The Red Web: Russia’s Digital Dictators and the New Online Revolutionaries

Review by Kathrin Hille

What does the Soviet Union’s first document-copying machine have to do with Facebook? A lot more than you might think.

After Vladimir Fridkin, a young physicist, designed the device in the early 1950s, colleagues came to his office every day to make copies of articles from foreign journals — until the KGB decided to destroy it because it might be used to spread forbidden information. Six decades later, the regime of President Vladimir Putin, a former KGB agent, is trying to get its hands on the Facebook servers through which Russian dissidents organise protests.

Fridkin’s tale is one of many that Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan enlist in The Red Web, their gripping book about of the internet and its censorship in post-Soviet Russia.

Having covered technology and the security services from the start of their careers in the 1990s, the two Russian journalists have accumulated expert knowledge few can match. And yet they have written a book not for geeks but for anyone who wants to understand how their country works.

They come at their story from several perspectives, describing the Soviet-educated engineers who came up with early internet technology, the goons who tried to control but struggled to understand it, and the activists who seize on the new channels of communication.

The timing of the book could hardly be better: since massive street demonstrations greeted the start of his third presidential term in 2012, Mr Putin has tried to dam in the power of social media through content filtering, website blacklists and government-sponsored trolling.

But the book’s biggest accomplishment is to trace the roots of Russia’s internet censorship far beyond Mr Putin. Each of the strands chronicled by Soldatov and Borogan starts in the Soviet Union. There is Soldatov’s own father, a “serious, heavily-built scientist” who “spoke slowly because he stuttered badly”. Alexey Soldatov became a pioneer of the internet in 1980s Russia by helping build one of the country’s first computer networks. During the putsch against reformist Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in August 1991, members exchanged news via this network — an embryonic form of online social networking.

The authors also chart the history of Sorm, a system as sinister as its ugly acronym suggests. The Sistema Operativno-Rozysknikh Meropriyatiy, or System of Operative Search Measures, has been giving the FSB, successor to the KGB, a back door to spy on internet communications since 1998. At one point, Soldatov the younger comes eye to eye with a Sorm device. “The heavy metal door was opened, and Andrei quietly stepped inside a small room, packed with equipment on the racks. One of them had a small black box. It was labelled Sorm. It had a few cables and a few lights. Andrei was told that when the small green lamp was illuminated on the box, the FSB guys on the eighth floor have something to do. As he looked down, Andrei saw the small green lamp winking.”

But Sorm was not born in 1998, the year Mr Putin became head of the FSB: as Soldatov and Borogan establish through interviews with KGB sources and engineers, the ancestors of the black box were in fact Soviet-era phone-tapping systems. To develop them, the KGB enlisted some of its enemies; in a prison lab near Moscow, dissident Lev Kopelev was set to work on speech-recognition techniques.

Through a multitude of narratives spanning more than half a century, The Red Web highlights the many strands that link today’s Russia to its violent, autocratic past. Perhaps the most powerful is the grip of the security services, which barely swayed even during the 1990s, a time which was both more chaotic and more democratic.

And yet, in its efforts to gain the upper hand over the internet, Russia’s security apparatus appears clumsy, with activists outsmarting some of the intrusive surveillance. If the book has one shortcoming, it is that it fails to offer a conclusive explanation for this. The authors state that the regime is helpless in the face of a decentralised network. “Information runs free like water or air on a network, not easily captured,” they say. We can only hope that they are right.

The writer is the FT’s Moscow bureau chief

The Red Web: The Struggle between Russia’s Dictators and the New Online Revolutionaries, by Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan (Public Affairs, £18.99, $27.99)