While the Soviet Union may be long gone, much of its mentality still lingers. A desire for control continues to motivate the Kremlin to impose an authoritarian regime not only in Russian media and politics, but especially on the Internet. Fighting Moscow’s online regime has proven to be a herculean—possibly even futile—task.

This is the sobering conclusion in The Red Web: The Struggle Between Russia’s Digital Dictators and The New Online Revolutionaries by Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan.

The two veteran Russian journalists have closely examined the inner workings of digital politics in their homeland for decades, and as they write in the book’s final pages:

Fear—and self-censorship caused by fear—were for centuries essential to the system of government in Russia, from imperial times through the Soviet period and into the president. The leaders often dealt in the currency of threats and intimidation. … Russia did not need to be as repressive or technically sophisticated as, say, China. [Russian President Vladimir] Putin did not need to carry out mass repressions against journalists or activists; he could get results just as effectively by using the tools of threat and intimidation, which is what he did.

For years, Ars has been interested in what’s been happening on the Russian Internet. I’ve sat up and taken notice as Russia tried to not only impose its strong will on its citizens—for example, driving the founder of Russia’s Facebook into exile—but also about pushing its agency on the international stage at agencies like the United Nations. And like it or not, Russia and its population of 143 million is a global player both online and offline.

In recent years, Russia has imposed an increasingly draconian and myopic view of the Internet. In 2012, the country passed its now-famous “Internet restriction bill,” resulting in a blacklist imposed by Roskomnadzor This agency, which in some ways acts as the equivalent of the Federal Communications Commission, also acts as a data protection authority and media overseer in the country. During the bill’s passage, Russian Wikipedia even shut down for a day in protest

So far, all of the journalists, bloggers, activists, lawyers, and other members of the “liberal” Russia community described in the book haven't gotten very far when trying to push Russia toward more openness. The most obvious example of this is Alexei Navalny, the largest political counterweight to Putin (and a notable blogger). Navalny has been arrested numerous times, yet he's made little significant headway.

Law and order

One particularly troubling anecdote in the opening section of the book outlines the brief tale of Vladimir Fridkin, a Russian professor who invented the modern photocopier in 1953. Fridkin’s bosses were alerted of his work, and a factory in Moldova was quickly organized to expedite the production of the photocopier.

However, by 1957, the KGB decided that such a machine was too dangerous. As Soldatov and Borogan write:

The first copying machine in the Soviet Union was smashed to pieces, and the parts were taken to a dump. One critical part of it, a slab of mirror, was salvaged and put up in the women’s restroom. Fridkin’s institute did not carry out secret research, so the decision to destroy his machine was not protecting anything at the institute; rather it reflected the broader and deeper paranoia of the Communist Party. The party maintained a stranglehold on power and a chokehold on information.

The authors next jump forward a few decades and explore flickering hope in the 1980s, the early days of the Russian Internet. They include the tale of Relcom , for example, a company founded by Soldatov’s father, Alexey Soldatov. (Frustratingly, this connection is not addressed in the book.)

By the early 1990s, when the Soviet Union collapsed and gave way to the modern Russian Federation, a number of successor agencies came to the fore, including FAPSI (the post-Soviet equivalent to the National Security Agency) and the FSB (the new KGB), which later absorbed FAPSI. Before the end of the decade, the government began to expand its Internet surveillance program through a system called SORM, effectively giving the FSB unlimited powers over the Internet in Russia.

As the authors wrote:

Although they would have to get an eavesdropping warrant from the court, the FSB was not obliged to show it to anyone, not even the Internet company they were tapping. The ISPs had no right to demand the FSB show it to them either, as they had no security clearance. Making matters worse, the ISPs would have to pay for the black boxes, the SORM equipment, and the installation, but they would have no access to it. Pure and simple, the SORM box was a backdoor to Russia’s Internet and the security service was about to open it.

For every American that worries about the NSA’s domestic overreach in the United States, we can take at least some solace that what we’re arguing about isn’t quite as bad as the deep packet inspection-enabled SORM put on every Russian ISP. By 2000, Russia released a public document entitled "Information Security Doctrine of the Russian Federation" (2000), essentially codifying what the FSB had been doing for a few years. This document includes sentences like this:

The state’s interests in the information sphere consist of creating conditions for harmonious Russian information infrastructure development… the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Russia, and political, economic and social stability; the interests of the state also consist in the unconditional maintenance of law and order and in the promotion of equal and mutually advantageous international cooperation.

