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

It was the same Andropov whose subordinates, a year before, had Kudryavtsev cut international phone lines. At that time nobody—and least of all Andropov—thought personal computers should be made available to ordinary Soviet citizens.

Back home Fredkin worked on lifting the US export controls on sending personal computers to the Soviet Union. He argued that personal computers would force the authorities to give up control over information, that they would jailbreak the prison. “I realized that nothing would happen until someone ‘broke the ice.’ I created ‘Computerland USSR,’ called Velikhov, and told him that if he would produce a purchase order for a small number of IBM PCs, I would arrange for them to be delivered and that that would open the floodgates,” Fredkin recalled.

Velikhov immediately produced the purchase order. “Computerland USSR” ordered about sixty computers from IBM in Europe, and Fredkin got friends at the Academy of Sciences Computation Center to make sets of chips that would allow the computers to display Cyrillic characters on the screen (as they had already done for one PC smuggled earlier into the Computation Center). Fredkin’s company took delivery in Europe, modified the keyboards and displays, got official clearance from the US Commerce Department, and delivered them to the Academy of Sciences. “The dam was broken,” Fredkin recalled. “Computerland USSR may be the only computer company in history that received and delivered one single order… then went out of business!”

For almost the whole of its history the Soviet Union had been a prison of information. But the prison, like so many other edifices of the Soviet state, was finally breeched in August 1991.

In the far north of Moscow the Kurchatov Institute sprawls over nearly 250 acres. Once an artillery range, the institute was founded by Igor Kurchatov, who developed the first Soviet atomic bomb within its walls. For decades since, the institute has served as a preeminent nuclear research facility. The compound is dotted with dozens of buildings, including a collection of impressive two-story mansions built for Kurchatov and his fellow researchers in the late 1940s. A small and unobtrusive barracks-like building houses the first Soviet nuclear reactor, still operating. The institute has always been a closed, heavily guarded facility and to this day is protected by armed guards at the heavily fortified gates. When a visitor arrives, documents are checked and the car trunk is inspected by a sentry carrying a Kalashnikov assault rifle. A second gate opens only when a first one is closed. [1] For details of the history of Kurchatov Institute see “Kurchatov Institute: Current Life of the Institute Celebrating Jubilees,” www.iter.org/doc/www/content/com/Lists/Stories/Attachments/1575/Kurchatov_Institute.pdf .

The Kurchatov Institute held an exalted and exceptional status in the Soviet Union. In addition to work on the atomic bomb, scientists were involved in many crucial defense projects, ranging from Soviet nuclear submarines to laser weapons. The KGB not only supervised the institute but, in a broad sense, was “one of the shareholders,” as Yevgeny Velikhov, who served as director from 1988 to 2008, recalled it. [2] Velikhov, interview with authors, September 2014. At the same time, the institute enjoyed a degree of freedom unthinkable for others at facilities far less important. Contacts with foreigners were allowed, including trips abroad, and the institute’s leaders took advantage of the fact that the Soviet state desperately needed their work—they demanded special treatment and got it.

The institute exploited this elite status to the full. In November 1966 more than six hundred people, mostly young physicists, gathered at Kurchatov’s House of Culture, the institute’s club, to listen to Solzhenitsyn, a writer of growing prominence. His first published work, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich , had caused a sensation for its frank depiction of Stalin’s prison camps when it appeared in the literary journal Novy Mir in 1962. Velikhov, who was then a deputy head of the institute as well as a broad-minded scientist who had traveled across the United States a few years before, invited Solzhenitsyn to the Kurchatov Institute. The institute was the very first venue that invited Solzhenitsyn to speak publicly. “Everything went well,” he recalled. [3] Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Oak and the Calf: Memoirs of a Literary Life (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), 142. “He told his story. How he found himself in the camp.” Solzhenitsyn also read aloud from a still-unpublished novel, Cancer Ward , which he hoped still had some chance to get approved by the Soviet censors. (In the end it was not.) Then he read the excerpts from The First Circle , his novel about the sharashka at Marfino, where he tells the story of a foreign ministry official who made a call to the US embassy and got caught. The novel had also not been published. The KGB had confiscated the manuscript, and reading it aloud at Kurchatov was a brave act for both Solzhenitsyn and his hosts. “The collective liked him very much,” Velikhov said. Later, in 1970, Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize for literature; four years after that he was stripped of citizenship and expelled from the Soviet Union. But the Kurchatov Institute did not change course and kept inviting dissident writers.

It was in this elite environment of relative freedom that programmers and physicists first connected the Soviet Union to the Internet.

By the mid-1980s the computer revolution in the West was racing ahead, and the Soviet Union lagged behind. The country struggled with the manufacturing challenge of computer chips, and Soviet personal computers were bad imitations of Western models. The Cold War persisted, and the astounding leaps in computer technology in the West were catching the attention of younger Soviet scientists, including Velikhov, but older party leaders and industrialists—Brezhnev and Andropov’s generation—were frustratingly indifferent. The technology gap between East and West continued to widen. In 1985 Alexey Soldatov, then thirty-four years old, was named head of the Computation Center at the Kurchatov Institute. He got the job because the director, Anatoly Alexandrov, wanted someone who could explain to computer programmers what the Kurchatov Institute needed from them. [4] At the same time, Alexandrov hid a fact about his past that could have called into question his loyalty: when he was sixteen years old, he joined the White Army and fought the Communists during the Russian Civil War. Anatoly P. Alexandrov, Akademik Anatoly Petrovich Alexandrov: Pryamaya Rech [ Academician Anatoly Alexandrov: Direct Speech ] (Moscow: Nauka, 2002), 15. Soldatov, Andrei’s father, was a serious, heavily built scientist, who spoke slowly because he stuttered badly. To overcome it, he had developed a method to think in advance what he wanted to say, which left his speech very precise, if rather colorless.

Soldatov had a promising career in nuclear physics. He had graduated from a prominent Moscow institute in 1975, defended his doctoral thesis in 1979, then held an internship at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen. He was known at the Kurchatov Institute for using more computer time on his work than anyone else.

The Kurchatov Institute had, by that time, assembled a team of skilled programmers working to adapt the Unix operating system to the Soviet Union, a copy of which had been smuggled to Moscow two years earlier. Unix is machine-independent, so it could be used on any of the computers at Kurchatov, including Elbrus, the first Soviet super-computer, and the ES, a Soviet-made replica of the IBM mainframe. But what made Unix significant was that it made networks possible. In the autumn of 1984 the Soviet programmers demonstrated at a seminar the first version of a modified Unix.