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

But Andropov could not block communications completely. In spite of his best efforts, some kinds of information kept flowing.

The same month that Andropov reported his concern to the Central Committee, a samizdat book was being passed to Kharkiv, 460 miles west of Moscow. The book was essentially a stack of tissue paper, bound by coarse thread, containing a collection of articles written by Vladimir Jabotinsky, a prominent Zionist in the early years of the twentieth century.

The samizdat book was passed to Alexander Paritsky, who was then thirty-seven years old. He lived with his wife, Polya, and two daughters in a small apartment. Kharkiv was mostly known for a huge tank factory. Paritsky’s father and brother were both imprisoned under Stalin, but he was by no means a dissident. He was constantly reminded, however, that he was a Jew. He had a modestly successful career as an engineer at a local research institute.

Paritsky’s sister, Dora, brought the dog-eared samizdat manuscript to him. “As usual, we had it for only the one night and then it went further on the chain,” Paritsky recalled. This was the usual procedure for samizdat—you could read it for one night and you had to pass it on. [15] Alexander Paritsky, communications with authors, October 2014. The night turned into a marathon reading session. By the next morning “Polya and I became Zionists. We decided to emigrate to Israel,” Paritsky recalled.

The next day he announced their decision to an astonished Dora. However, there was a problem: Paritsky worked on radars for the Ministry of Defense, and that made all his work top secret. Soon he left his job and became an elevator repairman. In July 1976 he applied for an exit visa for himself and his family. He also tried to find a way to contact Moscow’s community of refuseniks, hoping to make his case public. Paritsky began getting letters from Jews in Israel and soon got his first phone call from abroad. When he received his second international call, from London, the phone was turned off right in the middle of conversation.

“I was told that my phone was turned off by the order of the chief of Kharkiv’s communications center,” he recalled. “My wife and I arranged to see him, to find out the reasons.”

When the pair went to the communications center, the chief just gave the Paritskys a brochure, which turned out to be the Charter of Communications. The chief pointed to the article that had been inserted in 1972 prohibiting the use of the phone to do harm to the Soviet state. To drive the point home, a few days later Paritsky got a formal summons to the city council offices, where he was given a warning about his anti-Soviet activities. However, Paritsky didn’t stop, and after that he made his calls from special offices where citizens could book calls through telephone operators.

On August 27, 1981, Paritsky was arrested near his apartment in Kharkiv. The Chronicle of Current Events reported his case. The KGB first hinted at accusations of espionage, knowing of Paritsky’s past secret work, but then they changed tactics, indicting him instead for using international telephone lines to spread anti-Soviet information. “At the court, the prosecution presented a woman, an operator at the international telephone communications hub. She testified that during her duty her client complained about the poor quality of the line. Then she gave my name, so she identified me by my voice heard on the phone five to seven years earlier,” Paritsky recalled. “She then explained that she connected the line to check the quality and heard me defaming of the Soviet system.”

He was sentenced to three years in jail and sent to the labor camps. Only in April of 1988 were Paritsky and his family allowed to leave the Soviet Union.

At the height of the KGB’s powers, however, it turned out that the Soviet Union did indeed need international telecommunications—Moscow would host the Olympics in 1980 and the Kremlin wanted to go about things properly. In 1979 the number of international lines was significantly increased. An international telephone exchange station, located in two tall buildings on Butlerova Street in Moscow’s southwest and known as M9, was opened to deal with the expected calls.

When, on July 19, 1980, the Games opened in Moscow, Gennady Kudryavtsev, an engineer at the Department of the International and Intercity Communications of the Ministry of Communications, felt especially proud. Kudryavtsev had carried out a project to expand the international phone lines. He had delivered them on time. There were sixteen hundred new channels and a whole floor of M9 for international calls. [16] Gennady Kudryavtsev, interview with authors, October 2014. These channels provided automatic connection, without an operator, which was hitherto unheard of in the Soviet Union.

The KGB had resisted the expansion. To mollify them, the Ministry of Communications suggested that callers would have to dial not only the number they wanted to call but also their own number so no one would go unidentified. The KGB was still reluctant to allow more phone lines to contact the outside world. Then Kudryavtsev suggested adding another way for the KGB to eavesdrop on conversations. “There was a specialist who told me that there was a way to add a special programming loop to get all calls intercepted,” said Kudryavtsev. The method of intercepting all calls was introduced. Only then was the KGB finally satisfied. No matter how many more lines were opened, they could listen to any call.

The sixteen hundred channels turned out to be quite enough for the Games, which were boycotted by sixty-five countries in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. No one complained. “All the calls went through on the first attempt, because there was almost nobody to call, to be honest,” Kudryavtsev recalled.

Still, the regime did not want to let people have the option for long. A few months after the Olympics, in early 1981, Kudryavtsev, who had been appointed the first deputy minister of communications, was called to the offices of the Central Committee of the Communist Party.

He was uneasy. Just a few days before, he had learned that part of his responsibilities as first deputy minister was to oversee the system of Soviet jamming stations. He knew that the summons to the Central Committee had to do with the international lines. “I heard already that the KGB people went around complaining about international phone lines,” he said. But when he arrived, it was worse than he thought; he was given a secret decision approved by the secretariat of the Central Committee to reduce the number of automatic international lines. The lines had been his triumph, but now he was being asked to take them down.

The decision was presented as coming from the Central Committee, but in fact it was written at KGB headquarters. Kudryavtsev was put in charge, and the scale astonished him: the order was to reduce the number of overseas channels from sixteen hundred to only one hundred. For channels to some countries, the cut was even more drastic. “We had eighty-nine channels for the United States, and I was told to reduce the number to only six,” Kudryavtsev said. He was clearly upset, “Of course it hurt me—I made it, I saw that it was necessary, that it was impossible to go without it.”

In a month Kudryavtsev destroyed his own creation. The changes made automatic connection almost impossible, and customers, including foreign embassies, noticed it. On a small sheet of paper Kudryavtsev wrote out an explanation that it was due to “technical problems,” but he blushed every time he was forced to explain.

Finally Kudryavtsev found a way to take control of a telephone station on Leninsky Prospect. He redirected the lines of those who were allowed to use automatic international connection to this single station. In a year the chosen organizations, approved by the authorities, found that automatic international connection was restored.