“This is not a phone conversation…”

                                                                        – Soviet saying

Introducing his new book The Red Web: The Struggle Between Russia’s Digital Dictators and the New Online Revolutionaries at an event at the Frontline Club on Tuesday 29 September, co-author and founder of Agentura.Ru Andrei Soldatov began by saying that to understand modern Russia you must first understand the mentality and historical relationship between citizen, state and surveillance.

“The saying – ‘this is not a phone conversation,’ used by soviet citizens – is still in use today and reflects a continuity of some habits we inherited from the soviet past.”

The impact of this soviet legacy is mirrored in the methods and the principles of the FSB’s modern communication interception systems, as well as the “strange” and complicit relationship between the state military industrial complex and the telecommunications industry in Russia.

Soldatov continued: “The most important principle for the Russian system of surveillance is the back door to all Russian communications, which provides direct access to all servers, all networks on Russia soil.” The country’s revolving door policy between state and private sector results in a “complete lack of resistance, even collusion from the industry itself.”

Furthermore, said Soldatov, the “surveillance mentality” seen today derives more from the soviet approach to control, which prioritised intimidation and self-censorship, than from the use of technology.

“Russia’s system of online surveillance is not very sophisticated. The problem is that the Russian state is extremely skilful in sending a message: ‘You might be spied on… Be careful.’ And in a country with a very recent totalitarian past one needs to be only reminded of what might happen and that is enough.”

@AndreiSoldatov @irinaborogan presenting new book the Red Web in @frontlineclub #russia #putinAtWar pic.twitter.com/jI9W7OnBq0

— Agne Dovydaityte (@AgneDovydaityte) September 29, 2015

Co-author Irina Borogan acknowledged the problems of this soviet legacy and suggested that while the strategy President Putin has tried to apply to the internet is similar to that he successfully used to suppress traditional media in the early 2000s, his basic misunderstanding of how social media works post-Arab Spring leaves room for optimism.

“Once again, the Kremlin’s approach was based more on intimidation than mass oppression or technology. Putin believes that all things exist in a hierarchical structure and if you exert pressure from the top you can rule all things. But this fails to understand the internet as a network, which we all know has no centre – everyone can participate without authorisation.”

For Privacy International researcher Edin Omanovic, from the perspective of the state it is less a problem of a soviet citizen mentality than Putin’s worldview shaped by KGB/FSB surveillance policy.

“It is the narrative between how the horizontal approach to new technology is changing the world and being a force for liberation, versus how new technology is actually a force for oppression.”

Omanovic added that this is not merely a problem confined to Russia, but one that involves the billion-dollar private surveillance industry throughout the world, where cooperation between surveillance manufacturers and state defence contractors is often implicit.

The future of #Russia's internet: walking on the knife's edge – one kept purposefully obscure. http://t.co/LmzbEczf8m

— oDR (@opendemocracyru) September 14, 2015

For the BBC’s former Moscow correspondent and event moderator Daniel Sandford, while the KGB tactic to focus solely on dissident leaders and “well known trouble-makers” combined with often high levels of incompetence led to a certain lack of control, there is a concern that the FSB’s increasing professionalism – and a better organised and resourced state surveillance programme than existed in the 1970s and 80s – will see the state bring the internet under its control as it has done with other traditional media outlets.

Borogan, however, disputed this suggestion, claiming that what differentiates today from the soviet era is that “technology is getting cheaper and cheaper all the time and to install an all-powerful surveillance network throughout the entire country is ever more difficult.”

The widespread nature of internet networks will, in essence, beat Big Brother.

For Tonia Samsonova, foreign correspondent for Echo Moskvy, it is the actual goal of decision makers who are establishing the surveillance state that is the issue.

“One part of [these people] are actually working for the government, for the security of the regime, the others think of their job as a business. So one might ask what are the real goals of those guys? Are they to protect Putin, protect themselves as a class or to make as much money as they want?”

For Samsonova the danger lies not in the cynical surveillance measures of today, but in data departments and analytical models which can be used to predict issues and trends before they happen and to preemptively target potential trouble-makers.

“We used to say health to the people. Now we say health to the rich only.”

