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

Six days later she was charged with treason, which can carry a sentence of twelve to twenty years in prison. She was told that her call to the embassy of Ukraine had been intercepted. She was given a state-appointed lawyer who advised her to plead guilty. Overwrought with emotion and scared, at first she complied.

For the FSB it was not enough to have just a guilty plea, however; they needed to prove she had made the call. For this the security service needed a sample of her voice to compare with the recording of the call. But Davydova refused to give the voice sample.

At this point, in early 2015, her case gained widespread attention in Russia, and human rights activists visited her in Lefortovo, a common practice. When they came to the prison to see her, the FSB illicitly made a video, without telling her or the activists. Then the FSB reached back to technology that had been created and perfected since 1949 in the work at Marfino and Kuchino. From this video recording they compared her voice on the intercepted phone call. [23] Ivan Pavlov (Davydova’s lawyer), interview with authors, March 2015.

Davydova was not a spy—she was a housewife. But she was caught up in something larger—the secret services were repeating practices of wiretapping and examining voices, all in an effort to keep the lid on a closed society, to lock up information, even if it was just a rumor a housewife had overheard at a bus stop.

After two weeks in prison and a public outcry, Davydova was released, and the charges were later dropped.

In the summer of 2014 Russian and Ukrainian journalists started to find dozens of profiles of Russian soldiers on VKontakte—and many who had been posted to Ukraine had added to their pages photographs from their posting. The Russian military commanders were not aware the soldiers were posting boastful comments and photographs, identifying their units and their geographic positions.

The pictures and comments exposed the lies that Putin had been spouting about the war. Journalists in Russia’s northwestern city Pskov, bordering Latvia and Estonia, found online, on VKontakte, profiles of soldiers from a paratrooper base in the region. The soldiers, who had visited their pages for the last time on August 15–16, posted photographs from Ukraine.

Then the soldiers disappeared. There were awful rumors that dozens of Pskov’s paratroopers had been killed in an ambush in Ukraine. On August 22 journalists found a new post on the VKontakte page of one of the soldiers, Leonid Kichatkin:

“Life has stopped!!”

Then, a bit later: “Dear friends!!!!!!!!!! Leonid was killed […] funeral[’]s Monday at 10am in Vibutah. Whoever wants to say goodbye to him, please come over. My phone number 8953254066. A wife[,] Oksana[.]”

Soon the post reporting the tragedy was removed and replaced by a cheerful post depicting a family celebration. When journalists called the number, a male voice on the phone answered that he was Leonid, alive and well.

But journalists attended the funerals and found the two new graves, and one of them bears the inscription: “Leonid Kichatkin, 30.09.1984–19.08.2014.”

When two TV Dozhd journalists and a Novaya Gazeta reporter went to the Pskov cemetery, they were attacked by unknown men in balaclavas, and a local parliamentary deputy was beaten up because he had exposed the postings in the local newspaper. But it didn’t prevent other leaks about Russian soldiers in Ukraine, and VKontakte turned out to be indispensable—both for the soldiers posting and for those who would be reading. The soldiers chose VKontakte because it was easy to use and was there, always online. On July 23 a Russian soldier conscript from Samara in southern Russia posted photographs of his artillery pieces on VKontakte, with the words, “All night we were shooting at Ukraine.” It went viral.

The Russian seizure of Crimea in early 2014 was carried out bloodlessly by soldiers wearing no insignia. It was relatively clean and swift and heralded as a new kind of warfare. But the two graves in Pskov shattered this image of a bloodless new kind of warfare. The reality that soldiers were being killed on the battlefield in Ukraine exposed the cover-up and deception about Russia’s role in the violence in the Donbass. The losses, inevitable lies, and cover-ups didn’t work in large part because Russian soldiers as well as their relatives and friends kept posting on VKontakte.

After all the Kremlin efforts to control information, the information about Ukraine freed itself. The primary source of sensitive data on the violence in Ukraine was not journalists, nongovernmental organizations, opposition leaders, activists, or even bloggers; it was soldiers. Inexperienced young men, who had been schooled by state-sponsored television propaganda, were electrified by it and went to war, boasting of their exploits.

The network enabled the information to move freely, unhindered, to millions.

Despite the gloomy and depressing mood that swept the country after the Russian government defeated the Moscow protests and the patriotic hysteria generated by its annexation of Crimea, uncensored debates and unrestricted exchange of opinions still remain possible on the Russian Internet. The Kremlin certainly didn’t emerge a winner from its first serious collision with the global network.

