The Red Web: The Struggle Between Russia’s Digital Dictators and the New Online Revolutionaries. By Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan. PublicAffairs; 384 pages; $27.99.

THE Soviet Union was “the prison of information” and Vladimir Putin’s Russia risks becoming one too. That is the grim message of “The Red Web”, a well researched and disturbing book by two brave Russian authors. Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan caught global attention with “The New Nobility”, an earlier book on the caste of spooks and strongmen who run Russia. They have now turned their attention to the Kremlin’s control of electronic information. Even before Mr Putin rose to power, internet-service providers had to install (at their own expense) snooping devices, in what the authors prove was a direct continuation of the Soviet KGB’s mammoth phone-tapping efforts. Whereas in the West, communications companies typically co-operate with the authorities when a judicial warrant identifies a target, in the Russian system the surveillance was like a dragnet.

When in the Kremlin, Mr Putin, an ex-KGB man who once termed the fall of the Soviet Union a catastrophe, wrested control of television from the oligarchs, turning their corrupt but lively channels into docile sounding-boards. But for more than a decade Russia’s internet remained broadly free. Only when social media became central to organising opposition activity did the authorities begin to intervene.

Early efforts were futile. An attempt during elections in 2011 to swamp Livejournal (a Russian equivalent of Facebook) knocked pages run by election monitors off the internet, though they were quickly replicated elsewhere. Clumsy spam e-mails bearing toxic attachments to infect computers with snooping software appeared in opposition activists’ inboxes. Few were opened. Much more successful was a national blacklist of banned sites; Russia’s internet companies glumly co-operated in the intrusive inspection of suspect traffic.

More alarming still was the growing (and mostly secret) use of face-recognition technology. Anyone caught on a camera—for example at a football match—is logged, with their face turned into a mathematical matrix and stored on a database. Soviet-era voice-recognition technology, first chronicled by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his novel “The First Circle”, reached new levels, selecting phone calls on the basis of key words. As in the Soviet period, the authors observe, engineers enthuse over the technical challenges, seemingly unaware of the purposes their work serves.

The book’s narrative quickens with the arrival in Moscow of Edward Snowden, the fugitive contractor from the National Security Agency who took a trove of spy secrets from America and its allies. The authors, hyper-vigilant about privacy and internet freedom, are his natural allies, yet he refuses to talk to them. They hint that Mr Snowden is a hypocrite, the pawn of a regime which practises the abuses which he and his supporters say are looming in America. The Kremlin’s security agencies, the authors note drily, have received new powers over the internet on the pretext of protecting Russians from the American menace. (Mr Snowden this month broke his silence and criticised Russia’s human-rights record.)

The outlook is mostly bleak. Mr Putin dismisses the internet as a CIA operation, and warns Russian internet companies that they cannot hide. Given Russia’s anti-Western mood, that signals an open season on, say, firms with foreigners on their boards. Western internet companies have proved spineless—Twitter, for example, blocked a Ukrainian political party’s account to appease the Kremlin.

This is not quite the Soviet Union, though. The Putin system, the authors write, relies mainly on intimidation, not outright coercion. It is built to “zero in on a few troublemakers”, but “in times of instability it is average users who spread the information, and the Putin system then breaks down.” Perhaps. But not yet.

Correction: An earlier version of this article called Livejournal "the Russian equivalent of Facebook"; there is more than one.