was in the parking lot of Novaya Gazeta trying to inflate a tire on his eight-year-old car, an Opel. “Wow, Andrei, leave your old Opel—your black BMW is surely coming!” was the first mocking reaction of our amused colleagues at Novaya Gazeta .

Months after Medvedev took office, in August 2008, war broke out with Georgia. In six days the Russian army crushed the Georgian army, but the Kremlin was not happy with media coverage, especially on the Internet, where the war was frequently criticized.

At the time the biggest and the most popular search engine in the Russian-speaking world was Yandex. Every day the Russian news media struggled to get their stories placed in the top rankings of the search engine. In the late 2000s the middle class in Russia, especially educated people in the cities, lost their newspaper-reading habit in the morning and instead started using the Yandex home page as the starting point of the day and for their daily journey on the Internet. Five top news items on Yandex’s home page replaced the front pages of newspapers for millions of Russian Internet users.

In 2008 Yandex became the ninth-largest search engine in the world. [8] ComScore, “Worldwide Search Top 10,” December 2007, Total World Age 15+, Home and Work Locations, January 23, 2008, www.comscore.com/Insights/Press-Releases/2008/01/Baidu-Ranked-Third-Largest-World-Wide-Search-Engine . The company grew so quickly that the management thought of moving out of the offices on Samokatnaya Street that they had moved into just three years before. This pleasant area of Moscow was built up with red-brick factories in the late nineteenth century and maintains its character to this day. Yandex extensively renovated a three-and-a-half-story building of a former weaving mill down the road, giving it all the hallmarks of a global Internet giant headquarters: a parking lot for bicycles, a large open space inside, a reception desk held up by the letters of the Yandex logo, and an internal museum, with the very first server of the company on display.

In early September 2008, at the end of a working day, two black BMW sedans with flashing lights passed through the gates at Samokatnaya Street, past the life-sized statues of horses that had been brightly painted by children of Yandex employees, and pulled to a stop in front of the former factory.

Out of the cars climbed Surkov, Putin’s backroom strategist who was deputy chief of the presidential administration, and Konstantin Kostin, deputy head of the internal politics section of the administration. [9] Lev Gershenzon, interview with authors, August 2014. Surkov and Kostin went to the second floor, to the office of Arkady Volozh, the head of Yandex. In those days Volozh and the Yandex team were preoccupied with the threat of takeover by the oligarch Usmanov. His moves mysteriously coincided with the troubles the company now faced: a new data center had not opened because of a lack of some documentation, a strange criminal case was launched, with Yandex’s CEO made defendant, and so on. Volozh was a frequent guest at the presidential administration, and he tried to make friends to counter Usmanov’s moves. The Yandex people expected Usmanov to be the main topic of the meeting. For that reason Volozh invited Elena Ivashentseva, a senior partner at Baring-Vostok, a private equity fund and the main Yandex shareholder, to be present.

Lev Gershenzon, the twenty-nine-year-old chief of the Yandex News section, was also tipped off and told to be ready to provide explanations if the visitors were to ask how Yandex used algorithms to select news for the home page of the search engine. Volozh told Gershenzon that when he had gone to see Medvedev a few days before, he had noticed on his table a few screenshots of the Yandex home page, with headlines from Georgian media. Gershenzon recalled, “I had two tasks: to show them that it was a robot, not a human, who chose the news, and for that, to show the internal interface, the mechanism. The second task was to explain the top of the rating, and to show that it was selected by algorithm, not randomly.”

Indeed, soon after the meeting started, Gershenzon was summoned to Volozh’s office. When he came to the room, he saw Volozh, with two subordinates, along with Ivashentseva, Surkov, and Kostin standing. He was introduced, but Surkov and Kostin did not introduce themselves. They shook hands, and Gershenzon rushed to the table, knocking a glass over the table. It crashed to the floor. He quickly plugged his laptop into a large, flat TV and started showing his slides.

Gershenzon, who spoke slowly and softly, had strong democratic views. In fact, he had participated in all the anti-Putin protest marches. Gershenzon was not a programmer but rather a linguist. He joined Yandex in the fall of 2005 along with a team of friends to work on a special project—to use the search engine to identify the events connected with known persons, like politicians and celebrities, and fashion it into a news stream. Soon Gershenzon became the head of the larger operation of Yandex News. He knew how it worked from the inside, and when he was summoned to the meeting with Surkov and Kostin, he was well aware what was at stake. [10] Gershenzon was summoned to the meeting with Surkov and Kostin by Dmitry Ivanov, a projects director of Yandex. Before Yandex, Ivanov had worked in Pavlovsky’s foundation and succeeded Marina Litvinovich as chief of the FEP Internet department, when she was given Strana.ru to run.

Surkov, forty-three, was widely known as the Kremlin’s gray cardinal. [11] Steve Gutterman, “Russia’s Putin Brings ‘Gray Cardinal’ Surkov Back to Kremlin,” Reuters, September 20, 2013, www.reuters.com/article/2013/09/20/us-russia-surkov-idUSBRE98J0VK20130920 . He had an astonishing career; he had started in the early 1990s as a bodyguard for one of the most prominent Russian oligarchs, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, then made it to the position of his top advertising and then public relations man. In 1999 he landed in the president’s administration. Under Putin, he was believed to be behind most of the attempts to transform Russia into what he called a “sovereign democracy,” a term coined by Surkov, meaning that democracy in Russia should have different rules from that of the world outside. [12] Surkov first used the term “sovereign democracy” on February 22, 2006, in a speech before the Russian political party United Russia. According to Surkov, sovereign democracy is “a society’s political life where the political powers, their authorities, and decisions are decided and controlled by a diverse Russian nation for the purpose of reaching material welfare, freedom, and fairness by all citizens, social groups, and nationalities by the people that formed it.” See also Masha Lipman, “Putin’s ‘Sovereign Democracy,’” Washington Post , July 15, 2006, www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/14/AR2006071401534.html . These projects included creating pro-Kremlin youth organizations who could take to the streets to counter popular demonstrations, the so-called color revolutions such as Rose in Georgia and Orange in Ukraine, both uprisings that had forcibly ejected leaders from office. Surkov also built an effective system to corral the traditional media. He had sat at Putin’s right hand during the meeting with NTV journalists seven years earlier. Kostin, thirty-eight and fat and bulky, in the early 1990s had worked briefly at Kommersant , had a brief stint in public relations work, and had then gone to Khodorkovsky’s Menatep Bank, where he met Surkov. He worked on many pro-Kremlin projects, maintained good relations with Surkov, and in June 2008 was appointed to the president’s administration as “the right hand” of Surkov.