Since then we have seen two major developments. Inside Russia the Kremlin, worried about the disastrous consequences of its efforts to control the Internet, turned to China for guidance and technical support. The ramifications of this turn could be very serious. Outside Russia most Kremlin offensives now include an aggressive cyber component, such as the hacking operation in the United States in 2016, which produced surprisingly successful results. Whether it affected the outcome of the presidential election result is questionable, but it certainly propelled Russia right into the heart of the election process and made Putin look like the third player—perhaps even the kingmaker—in the most powerful country of the world.

So how did the Kremlin, once so fearful of the power of the Internet and understanding so little about the nature of the global network, find a way to use it in the United States, the birthplace of the Internet and still its innovative powerhouse? The first stage of the story required Russia to align its interests with a onetime online antagonist. So began the uncomfortable liaison between the Kremlin and WikiLeaks.

In January 2016 thirty-five-year-old Mika Velikovsky, a shrewd, jovial reporter with a habit of wearing an Indiana Jones hat everywhere he went, was invited to join an international team of investigative journalists.

Velikovsky was thrilled. He had been in and out of work for several years, ever since the Kremlin began its purge of the media following the Moscow protests in 2011–2012. In media circles this purge was referred to as a “f—ing chain of events,” an expression coined by its first victim, the editor of the liberal journal Bolshoi Gorod (The Big City), who was fired because his publication had been supportive of the protests. Four years later the Moscow media landscape was distinctly depressing, rife with stories about bad editors and which team of journalists had just been fired.

Velikovsky accepted the job right away. After all, he had plenty of experience working on investigations involving international partners. In the late 2000s he worked for the Russky Reporter (Russian Reporter), WikiLeaks’ media partner in Moscow. [1] It was a surprising choice. Russky Reporter was a publication very close to the Kremlin, essentially a government-backed media. The idea of cooperating with WikiLeaks on the State Department cables was brought to Vitaly Leibin, editor-in-chief of Russky Reporter , by Israel Shamir, a controversial journalist who styled himself as a WikiLeaks-accredited journalist in Russia. The Guardian reported that Shamir was not only given access to cables but also invoiced WikiLeaks for £2000, in thanks to “services rendered—journalism.” (See David Leigh and Luke Harding, WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy [New York: Public Affairs, 2011]). Shamir’s son, Johannes Wahlstrom, was a close associate to Assange. In 2016 Shamir wrote extensively for pro-government Russian publications, namely Komsomolskaya Pravda , attacking Hillary Clinton. On July 28 he accused the American establishment of a conspiracy to elect Clinton, referencing the WikiLeaks revelations. He also promised new exposés from the DNC hacks to follow. See Israel Shamir, “Novie Razoblachenia WikiLeaks: Americanskaya elita ustroila zagovor, chtobi protashit v presidenti Klinton” [New revelations of WikiLeaks: the American elite conspires to elect Clinton to the presidency], Komsomolskaya Pravda , July 28, 2016, www.kp.ru/daily/26561/3577385 . In 2010 Velikovsky traveled to Sweden and spent a few days conferring with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. After that, he became Russian Reporter ’s contact for interacting with Assange’s team, working on US State Department diplomatic cables and the leaked emails from the private security company Stratfor. Velikovsky valued his connection with WikiLeaks and took pains to maintain it after the joint project ended, speaking occasionally on Skype with Assange and Sarah Harrison, head of the WikiLeaks’ investigative team. (It was not easy: Assange had a habit of cutting partners off completely once a project was done.) The effort was fruitful: when Velikovsky visited Assange in London the Russian journalist agreed to work on a film based on the WikiLeaks’ cables. He spent four months traveling across Central Asia for a documentary that was to show how the region’s authoritarian regimes reacted to the WikiLeaks exposés. [2] Mediastan , documentary film, 2013, produced by Julian Assange, Rebecca O’Brien, and Lauren Dark. In the documentary a group of journalists led by Johannes Wahlstrom test the impact of leaked documents as they travel through Central Asia in search of local media outlets willing to publish Cablegate files. Their journey follows the ancient Silk Road traversing Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and US-occupied Afghanistan. When Edward Snowden flew to Moscow, Velikovsky tried to use his contacts at WikiLeaks to get in touch with the American. He even met with the WikiLeaks people in Moscow, but the only result of this effort was surveillance by the Russian security services. The surveillance was so easy to spot—the same men followed Velikovsky on foot and in a car—that it was clearly intended to be a warning. [3] Mika Velikovsky, interview with authors, January 2017. The state seemed to be telling him to mind his own business.