The incredibly disturbing reason why the Russian Internet was broken the day it was created

You can read “The Red Web” as a definitive account of how the Kremlin has thoroughly co-opted the Russian Internet, turning it into an effective tool for the modern surveillance state. That, clearly, is how the two co-authors — Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan — want you to read it. They consider themselves to be “digital revolutionaries” playing havoc with the Kremlin’s relentless pursuit of control over the Internet over the past fifteen years.

However, you can also read “The Red Web” as a haunting commentary on how the Russian Internet was doomed from the outset, despite all its early promise during the Yeltsin era. In economics, this outcome is explained as being the result of “path dependence,” a concept that explains the continued use of a product or practice based on historical preference or use. In short, history matters. Path dependence explains why an inferior product manages to succeed, even if better products or practices are available. In layman’s terms, Russia was locked into an inferior product — an Internet that was only marginally free and expressive — thanks to the way information was viewed by the repressive Soviet state.

In fact, the first half of “The Red Web” is dedicated entirely to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the nearly two decades leading up to the Moscow street protests of 2011–2012. The book lays the groundwork for the creation of the modern Russian Internet by stepping back to the 1950s and the Soviet Union’s elaborate network of state-run prison camps for scientists where many of today’s Internet technologies originated. It examines how the Soviet state relentlessly cracked down on any free flow of information, and began to develop very sophisticated devices for monitoring just about any form of communication.

As a result, Vladimir Putin only makes his first appearance in Chapter Five — the ominously titled “The Coming of Putin” — which describes how Putin first entered the public limelight in 1999 as the successor to Boris Yeltsin. Based on his KGB background, Putin was naturally disposed to suspicion of the Internet and what it meant for the explosion of new ideas and concepts in society that couldn’t be controlled by the state. Putin experienced the power and reach of mass media when he first entered the Kremlin, as the nation’s oligarchs attempted to use their television networks to take down Yeltsin and hand over power to a rival. In short, writes Soldatov, “President Putin never forgot that Vladimir Gusinsky’s media empire had nearly broken the Kremlin.”

According to Soldatov and Borogan, it has been Putin who has been behind a relentless push to crack down on the opposition ever since 1999, including the use of sophisticated cyber-strategies to combat dissent about Ukraine in 2014. There are pages upon pages of detailed accounts in the book of how Russian government officials are trying to shut down sites officially — and when they can’t, are using trolls, hackers and massive denial of service attacks to shut them down unofficially. And Putin’s famous comment that the Internet began as a CIA project looms large in trying to grasp how the Kremlin views the Web.

What becomes very clear, however, is that what’s going in Russia now in 2016 is nothing new — it’s the same cat-and-mouse game that’s been going on since the 1950s, when there was no Facebook, Google or Twitter. Today’s Internet eavesdropping devices (those dreaded black SORM boxes that appear throughout the book) are yesterday’s telephone eavesdropping devices. Today’s proliferation of blogs and social media sites are yesterday’s samizdat. And today’s Internet-monitoring agencies (FAPSI, Roskomnadzor) are yesterday’s KGB, which splintered into several different pieces with the collapse of the Soviet Union.

That’s what’s meant by “path dependence” for the Russian Internet — is it even possible that things could have turned out differently in Russia, given the legacy of the Soviet Union? You can’t just dismantle a massive surveillance state overnight - there are just too many vested interests.

As Soldatov notes in the book, the way that Russians and Americans view security is also very different. In an account of how Russia has been trying to use an obscure UN agency — the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) — to crack down on the Internet, he explains that Russians view “Internet security” the same way they view “national security” — as a topic that is central to the future of the nation.

In Russia, the geopolitical disputes may change, but the approach doesn’t. The same technologies used to clamp down on Chechen dissidents in the 1990s are the same technologies used to clamp down on Maidan dissidents protesting Ukraine or Bolotnaya dissidents protesting the results of Russian elections in 2011–2012.

The fact that so many tools and technologies already existed from the old days of the Soviet Union means that there has been a natural transition to using them in the modern Russia. In fact, Chapter Nine of “The Red Web” makes the compelling point that Russia’s scientists and engineers are pretty much agnostic when it comes to making tools and technologies. “We just come up with the hardware,” they suggest, without thinking of how monitoring devices or technologies might be used.

In short, it’s impossible to consider the future without considering the past. There’s no such thing as starting from scratch in Russia. Even the most successful Russian start-ups — think Yandex — are caught up in the strange world of Soviet-era intrigues. The most famous Russian cyber security company — Kaspersky Lab — is viewed with skepticism, given the KGB background of Eugene Kaspersky, the founder and CEO of the company. And those old Soviet-era youth groups? They’ve been given a modern makeover, where now their tasks consist of blocking unwanted websites and preparing blacklists of sites to be banned by the state.

Even Soldatov himself is testament to this fact that the past has a long reach — he details within the book how his father (Alexey Soldatov) helped build the foundations of the original Russian Internet back in the late 1980s before the collapse of the Soviet Union. Alexey Soldatov’s Relcom network gave breaking news updates to the West during the attempted putsch against Yeltsin — something that automatically gave the younger Soldatov entry into the elite of Russian technological society when he was just a teenager.

Part II of “The Red Web” leads off with “The Snowden Affair,” which basically becomes the point of the book where the Kremlin begins to use the example of the U.S. and its expanding surveillance state as an excuse to step up its own efforts to monitor e-mails, Internet usage, Skype, cell phone calls, text messages and social networks. While Russia has been aggressive in policing the Internet, it pales in comparison to what’s happening in China or the Middle East — and, quite possibly, as we saw with Snowden, with what’s happening in the U.S.

Throughout the book, it’s actually willing Western IT vendors who unknowingly or knowingly become part of the story, aiding and abetting the Kremlin. In one anecdote, social media filtering software — the type of harmless software that might be used by a consumer brands company to see which moms are talking about which brands of diapers — is adopted by the Russian intelligence services as a way of seeing which Russian bloggers are talking about the Russian state.

Even Google — one of the great U.S. Internet companies — is seen as a willing accomplice, going along with plans to host Internet servers on Russian soil so as not to lose access to the Russian Internet market. In one example cited by Soldatov, Google rents an entire floor in a building that is a crucial Internet exchange point known as MSK-IX. One floor below, the FSB (the main successor to the KGB) rents entire rooms dedicated to monitoring all of Russia’s Internet traffic. Google and the FSB, separated only by an elevator ride.

Ultimately, it’s impossible to ignore the fact that it’s not just Russia — it’s the whole world — that’s struggling to make sense of the Internet as both a tool of democracy and an instrument of surveillance. With every new terrorist attack, we are made aware of how such technologies might hurt us — and also how they might ultimately become part of what saves us, providing we are willing to cede our privacy and freedom.

As Soldatov notes in the prologue, “The book is an investigation into these two great forces — surveillance and control on one side, and freedom on the other — and what happens when they collide.” Which force emerges as the winner is still to be determined.