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

The Soviet regime rigidly controlled public space. Newspapers and television were censored by the general directorate for the Protection of State Secrets in the Press, known as Glavlit, which reported to the Council of Ministers. From March 1961 Glavlit was also put in charge of controlling the communications (telex and phone conversations) of foreign correspondents in Moscow. [9] Yevgenia Albats, The State Within a State: The KGB and Its Hold on Russia—Past, Present, and Future (New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1994), 234. A photocopy of the document is in the Russian edition of the book, Mina zamedlennogo deistvia. Politichesky portret KGB (Moscow, 1992), 314. Another government committee, known as Goskomizdat, censored fiction and poetry. Radios were jammed, and dozens of jamming transmitters were positioned along the borders. It was a fast-growing industry. In 1949 350 short-wave transmitters tried to jam the Western radio broadcasts. In 1950 there were 600 of them; in 1955, about 1,000, with 700 in the Soviet bloc countries. Their goal was to jam what amounted to no more than 70 Western transmitters. By 1986 the Soviet Union had thirteen powerful long-range jamming stations, and local city jamming stations were established in eighty-one cities, with 1,300 transmitters in total. The radio jamming was stopped only in November 1988 by the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. [10] Rimantas Pleikis, “Radiocenzura” [Radio Censorship], Agentura.ru, 2003, www.agentura.ru/equipment/radiocenzura .

For most of the seven decades of Soviet rule to seek information was a risky and dangerous game for ordinary people. Soviet-produced radio sets had certain frequencies disabled. To be found in possession of a quartz with the wrong frequencies was a criminal offense. Soviet-made radios were required to be registered with the government, a rule that was canceled only in 1962. The authorities wanted to be able to track anyone who copied information; the KGB required that samples taken from all typewriters be kept on file in case one had to be identified.

The ordinary and casual exchange of news with foreigners was also restricted. Living behind closed borders, Soviet citizens needed an “exit visa” to go abroad, a long-cherished dream that could be granted only after a long talk with a KGB officer. When abroad, Soviet citizens were requested to walk in groups so to exclude any contact with locals, including informal conversations. Soviet citizens who were allowed to go on business trips were requested to present reports of their encounters with foreigners.

Not surprisingly, the Communist Party wanted to force Soviet citizens to censor themselves. And the intimidation was effective. Everybody in the Soviet Union knew the expression “this is not a phone conversation,” which expressed a wish to discuss something in person because they were afraid somebody else might be listening. The “somebody else” was the state and its vast networks of informers.

The Soviet Union was not an occupying regime; instead, the regime attempted to make everyone complicit in its goals. The peculiar structure of Soviet society helped the authorities in this. The military-industrial complex was an enormous archipelago of institutes, factories, and government ministries. By some accounts, it made up 30 to 40 percent of the Soviet economy. Within it the Soviet Union employed a vast army of engineers at secret military and security research facilities, known colloquially as “post office boxes.” These laboratories and offices were known only by a post office box number, such as NII-56. Any mail would be addressed to that box number, not to the real name of the facility. One purpose of the zip-code-style number system was to hide the secret facilities from the prying eyes of foreigners, who were prohibited from going near them. Often the state designated an entire city “closed.” Both of Irina Borogan’s parents, engineers by training, worked at the post office box in the tiny town of Electrougli: foreigners were not allowed into the town, although it is located only twelve miles from Moscow. There a certain kind of vague doublespeak took hold and became part of everyday conversations. A person might say they worked at a “post office box” developing a “device,” but their meaning was immediately clear. In this way the Soviet population was co-opted into becoming a part of the system. Even if an individual didn’t work at a “post office box” or in the military, it was likely that someone else in the family did so, and the rules covered everyone.

In such a system the government did little to encourage telephone use. Officials at the Soviet Ministry of Communications loved to recall Khrushchev’s statement that Soviet citizens did not need home phones because, unlike in the United States, there was no stock exchange in the Soviet Union, and therefore they don’t need so much information.

When dissidents tried to use telephones to exchange information and contact each other, the KGB was quick to react.

Kopelev, who left the Kuchino sharashka in December 1954, became a passionate Soviet dissident in the 1970s. He turned his two-room apartment, on the sixth floor of an apartment building in the north of Moscow, into a gathering place for dissidents. Dozens of phone calls were made from there every day. But when the KGB found out, they cut off his home phone line. After that, his son-in-law brought him a handset from a phone station he worked at, a plastic black piece with a white disk, a dial, and a cable. Every night Kopelev walked down the stairs to the first floor of his apartment building. There was a room there for a dezhurnaya , a person on duty, usually a woman, whose job was to control who came into the building. Inside the room there was a phone, but the room was locked. However, outside there was a phone socket on the wall, and when the dezhurnaya went home, Kopelev got the device connected to the socket—and spoke for hours. [11] Maria Orlova (Kopelev’s daughter), interview with authors, October 2014.

In 1972 the KGB requested the Soviet Council of Ministers to adopt a new rule prohibiting the use of international phone lines “in a manner contrary to the public interest and public order of the USSR.” [12] Yuri Andropov, “Ob Ispolzovanii evreiskimi natcionalistami mezjnudarodnogo telephonnogo kanala svyazi” [About the Use of International Phone Calls by Jewish Nationalists], order No. 1428-A, June 1975, quoted in Evreiskaya emigratsia v svete novikh documentov , ed. B. Morozov, 41–44 (Tel Aviv: The Cummings Center for Russian and Eastern European Studies, Tel Aviv University, 1998). It was a typical KGB move to keep tight control. Even though the restriction was approved, it was not enough for the KGB; they wanted still more restrictions. In June 1975 Yuri Andropov, then chairman of the KGB, reported to the Central Committee about a new threat. He said that Jewish refuseniks were making international phone calls. In his letter to the Central Committee marked “Secret,” Andropov reported that in 1973–1974 more than one hundred phone customers were identified and their phone lines turned off, which, according to the KGB chairman, “caused a severe blow to the foreign Zionist organizations which consider regular telephone as the most important way to get information of interest from the Soviet Union.” [13] Ibid., 41–44.

Andropov warned, however, that the Russian Zionists were bypassing the KGB by actively using automated international telephone lines as well as telephone booking offices to make international calls using bogus names. The KGB lamented that the Zionists had delivered a series of appeals to the West addressed to the international community, demanding that the Soviet authorities restore their disconnected phones. Andropov’s recommendation was “to suppress the use of international communication channels for transmission abroad of biased and slanderous information.” [14] Ibid.