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

VKontakte was caught in the middle of a conflict over control of the company between two of its biggest shareholders, both oligarchs: Igor Sechin and Alisher Usmanov. Sechin was a personal friend of Putin; Usmanov was a pro-Kremlin oligarch who had gathered a vast media empire of formerly liberal news outlets—he started with Gazeta.ru, then acquired Kommersant , and later turned to the Internet—and absorbed LiveJournal.com, the most popular blogging platform, as well as Mail.ru, the most popular e-mail service, and was believed to want to acquire some of Yandex too.

When caught in the squeeze between the two oligarchs, Durov was feeling the pressure personally. Some shareholders reportedly launched an internal investigation at the behest of one of the oligarchs into Durov’s business expense accounts, for reasons that were unclear. [2] Alexandra Bayazitova, “Pavel Durov May Face a Criminal Case for His Expenses,” Izvestia , March 5, 2014, www.izvestia.ru/news/566840 . In spring 2014 the pressure took its toll on Durov, who was still only twenty-nine years old. His moves became frantic. On March 11 he posted, “Seven Reasons to Stay in Russia,” in which he wrote, “In recent months the topic of emigration from Russia has become fashionable. But I go against the trend, and here are my seven reasons to stay in the country.” He listed low taxes, talented people, beautiful girls, and so on.

On April 1, out of the blue, Durov announced he was resigning as CEO of VKontakte. Then, two days later, he disavowed his resignation statement, and four days after that he posted a new message, lamenting bitterly the situation inside the company. He said he had filed a lawsuit to try to get back on the board of directors.

Whereas Durov’s previous posts had largely been about the company’s internal ownership conflict, the posts that he put up on April 16 carried a more ominous tone; they potentially applied to everybody who used the network. The first was posted at 9:36 p.m.:

On December 13, 2013, the FSB requested us to hand over the personal data of organizers of the Euromaidan groups. Our response was and is a categorical “No.” Russian jurisdiction cannot include our Ukrainian users of VKontakte. Delivery of personal data of Ukrainians to Russian authorities would have been not only illegal, but a treason of all those millions of Ukrainians who trust us. In the process, I sacrificed a lot. I sold my share in the company. Since December 2013, I have had no property, but I have a clear conscience and ideals I’m ready to defend.

He then posted a scan of the FSB letter, exactly in the same manner as he had in December 2011, when he refused to cooperate with them about the protests in Moscow.

The second posting, two hours later, declared, “On March 13, 2014, the Prosecutor’s office requested me to close down the anticorruption group of Alexey Navalny. I didn’t close this group in December 2011, and certainly, I did not close it now. In recent weeks, I was under pressure from different angles. We managed to gain over a month, but it’s time to state—neither myself, nor my team are going to conduct political censorship…. Freedom of information is the inalienable right in the post-industrial society.”

On April 21 Durov was fired as chief executive. He learned the news from journalists. He claimed he was fired because of his public refusal to cooperate with the authorities. The next day TechCrunch, a website, asked Durov in an e-mail about his future plans. “I’m out of Russia and have no plans to go back,” he wrote back. Durov left the country.

With Durov gone, the company was firmly under the control of two loyal oligarchs; the Kremlin had managed to repeat the tactic it had used earlier with traditional media, like Gusinsky’s Media-Most in the 2000s. This time it was even easier, as there were neither journalists to demand a personal meeting with Putin nor users who might turn out for demonstrations on Moscow’s streets. At this time the Kremlin believed they fully controlled the VKontakte company and its network—they foresaw no surprises. What the Kremlin miscalculated was that a social network is different from either television or newspapers. Although journalists generate the content in traditional media by working in the editorial office, users, often widely dispersed, create the content on social media, and they don’t care who owns the network.

These legions of dispersed users would soon prove VKontakte’s strength.

On April 24 Putin fired a shot that had wide reverberations for the second-largest Internet company in Russia. He was in St. Petersburg at a media forum organized by the All-Russia People’s Front, an ultrapatriotic, populist movement Putin had launched in haste in 2011 to corral political support from the provinces and other quarters when his United Russia Party, largely made up of bureaucrats, lost the respect of many voters. The new People’s Front, consciously evoking symbols and names from the Soviet era, had a modern political purpose for Putin: to counter the liberal-minded, Westernized intelligentsia of the big cities.

It was a staged event in the round, and in the middle of the discussion a pro-Kremlin blogger, Viktor Levanov, addressed Putin with an unusually long statement about the Internet. Levanov first attacked the United States—“It is an open secret that the United States controls the Internet”—then went after Google specifically. “Why can’t they build servers here?” he said, echoing the Kremlin line. “I do not want my personal data and information about politicians that run my country to go to the United States.”

Putin weighed in and answered as he had before, referring to Snowden and NSA, saying that the servers should be relocated to Russia. Then Putin asserted that the Internet began “as a special CIA project. And this is the way it is developing.”

Next Levanov did something unexpected. He asked a question about the Russian company Yandex, one of the most recognizable brands and popular websites in the country. “It is not quite clear what Yandex is: on the one hand we know it as a search engine; but on the other hand it is a kind of media, because all the time, every day the top five news items Yandex collects from other sources are viewed by millions of people. Meanwhile, Yandex does not have a media license and cannot be held liable under the law as a media outlet because it is a search engine.” [3] “Media Forum of Independent Local and Regional Media,” Transcripts, Kremlin.ru, April 24, 2014, http://eng.kremlin.ru/transcripts/7075 .

This was not a casual allegation. By raising the question of whether Yandex was a media organization, the blogger was aiming a knife at its heart. Forcing Yandex to register as media would make the company subject to Russian media legislation and libel law, under which, if the media gets two warnings from the government, it could be closed down. Until this point Yandex had operated outside this control.

Putin eagerly pursued the theme. He claimed that Yandex, when it was formed, had been “forced” to accept Americans and Europeans in its company’s management. “And they had to agree to this,” he said. He also lamented that the company was partially registered abroad. Then Putin bore down on the real culprit he had in mind: “As I have said, this was all created by the Americans and they want to retain their monopoly.” [4] Ibid.

His message was ominous, suggesting that one of the most successful Internet companies in Russia was under American control, which in turn controls the Internet. Putin had already warned with great fervor in his Crimea speech about traitors and “fifth columns,” and now his comments seemed to suggest there was something wrong with Yandex having foreigners around.