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

Vadim Petrov (technical manager of Slon.ru), interview with authors, April 2012.

According to a report by Highload Lab company, the owners of Qrator service, posted on the site of Habrahabr, the community of geeks in Russia, http://habrahabr.ru/company/highloadlab/blog/134124.

For more details, see Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan, The New Nobility: The Restoration of Russia’s Security State and the Enduring Legacy of the KGB , ch. 18, “Hackers” (New York: PublicAffairs, 2010).

“Kremlin-Backed Group Behind Estonia Cyber Blitz,” Financial Times , March 11, 2009, www.ft.com/cms/s/0/57536d5a-0ddc-11de-8ea3–0000779fd2ac.html#axzz3QDihM3bC.

Eugene Kaspersky personal blog, “Vibori, vibori—ddosyat-3” [Elections, Elections, Sites Are Under DDOS-3], December 16, 2011, https://eugene.kaspersky.ru/2011/12/16/vybory-vybory-3/.

The transcript is available on Kot’s blog, https://edvvvard.livejournal.com/56342.html.

Boris Nemtsov, interview with authors, February 2012. Also see Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan, “Who’s Bugging the Russian Opposition?” OpenDemocracy, February 24, 2012, www.opendemocracy.net/od-russia/andrei-soldatov-irina-borogan/project-id-who’s-bugging-russian-opposition.

The transcript was published in Rossiyskaya Gazeta , December 15, 2012, www.rg.ru/printable/2011/12/15/stenogramma.html.

Olga Romanova, interview with authors, March 2013. Alexey Kozlov was finally released in June 2013.

Grigory Okhotin, interview with authors, June 2014.

The impressive video setup was thanks to the efforts of Yuri Saprykin, editor of Afisha.ru, which had experience in organizing music festivals. Saprykin helped find the equipment for sound and video. Yuri Saprykin, interview with authors, February 2015.

Ilya Klishin, interview with authors, October 2014.

The Masterskaya club is owned by a prominent family, Paperny, famous among the Moscow liberal intelligentsia.

“FSB obeshaet ochistit Runet ot vozdeistvia zapadnikh spetszluzhb” [FSB Promises Clean Runet of Foreign Intelligence Services], Vedomosti , March 27, 2012, www.vedomosti.ru/technology/news/2012/03/27/fsb_obeschaet_ochistit_runet_ot_vozdejstviya_zarubezhnyh.

The new system of filtering was modeled on the one used to block extremist and terrorist bank accounts in Russia. Three government agencies—Roskomnadzor (the Agency for the Supervision of Information Technology, Communications and Mass Media), the Federal Anti-Drug Agency, and the Federal Service for the Supervision of Consumer Rights and Public Welfare—submit data for the government’s blacklist of sites. Roskomnadzor is in charge of compiling and updating the register and is also responsible for instructing host providers to remove the URLs. If no action by the host provider follows, the ISPs are required to block access to the site within twenty-four hours. The host providers must also ensure they are not in breach of current law by checking their content against the database of outlawed sites and URLs published in a special password-protected online version of the register open only to web hosters and ISPs. Since November 2012 thousands of websites have been banned from the Russian Internet; the Internet monitoring law has had some substantial offline consequences as well. Institutions providing public access to the Internet—schools, libraries, Internet cafés, and even post offices—have been targeted for law enforcement inspections to check for computers containing software that might allow access to banned websites.

Irina Levova and Mikhail Yakushev (a vice president of ICANN for Russia, present at the meeting), interviews with authors, July–October 2014.

Ilya Ponomarev, interview with authors, September 2012. See also Agentura.ru, September 26, 2012, http://agentura.ru/projects/identification/iponomarev.

Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan, “The Kremlin’s New Internet Surveillance Plan Goes Live Today,” Wired.com, November 1, 2012, www.wired.com/2012/11/russia-surveillance.

The video was considered insulting to Muslims and includes cartoonish scenes depicting the prophet as a buffoon, a womanizer, and a greedy thug, among other things.

YouTube was made inaccessible in Chechnya, Dagestan, Kabardino-Balkaria, Ingushetia, Karachay-Cherkessia, North Ossetia, and the Stavropol Region.

For details, see Soldatov and Borogan, “The Kremlin’s New Internet Surveillance Plan Goes Live Today.” The mobile operators in Russia came up with the idea of traffic “shaping,” a euphemism that means by using DPI technology, they could, if they wished, suppress particular services—in most cases torrents, peer-to-peer protocols, and Skype, which poses a threat to the voice-over Internet protocol services offered by the mobile operators themselves.

See details of the meeting in our investigation: Soldatov and Borogan, “The Kremlin’s New Internet Surveillance Plan Goes Live Today.”

Volkov and Saprykin had come to see Zygar at noon, and by 3:00 p.m., Zygar secured approval from Sindeeva, and by 11:00 p.m. of the same day, Zygar, Volkov, and Saprykin sat at the café on Nikitskaya Street to talk over the technicalities. They also invited Demian Kudryavtsev, a former CEO of Kommersant publishing house; Zygar intended to ask him to cohost the debate along with Saprykin. Kudryavtsev eagerly supported the idea.

Yuri Saprykin, “O teledebatakh na Dozhde” [On the TV Debates at Dozhd], Rambler-Afisha , October 17, 2012, http://gorod.afisha.ru/archive/sluchai-saprykin-teledebaty.

Konstantin Kalachev, V kruge tretiem [In the Third Circle]. Kalachev worked as a researcher at Marfino from 1947 to 1996, and in 1999 he wrote a history of the Marfino project. The book never made it into print and is available only on the site: http://anmal.narod.ru/kniga/kniga.html.

Lev Kopelev, Utili moi pechaly [Soothe My Sorrows] (Moscow: Novaya Gazeta, 2011).

In the uncensored edition of The First Circle , Solzhenitsyn carefully changed all the names except for the betrayed Soviet spy Koval; apparently he thought it was not a real name. As it turned out, he was wrong.

In June 1997 Kopelev died in Cologne. A few months before, in January 1997, in Moscow, Solzhenitsyn went back to Marfino—as a visitor. The visit needed weeks of negotiations, as it remains a highly secret facility, manned by what was then called FAPSI, the Russian electronic intelligence agency. On January 16, 1997, the gates opened to let in Solzhenitsyn’s cherry-red Volvo. Solzhenitsyn was full of memories. “I never thought I could visit this place again. I walked and couldn’t stop, in some rooms—incredibly!—everything is as it was then.” Eventually he was shown into the large room where over five hundred employees gathered. In 1997 Marfino suffered three months’ delay in payment of salaries, and the employees asked Solzhenitsyn anxiously, “What should we do? Does our country need us?” They called him a colleague. The only media report from the meeting said, “They felt in today’s Solzhenitsyn an accomplice and applauded.” Vladimir Umnov, “Solzhenitsyn snova v sharashke” [Solzhenitsyn Is Again in Sharashka], Ogonyok , January 27, 1997, www.ogoniok.com/archive/1997/4487/04–20–21.