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

On February 19, four days before the Games ended, the protest band Pussy Riot made a trip to Sochi to perform and planned to record a new video clip. They knew it could be difficult: after the group performed a punk prayer, “Mother of God, Chase Putin Away,” in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior, they were considered an enemy of the state, and three of them were imprisoned. Anastasia Kirilenko, a journalist for Radio Liberty , was to accompany Pussy Riot in Sochi. They were well aware of surveillance and had talked details of the coming trip via ChatSecure, an encrypted smartphone messenger. One of the group’s supporters gave them new cell phones that, in Sochi, they used exclusively. But it did not help Pussy Riot avoid surveillance. Video cameras spotted their car, and the police detained them a few times under false pretexts. [20] The account is based on Anastasia Kirilenko, interview with authors, March 2014.

Nevertheless, Pussy Riot managed to perform in Sochi twice. Five girls in colorful balaclavas started to shout out “Putin will teach you to love the Motherland” in front of the Sochi-2014 banner and were immediately attacked by a group of Cossacks, who beat them with whips, ripped their masks off, and threw the group’s guitar away. Journalists recorded the group’s performance and the Cossacks’ intrusion. A bit later the group held another performance in central Sochi next to the Olympic rings in front of the city hall. Although police watched the event, they did not intervene. The video of the clip went viral.

The Russian secret services have had a long tradition of using spying techniques not merely to spy on people but to intimidate them. The KGB had a method of “overt surveillance” in which they followed a target without concealing themselves. It was used against dissidents. After all of the evidence we found of investments in cutting-edge surveillance technologies, the FSB primarily used them for intimidation; they wanted to showcase their surveillance and did not hide it, like the “overt surveillance” of the KGB. The authorities didn’t deny our investigation—in fact, it was confirmed by the Voice of Russia , and Medvedev’s decree, openly posted, also sent a strong signal. Even Kozak’s comment, though extremely bizarre, seems to make the same point—in Sochi we are watching you everywhere.

But the intimidation didn’t work. Committed bloggers, foreign journalists, Pussy Riot, and activists all managed to do their thing without much restraint. If the surveillance was built to prevent protests or bottle up information, then the surveillance state built in Sochi was a paper tiger. Still, publicly Sochi became a great personal success for Putin; he got support domestically and around the world. After all, nobody wanted to question the enormous $50 billion cost of the Games. [21] Joshua Yaffa, “The Waste and Corruption of Vladimir Putin’s 2014 Winter Olympics,” Bloomberg, January 2, 2014, www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2014–01–02/the-2014-winter-olympics-in-sochi-cost-51-billion ; and Thomas Grove, “Special Report: Russia’s $50 Billion Olympic Gamble,” Reuters, February 21, 2013, www.reuters.com/article/2013/02/21/us-russia-sochi-idUSBRE91K04M20130221 . It was all justified by success: Russia was back. The games went off largely without a hitch—there was no terrorism and a great deal of national pride on display.

We don’t know with any degree of detail how much interception or surveillance was carried out at Sochi using such things as SORM and other technology. But we think there is another possibility, equally disturbing: the Russian secret services gathered large amounts of personal data on all visitors to the Games, including diplomats, journalists, and all kinds of officials. And these efforts were planned and conducted under guidance of the top counterintelligence official in the country, and counterintelligence officers tend to play a long game. It cannot be ruled out that someday, long after the closing ceremony of the Olympic Games, any one of these people could be approached with the information collected in February 2014 in Sochi.

On February 23, 2014, the day the Sochi Olympics ended, Putin was not entirely happy. One of his guests, a close ally, who was with him at the opening ceremony of the games had gone missing from Sochi. Viktor Yanukovych, the Ukrainian president, had disappeared from his capital, Kiev, a day before. After months of protests against Yanukovych on the Maidan, the central square of Kiev, no one knew where the president had gone. Television broadcasts showed that some government buildings in the capital had been abandoned; the headquarters of the Ukranian secret police was also empty, and police were nowhere to be seen. Protesters had pulled down a monument to Lenin. The demonstrations and the sudden dissolution of Yanukovych’s presidency appeared to Putin to be far more serious than the public uprisings known as “color revolutions” over the previous decade in Ukraine and Georgia, and, beginning in 2010, the Arab Spring; this time it looked more like August of 1991, when the Soviet Union teetered on the abyss. For Putin, the events in Ukraine suggested that the elites of the country had split, and some of them had betrayed Yanukovych, a frightening prospect for the Russian president. Putin had invested his personal prestige in Yanukovych and sent his intelligence officers to Kiev under the guidance of a colonel general of the FSB to show his support. When Yanukovych fled, Putin saw it as proof of a conspiracy by the West to undermine Russia’s sphere of influence, which, in his mind, included Ukraine. [1] On April 4, 2014, Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry sent a note to Moscow demanding to clarify the circumstances of presence of FSB Colonel-General Sergei Beseda in Kiev on February 20 and 21. The next day the Russian news agency Interfax, citing security sources, confirmed that Sergei Beseda was indeed in the Ukrainian capital on February 20–21, “Russia’s FSB Says Top Officer Went to Kiev for ‘Security,’” AFP, April 5, 2014. For details, see James Marson, “Russia Fails to Make Deeper Inroads in Ukraine—For Now,” Wall Street Journal , April 10, 2014, www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303603904579491641537737078 .

In a week the Russian military transported Yanukovych to Rostov-on-Don and unmarked Russian troops occupied Crimea, which had been part of Ukraine. On March 1 Putin obtained permission from the cheering Russian parliament to use troops in Ukraine as well. [2] Kathy Lally, Will Englund, and William Booth, “Russian Parliament Approves Use of Troops in Ukraine,” Washington Post , March 1, 2014, www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/russian-parliament-approves-use-of-troops-in-crimea/2014/03/01/d1775f70-a151–11e3-a050-dc3322a94fa7_story.html . They unleashed an unprecedented campaign of propaganda, calling the Ukrainian protesters “fascists” and warning that Russians living in eastern Ukraine were threatened. [3] The archive of NTV coverage is available on the site of NTV, March 1, 2014, www.ntv.ru/2014/03/01 . This was the start of a major armed conflict that engulfed eastern Ukraine in the months ahead as Russian-backed separatists battled Ukrainian troops for control of several provinces. Thousands of people were killed and injured in the war, inciting sharp protests and Western sanctions imposed on Russia.

As soon as the crisis began, the Russian authorities tightened control of information online. Since 2012 the Kremlin had been actively building mechanisms and tools of control of the Internet, and now the moment came to test their effectiveness. On March 3 Roskomnadzor rushed to block thirteen pages of groups linked to the Ukrainian protest movement on the Russian-based social network VKontakte. [4] Roskomnadzor news, “Po trebaniyu Generalnoy Prokuraturi prekrashen dostup k soobshestvam urkainskikh nationalisticheskikh organizatciy v socialnoy seti ‘VKontakte’” [At the Request of the General Prosecutor’s Office Access Discontinued to Communities of Ukrainian Nationalist Organizations in the Social Network ‘VKontakte’], March 3, 2014, http://rkn.gov.ru/news/rsoc/news24185.htm .