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

For the rest of the country it was not—and remained that way for many years.

Kudryavtsev was angry because the KGB was given everything they demanded for the Olympics, but after the games were over, they forced everything to go back to the way it was before. As a Soviet official, Kudryavtsev completely accepted that the KGB needed to possess the means for intercepting calls, but he didn’t understand why they needed to cut the lines. It was against his engineer’s nature, and it tortured him for years. His usual sad joke was to tell his friends that he got his first government award for increasing international communications capacities, and his second award came for cutting them off.

For many years after 1981 Kudryavtsev tried to talk some sense into the KGB, but the generals would not listen. They believed he was behind the expansion of the phone lines before the Olympics—and in this they were right—and they told him only one thing: “Gennady Georgievich, you had f—ed us when you were leading to the Olympics. Now shut up.”

Kudryavtsev took that rather seriously. He knew how intimate the relationship between the Ministry of Communications and the Soviet secret services was. In the massive building of the Ministry of Communications on Tverskaya Street, known as the Central Telegraph, he was given an office once used by Genrikh Yagoda, a chief of Stalin’s secret police, the NKVD, who was also a commissar of communications. “All the furniture was from Yagoda’s times—his table, his safe—only his lift was blocked, which used to lead to the basement and then to the metro. But I checked—the lift shaft was still there.”

In 1988 Kudryavtsev went to the Politburo to explain a minor issue of international connection between a factory in Ivanovo, not far from Moscow, and its Bulgarian partners, and Mikhail Gorbachev was present. When Gorbachev asked him what should be done to improve the line, Kudryavtsev replied, “Cancel the decision of the secretariat of the Central Committee on restrictions of international communications.” Gorbachev said, “But what should be done specifically for Ivanovo?” And thus the question was postponed again. [17] In 1989 Kudryavtsev finally found a way to bypass the restrictions. Denis Thatcher, the husband of British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, was a counsel to Cable & Wireless, the British telecom company. Kudryavtsev suggested to him that they launch a joint project in Moscow to establish dozens of phone boxes for automatic international connection in hotels and airports. The project was given a green light, and once again automatic international calls were possible from Moscow, at least in a very limited way. But the hour was late; these were the final years before the Soviet collapse.

Ayear after Kudryavtsev was forced to destroy his greatest achievement, Ed Fredkin, a leading computer authority at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a jovial and energetic former Air Force fighter pilot, went to Moscow. Fredkin had worked for years developing contacts inside the Soviet research community. He was fond of big ideas and flew to Moscow to attend a physics conference with the notion, as he recalled it, to “infect the Soviet Union with personal computers.”

“Since we arrived a few days prior to the start of the meeting, I immediately went to the Academy of Sciences Computation Center to reconnect with old friends and explain what I wanted to do,” he told us. “My friends told me that I had to talk to Yevgeny Velikhov. I called him, and he came over to the Computation Center.” [18] Edward Fredkin, interview with authors, October 2014.

Velikhov, then forty-seven years old, was an open-minded and ambitious nuclear physicist and a deputy director of the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy. Velikhov had recently been elected a vice president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, the youngest ever. Fredkin had known Velikhov for years, and he spoke openly with him, arguing that the widespread adoption of computer technologies was vital to the future of the Soviet Union and that better times could be realized only if the authorities gave up rigid control of information. Fredkin suggested that personal computers could fit with socialism even better than with capitalism, and Velikhov, an enthusiast of personal computers since the late 1970s—when he had bought for himself one of the first Apple models—arranged for Fredkin to speak before Soviet scholars at the presidium of the Academy of Sciences. “We needed this talk at the presidium to overcome the resistance,” recalled Velikhov. [19] Yevgeny Velikhov, interview with authors, September to November 2014. The goal was to change the Soviet government’s position, which was then geared toward developing information technologies by using a rigid hierarchical scheme with massive, central computers, and terminals, not personal computers.

Two days before the talk Fredkin was in his room in the Academy of Sciences Hotel when he got a phone call from someone. The person spoke English and didn’t introduce himself:

“I understand that you have been told by Velikhov that you will be allowed to give a talk at the next meeting of the presidium.”

“Yes, that is correct.”

“Well, we have looked into the matter, and to this date, no foreign person has ever made a presentation at a meeting of the presidium. It’s true that Vice President Velikhov is an important man, but he is not important enough to overcome such a lack of precedence.”

Fredkin was speechless.

“So, you will not address the meeting of the presidium.”

Not knowing how to reply, Fredkin simply said, “Thank you.”

But the next day Fredkin got another call from the same person, who now told him that the talk was approved. Still, it was not easy. “When I arrived to give my talk, the acting president of the Academy of Sciences, someone whom I knew well and considered to be a friend, pointedly stood up, put his papers into his briefcase, slammed it shut, and stormed out, just as Gromyko had done, on occasion, at the United Nations.”

Fredkin made every effort to break the ice. He told the audience about his family ties to Russia; his parents had been suppliers of wood for the imperial palace in St. Petersburg. He spoke of the large technology gap between the Soviet Union and the United States. He said computers were different: the performance-to-cost ratio improved by more than a factor of two every two years, making it uniquely different from any other kind of technology. But the suspicious audience first asked him why he cared about Soviet technological problems. Fredkin had a ready response, “My wife and I would feel safer back in Boston if the world remains relatively balanced.”

Fredkin impressed the audience. Next Velikhov went to Staraya Ploshad, a city square where the headquarters of the party’s Central Committee is located. He headed to a building right on the square, a big six-story neoclassical edifice with giant windows, built in 1914 for an insurance company. The top officials of the Central Committee had their offices there, and Velikhov had an appointment on the fourth floor to see Yuri Andropov. At the time Andropov, the KGB chief, had been elevated to become a secretary of the Central Committee, responsible for ideology; he was also sitting in for Brezhnev temporarily while the ailing general secretary was on holiday in Crimea. Velikhov asked for the meeting, an effort to overcome the resistance he faced to introducing personal computers into the Soviet Union.

The meeting with Andropov lasted an hour. “He was well prepared for the meeting, and he had his information from the foreign intelligence; it was obvious I didn’t need to explain to him things from scratch,” said Velikhov. He persuaded Andropov to form a new branch inside the Academy of Sciences, a section of information technologies and computation systems.