In fact during the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics, the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team put out this warning:

SORM-1 captures telephone and mobile phone communications, SORM-2 intercepts internet traffic, and SORM-3 collects information from all forms of communication, providing long-term storage of all information and data on subscribers, including actual recordings and locations. Reports of Rostelecom, Russia’s national telecom operator, installing deep packet inspection (DPI) means authorities can easily use key words to search and filter communications. Therefore, it is important that attendees understand communications while at the Games should not be considered private. … If individuals decide to bring their personal devices, consider all communications and files on them to be vulnerable to interception or confiscation.

Snowden, subdued

By the middle of the book, the authors devote a little bit of time to address Edward Snowden and how he fell into the Kremlin’s lap, right when he “got stuck” in a Moscow airport while in transit in 2013. The famous NSA contractor and whistleblower appeared before Moscow media and human rights advocates at the airport on July 12, 2013—alongside his Russian lawyer Anatoly Kucherena. This attorney, profiled later that month by The New York Times, is often described as a Kremlin ally.

As the Times wrote at the time:

Mr. Kucherena’s role has increased his prominence in Russia. Like many defense lawyers in a country where justice is viewed as deeply politicized, he occupies an occasionally awkward space between challenging authority and being part of the system itself. At the same time, he is a political supporter of Mr. Putin’s and serves on the Public Chamber, an advisory body that critics have long derided as a Potemkin construct of actual government oversight. He also serves as a member of another board that oversees the Federal Security Service, or F.S.B. Those roles have prompted accusations that the Kremlin is orchestrating events behind the scenes and that Mr. Kucherena has ties to the authorities or the security service itself, which he disputed.

But in The Red Web, the authors are more forthright:

Kucherena is a prominent lawyer as well as a member of the Public Council within the FSB, an organization established in 2007 to promote the image of the Russian security service. Kucherena also serves as chairman of the Institute for Democracy and Cooperation, a front organization for Russia’s propaganda machine, with branches in New York and Paris. Putin had suggested personally that such an institute be created to criticize human rights violations in the United States; the institute has an annual report called “The State of Human Rights in the United States.”

This section, too, is bafflingly thin. Neither Snowden himself nor his attorneys have fully explained the precise nature of the relationship between the Russian government and their most famous American resident. Ars has sent questions to Snowden via his legal team at the American Civil Liberties Union several times, but he has not responded. It seems unlikely that an FSB-affiliated lawyer representing one of the world’s most notable whistleblowers has not made some sort of arrangement within an authoritarian country.

Synopsis The Red Web, set to be released on September 8, opens with a quick history of communications technology in the Soviet Union and how the KGB (the infamous Soviet-era security agency) halted technological progress early on in order to co-opt it. Despite various detailed efforts to break through the Kremlin’s control, it seems that in the end the state always wins. Still, the book provides a fascinating and extensive examination as to how Russia arrived at this point.

Ars would have hoped that two veteran Russian journalists, writing in English, would be able to provide the best insight—informed speculation at a minimum—as to what exactly is going on. Instead, the authors spend a lot of time lamenting Snowden’s lack of speaking out against increased Russian digital surveillance. The authors probably made a strategic decision to not focus too much on Snowden in favor of keeping a wider reach, but it seems a lost opportunity.

In the end, the book comprehensively explores the decades-long evolution of the Russian Internet and the Kremlin’s tight fist around it. The story provides a lot of names that would only really be familiar to a Russian politics nerd, but it sorely lacks some of the “revolutionaries” advertised in its subtitle. While there are brief glimpses of cracks in the matrix—Russian soldiers in occupied Ukraine putting their exploits on Instagram, for example—the system as a whole remains intact.

In the eyes of these journalists, the Putin-dominated Kremlin continues. Recent events seem to support them. After all, this is the government that invaded neighboring Ukraine, and it either perpetrated or allowed the February 2015 murder of Boris Nemtsov, the country's former deputy prime minister.