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

That month Navalny posted on his blog his investigation of corruption in Transneft during the construction of a pipeline from Eastern Siberia to the Pacific Ocean. He found that 120 billion rubles had disappeared, and he then posted online scans of documents he had obtained. The next day he woke up the most popular muckraker in Russia. In the country where traditional media were distrusted and investigative journalism was compromised, he soon earned a reputation as a fearless fighter of corruption. “My blog exists only because there is a censorship in media,” said Navalny. [20] “Pravila zhisni, Alexey Navalny” [Rules of Life, Alexey Navalny], Esquire , December 2011, http://esquire.ru/wil/alexey-navalny . His popularity among the middle classes in big Russian cities, fed up with corruption, rocketed. TV Dozhd reported his every move.

Meanwhile the authorities were still foundering in the new digital era. Medvedev made a show of being in tune with the age by visiting Silicon Valley in the United States. He opened a Twitter account—@kremlinrussia—during his visit to Twitter headquarters and ordered government ministries to launch Twitter accounts as well. Even the FSB followed orders and launched an account, but only for a few months. Medvedev also started a high-tech incubator project known as Skolkovo, an attempt to create a Russian version of Silicon Valley. But it was very late to the game, and rather than springing up from innovation, it was directed from the top down.

Medvedev wanted to make Russia technically advanced but not necessarily more democratic. He was eager to follow Singapore’s authoritarian leader, Lee Kuan Yew, who was put on the board of Skolkovo, chaired by Medvedev. When Medvedev visited Singapore in 2009, the bureaucracy’s effectiveness impressed him; he registered a company online, and it took just a few minutes. Medvedev cited Singapore as the model Russia must follow. [21] Kremlin.ru, transcripts, Speech at Meeting with Russian and Singaporean Business Communities, November 16, 2009, http://eng.kremlin.ru/transcripts/10449 .

Navalny was equally fond of Lee Kuan Yew, praised his effectiveness in fighting corruption, and said, “I would forgive many things to Putin, if he were a Russian Lee Kuan Yew.” [22] “Pravila zhisni.”

Authoritarian leaders don’t tolerate criticism from outside and zealously protect their national sovereignty. Medvedev shared this approach, and Shchegolev, his minister of communications, began to promote the idea of Russia’s “national sovereignty” on the Internet. Soldatov helped acquire for Russia the Cyrillic domain .рф from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, in charge of managing domain names worldwide. But he left the government in November 2010, unwilling to support other ideas being debated, such as the development of a national computer operating system or a national search engine that would stand apart from the wider world of the Internet, ideas that were being frequently discussed in the corridors of power.

The mass protests that broke out in the Middle East in early 2011, known as the Arab Spring, struck Moscow as a threat to the Kremlin too. On January 14 the president of Tunisia, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, fled to Saudi Arabia after twenty-three years in power. On February 11, following waves of huge demonstrations, President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt resigned after twenty-nine years in office. Ten days later, on February 22, the Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, flew to Vladikavkaz, the capital of North Ossetia, a republic in the North Caucasus. The visit was not announced in advance. At the airport he was met by FSB director Alexander Bortnikov, and they went together to an urgently convened meeting of the National Antiterrorism Committee, which consisted of leaders of the security and law enforcement agencies. In the past Bortnikov had always chaired committee meetings, but this time Medvedev personally took the chair at the head of the table, with Bortnikov on his right. His face was gloomy; he spoke very slowly, emphasizing each word. He started by describing the situation in the North Caucasus and then turned to the Middle East. “Look at the current situation in the Middle East and the Arab world. It is extremely difficult and great problems still lie ahead,” he said. “We must face the truth. That scenario was harbored for us, and now attempts to implement it are even more likely. In any case, this plot will not work.” He was suggesting that a Western conspiracy was afoot, aimed at instigating protests to overthrow the Russian regime. [1] Transcript of the meeting of the National Antiterrorism Committee, February 22, 2011, http://eng.kremlin.ru/transcripts/1804 .

Putin, then prime minister, was even more emotional. On March 21 he visited a Russian ballistic missile factory, and one of the workers asked him about Western airstrikes aimed at toppling Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi. Putin retorted that it was just another example of the United States resorting to armed force. He then compared the Western air strikes to a medieval crusade, a comment with deep echoes in Russia’s historical memory: one of the early crusades, in the thirteenth century, was directed at Russia. Although it was repelled, the mention of crusades for many Russians evokes fear of being invaded by Western hostile forces. [2] Video of Putin’s remarks in Votkinsk, YouTube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tr-jIPUZPOk . Also see “Russia’s Putin Sees No ‘Logic or Conscience’ in US Air Strikes on Libya,” Interfax , March 21, 2001, and “Putin Likens UN Libya Resolution to Crusade Call,” RIA Novosti , March 21, 2011.

Putin had long harbored a suspicion that the United States was working on technology that would allow it to topple political regimes on the soil of the former Soviet Union. The “color revolutions” of the early part of the decade in Georgia and Ukraine were seen in the Kremlin as the direct result of an American effort to interfere with regimes closely allied with Moscow. Putin’s fear was uncomplicated: a revolution needs crowds, and authoritarian regimes had often successfully suppressed traditional means of mobilizing people, like trade unions and opposition parties. But the new method championed by the United States would bring to the streets youth movements organized from scratch. To counter this threat, the Kremlin attempted to straitjacket any political opposition groups that might use street demonstrations or occupy government buildings in protest. The Kremlin also launched pro-Putin youth movements, whose role was to fill the streets in case of a crisis.

Beyond this, the Kremlin also saw the Arab Spring as another threatening step toward American hegemony. It was not lost on Putin and his people that the events in Tunisia and Egypt were widely characterized as Facebook and Twitter revolutions. Putin and his entourage became worried that this time the United States had found a truly magic tool that could bring people to the streets without any organizing structure: the Internet. Anxious political masters in Moscow took careful note of a speech by Alec Ross, adviser for innovation to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, on June 22 in London, in which he declared that the “Che Guevara of the twenty-first century is the network.” [3] Josh Halliday, “Hillary Clinton Adviser Compares Internet to Che Guevara,” Guardian , June 22, 2011, www.theguardian.com/media/2011/jun/22/hillary-clinton-adviser-alec-ross . Two of his points were particularly threatening to the Kremlin: the Internet acted as an accelerant for the Arab Spring, and the Internet facilitated leaderless movements. Ross said that “dictatorships are now more vulnerable than they have ever been before, in part—but not entirely—because of the devolution of power from the nation state to the individual.” For people with a KGB mindset, this was a serious warning that the security services could easily miss the right moment and fail to identify the ringleaders, as there were no leaders of protests in the digital revolution and a crisis could break out swiftly. Soon social network technology was made a priority target for the secret services, primarily the FSB. But it was strange new territory they did not fully understand.