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

In practice Putin’s tactics were never fully exploited. The Internet filtering in Russia turned out to be unsophisticated; thousands of sites were blocked by mistake, and users could easily find ways to make an end-run around it. At the same time, very few people in Russia were actually sent to jail for posting criticism of the government online. This is a far cry from the frequent and brutal persecution of people in China and Turkey, for example, for their opinions. Even with all the mechanisms available, relatively few new media organizations were actually closed down; many more were simply brought to heel. Those media that were blocked were left alone, their offices not raided by police nor their journalists sent to prison; Russia did not need to be as repressive or technically sophisticated as, say, China. Putin did not need to carry out mass repression against journalists or activists; he could get results just as effectively by using the tools of threat and intimidation, which is what he did. He carried a big stick, but he didn’t always use it.

Putin could be remarkably effective with the threat of the big stick. Russian Internet freedom has been deeply curtailed. The thriving Internet companies, many of them started in Russia from scratch in a free and open Internet environment, agreed to work under state censorship without creating much of a fuss. When invited to talk to Putin, they were so intimidated that they avoided raising the issue of sustaining Internet freedoms. When the security state, acting largely in secret, planned to install intrusive surveillance equipment in Russia, thus creating back doors to the messages and content of the entire country, the ISPs hardly murmured a complaint. There was also little resistance when the state imposed four blacklists of Internet sites.

The Putin approach is all about intimidation, more often than actual coercion, as an instrument of control. To intimidate, legislation was drafted as broadly as possible, the restrictions constantly expanded; companies, ISPs, and the media rushed to the Kremlin to ask what was now allowed. The authorities threatened to block entire services like YouTube—and the Internet giants came running, offering technical solutions, often at their own expense. More often than not this intimidation was aimed at pressuring individuals to do what the Kremlin wanted rather than attacking a whole network or company. When the authorities wanted to control VKontakte, they ousted its founder. They twisted arms more often than they cut wires.

Putin’s system is effective as long as people are certain the Kremlin is in control, that the stability of the political regime is unperturbed. Intimidation is essential in this environment, and it sends an unmistakable message: we are watching you, we are in charge, and there is no way to hide from us. But during a crisis of confidence, an upheaval, or an emergency, the dynamic is transformed. In a crisis a tidal wave of content is generated and shared in real time. A single message can be copied by millions, and here the Putin system of control cannot cope. It is built to zero in on a few troublemakers, not millions of average users. It cannot easily comprehend mass action. In times of instability it is average users who spread the information, and the Putin system then breaks down.

There was a larger failure in the Putin strategy. He was accustomed to dealing with hierarchy and organizations that could be coerced by going after the bosses. But networks have no tops; they are horizontal creatures. Everyone can participate without authorization. The content is generated not by the companies that operate websites and social media but by the users. Putin and his team never fully grasped this, either.

The Internet today is the printing press of the past. Just as the invention of a printed page once enabled a free flow of ideas, so now simple tools like VKontakte and Facebook, widely used every day by average people in Russia, have created an environment in which information cannot be stopped. The British historian of the Civil War in England, Christopher Hill, described this in The World Turned Upside Down , a work devoted to the radical thinkers of the time. He explained why the Revolution caused such a “fascinating flood of radical ideas”: “During the brief years of extensive liberty of the press in England it may have been easier for eccentrics to get into print than ever before or since. Before 1641 and after 1660, there was a strict censorship. In the intervening years of freedom, a printing press was a relatively cheap and portable piece of equipment. Publishing had not yet developed as a capitalist industry.” [2] Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down (London: Penguin Books, 1991), 17.

Today the Internet is the everyman’s platform. To control it, Putin would have to control the mind of every single user, which simply isn’t possible. Information runs free like water or air on a network and is not easily captured. The Russian conscript soldiers who posted their photographs taken in Ukraine did more to expose the Kremlin’s lies about the conflict than journalists or activists. The network enabled them.

Writing books takes a lot of time, and the work on this one was a rather long journey. It probably started in 1996 in Moscow, when the Internet was the very first topic Andrei was assigned to cover as a journalist at the newspaper Segodnya , or in 1997 when Irina decided to move to the newspaper department that conducted investigations. Along the way many colleagues supported us. We owe much to Lyudmila Telen and Michael Shevelev, whom we met in 2004 at Moskovskie Novosti and who have encouraged us ever since. Marina Latysheva, our best friend for many years, has been a source of constant and never-ending support. Nick Fielding never hesitated to offer his much-appreciated advice. Mort Rosenblum was a source of inspiration about journalism. We are grateful to Olga Pashkova, the courageous and flamboyant director of the website Ezhednevny Journal, or Ej.ru, who invited us to write for the website and was always willing to accept our ideas, including the 2009 project, “Control Over Society: Methods of the Kremlin,” which laid the first research groundwork for the book. Ej.ru has been blocked in Russia since March 2014 but remains alive and online.

As it is getting more difficult to publish journalistic investigations in Russia, we are very grateful to our colleagues and friends at OpenDemocracy, Wired.com, World Policy Journal , and the Guardian . With their help, our stories on surveillance and censorship in Russia were published and eventually found their way back to a Russian audience.

We began working on the topic of the book intensively in 2012, and since then we have been very lucky to find new friends in Russia and beyond. We are very grateful to Alexander Verkhovsky, an extremely brave director of the SOVA Center, who is the best expert on Russian nationalist movements, a dangerous topic for research. He helped us when we needed it most. Our thanks also go out to Sergei Lukashevsky and Lena Kaluzhskaya, at the Sakharov Center, who very generously gave us an opportunity to test our ideas in a series of discussions at the center in 2012–2014 and who made it possible to bring our friends from international organizations concerned with privacy and surveillance issues to Moscow to exchange ideas and information.

We are very grateful to Ron Deibert and his group at Citizen Lab as well as Gus Hosein and his team at Privacy International. They proved to be good friends, and we enjoyed working together. Our special thanks go to Max Kashulinsky, at Slon.ru, whom we worked with at Segodnya back in the 1990s; Max helped us secure a series of interviews crucial for this book. And Svetlana Reiter, at RBC, was extremely generous with her contacts and insights. Our special thanks goes to Sally McGrane; she wrote the very first article about Agentura.Ru in 2000, and helped with advice and editing for the paperback edition.