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

Putin is a product of this thinking. He doesn’t believe in mankind, nor does he believe in a benign society—the concept that people could voluntarily come together to do something for the common good. Those who tried to do something not directed by the government were either spies—paid agents of foreign hostile forces—or corrupt—i.e. paid agents of corporations. Any public debate with them about important issues was thus meaningless and dangerous. For Putin the serious business of governance should be left to professionals— his government officials.

This message was spread inside the country and was used to attack the political opposition; it also targeted all sorts of activists, from enviromentalists to feminists, using all the tools of propaganda available, from TV channels to social networks. Political or civic activity is a dirty business by definition, and nobody could be trusted—that was the main message. In the fragmented, confused post-Soviet society, it worked pretty well.

This cynicism was Putin’s gift to America.

In 2016 this message was widely propagated through social media in the United States, to a great extent supported by the publication of leaks, most of which were the result of Russian hacking operations. Conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton, supplied by “the evidence” provided by WikiLeaks, were picked up by the pro-Kremlin English-speaking media like Sputnik, then promoted by trolls on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Donald Trump was keen to exploit them, as the Blumenthal fake email story proved.

But this alone was not the reason Trump won the presidency. Large sections of American society had already lost their trust in political institutions—and particularly in the media. The process had started long ago and is also apparent in many other Western countries. The Russian hackers and their bosses did not create a wholly new narrative in America but instead sought to exploit the weaknesses that already existed.

This dark concept of total distrust was mostly spread via the Internet because it was what the Internet was built for—sharing ideas. Although the Internet is the most democratic means of communicating, it can be used by governments and groups that understand nothing about its nature. Creating disruption on the Internet doesn’t need advanced technology—North Korea very quickly developed cyber capabilities strong enough to hack Sony servers, and for years ISIS has outmaneuvered the West in online propaganda. Russia simply combined hacking, the public use of stolen information, and the moment—acting during the election period.

Does this mean we should accept the concept that the Internet carries more threats than benefits?

The creators of the Internet supported the opposite concept. Unlike Putin, they believed in people and built the global network under the assumption that it would be used for sharing something good. They may look naïve these days, but we got our modern linked-up technological world thanks to their concepts, not Putin’s. The Internet—and the concepts behind it—are still full of potential.

On December 19, 2011, LifeNews, a website of yellow journalism and Kremlin propaganda, published a report with a photograph of the former deputy prime minister and opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, with the headline, “Lifenews Publishes Secret Talks of Nemtsov.” [1] “Lifenews Publishes New Secret Phone Conversations of Nemtsov,” Lifenews.ru, December 20, 2011, www.lifenews.ru/news/77529 . The site boasted that they had acquired more than six hours of audio recordings of Nemtsov’s phone calls and posted nine of the recordings online, including those in which Nemtsov made candid and sometimes embarrassing comments about his opposition colleagues. How did they get these recordings? There can be only one answer. Nemtsov told us back then that the Russian security services had tapped his cell phone conversations and then someone leaked the recordings to harm him. Nemtsov was subjected to SORM.

Three years later, on February 27, 2015, late in the evening, Nemtsov was walking with his girlfriend across the Bolshoi Moskvoretsky Bridge, a stone’s throw from the Kremlin wall. They were heading over the bridge, away from the Kremlin, when they reached a stairwell that runs down the side. A man appeared behind Nemtsov and opened fire, shooting four bullets into his back. Nemtsov died instantly. The shooter escaped in a passing car.

Two days later we joined the crowds gathering in the center of Moscow to honor Nemtsov’s life and memory. It was a cloudy and somber afternoon. People carried flowers—white roses, yellow chrysanthemums, and red carnations. In contrast to the boisterous protests of recent years, the crowd was quiet; almost nobody spoke of the killing or showed their anger. Some carried Russian flags with a black ribbon in a sign of mourning; others brought placards that said simply, “I do not fear.”

The wiretapping of Nemtsov in 2011 and his murder just over three years later are two strands in a larger narrative about Russia today, one that was well understood by us and thousands of others as we expressed sorrow and rage for his loss. The interception of his calls and their release was an attempt to unnerve Nemtsov and send a message to Putin’s opposition. The killing of a charismatic politician near the Kremlin wall was an attempt to send a message to fear to everyone. Both events spoke volumes about how the Kremlin has wielded power in recent years and, in particular, how Putin has confronted the rise of the Internet.

Fear—and self-censorship caused by fear—were for centuries essential to the system of government in Russia, from imperial times through the Soviet period and into the present. The leaders often dealt in the currency of threats and intimidation. Since 1999 we have chronicled the activities of Russian secret services, publishing many of our findings in our 2010 book, The New Nobility . For years we’ve been trying to understand the main impact of former Soviet KGB officers’ presence in today’s corridors of power. We believe it has come to dominate the way Putin views the world. He and his colleagues from the security services brought with them the old mindset that threats existed and had to be countered. First and foremost they had to fight any threat to the stability of the political regime, which meant any threat to their hold on power.

This mindset came into full bloom in 2011 when Putin announced he would return to the Kremlin, touching off widespread protests by voters who felt insulted and angry at how the decision was made, apparently without their participation. The subsequent uprisings, lasting well into 2012, brought tens of thousands of people to the streets and were the largest public protests in Moscow during his presidency and the first really mass demonstrations against him in a dozen years. For Putin, the sense of threat resided in something invisible and ubiquitous in the prosperous Russia he had presided over since 2000: the Internet. The vibrant digital channels that existed, especially in Moscow, proved vital to mobilizing the demonstrations that echoed off the Kremlin walls.

On the surface, the system the Kremlin created was technically advanced and well-orchestrated, with special roles assigned to different actors. Parliament was tasked with producing a flow of repressive legislation. Pro-Kremlin hacktivists and trolls were hired to attack and harass liberals online. The security services were given the nod to spy on and intercept the opposition. Roskomnadzor was handed the power to censor and filter the Internet. Friendly oligarchs were asked to bankroll and take over media companies, both traditional and new media, to bring them to heel and to take over Russia’s Internet companies when necessary to strengthen the Kremlin’s hand with services that were popular among tens of millions of people. Finally, to provide surveillance equipment, manufacturers were selected, both domestic and international. What Putin brought that tied it together was an outlook of unabashed paranoia that saw enemies all around.