On Monday 3 February 2014, the Frontline Club screened the UK premier of Putin’s Olympic Dream. Director Hans Pool shone light onto the crooked nature of Putin’s very own “fake smile.” Behind the facade of the Sochi Olympics is a world where the elderly are uprooted to make way for ice rinks and where 50–70% of migrant workers are deported without pay after months of exploitation.

Director Hans Pool. Photo credit: George Symonds

Pool began the Q&A by describing the film – initially conceived as part of The Sochi Project – as his most difficult project to date. He talked of run-ins with the FSB and interviewees who would refuse further participation after being threatened.

In response to a question about managing the risk to people who spoke on film, Pool said:

“When we were filming, they only told us stories they really wanted to tell us. There was no pressure from us to tell really bad stories.”

However, he was only able to find one human rights defender in Sochi willing to speak to the filmmakers:

“It was very difficult. . . . They are very scared to talk about those things. He was the only one.”

Asked by audience members about navigation of visa restrictions and the more opaque elements of the Russian authorities, Pool described the situation as, “always a kind of cat and mouse”.

A crew member in attendance told a tale of sabotage:

“There were a few cars chasing us all the time. I’m Russian actually, so I was kind of embarrassed because of that, so I went up to them and said, ‘What are you doing? You’re embarrassing me and all the Russians, and we know you’re following us.’ They just acted like nothing was going on.

 

“We were actually laughing about it all the time,” she continued, “and going to this one restaurant every evening. But when we got back we figured out that actually every night we were sitting in the restaurant they were entering our hotel rooms. They managed to destroy all the [memory] discs we were using to film. We just figured it out when we got back to Moscow and when we sent the discs back to the Netherlands they couldn’t open them. When the Sony company, in the end, opened them they saw they were scratched. . . . Well we flew back and filmed everything again in one day, . . . but that was really frightening.”

Project participant Valery Molozov

When asked whether members of the International Olympic Committee had seen the film, Pool said he did not know, however: “For me it’s a big question why they organise those Olympic games in countries like Russia or in Beijing. I really don’t understand. It has to do with a lot of money. You know there’s a lot of corruption.”

“What do you think about boycotting the games?” posed another member of the audience.

“Boycotting the games, I don’t know,” responded Pool. “You have to protest. If you’re going there as a supporter or as a politician you have to discuss these things. I think that’s very, very important. . . . I think it’s very important not to shut your mouth, but to discuss it and to get it in the open. It’s terrible for those workers, because they’re paying for the Olympic games, actually. . . . It’s really a shame out there.”

Putin’s Olympic Dream will be screened at the Lexi Cinema in London on 13 February. It will also be screened in Bratislava, Slovakia, on 10 February through the Frontline Club’s International Partners project.

By Sara Elizabeth Williams

A dark picture of Russian democracy emerged at the Frontline Club last night as Susan Richards spoke with journalists Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan about power, accountability and Russia’s secret services. 

Soldatov and Borogan, co-founders of secret service watchdog site Agentura.ru, are the authors of The New Nobility, an investigation into the FSB. Powerful, mysterious and accountable to no one, the term fits Russia’s secret services a little too well. 

Even as the FSB’s mandate grows, there is little discussion around its ascension to power. The New Nobility hasn’t been published in Russia because publishers showed no interest. Borogan wasn’t optimistic about the book’s  – or her own – potential as a catalyst for change:

As journalists, you have no possibility to change anything, to have any impact, because authorities pay no attention to your investigations.

Soldatov elaborated on this by describing how the scientific community became fearful after the KGB started imprisoning people for questioning the government, and how the FSB has carried on and even compounded this tradition of silencing dissension.

The first step towards modernisation is discussion. You cannot modernise your country if you have no public discussion. We have to ask questions, to question decisions.

Soldatov described the FSB’s vicegrip on Russia as a process that began not with Putin, but in the mid-1990’s when the unit was charged with running Russia’s prisons. The FSB’s evolution to near-total power happened in stages and was facilitated by the end of the mafia tradition and the emergence of a new middle class that put mansions and BMWs before ideology:

The middle classes have been given private freedoms and forgotten about public freedoms.

A portrait emerges of a state within a state that reset the rules as it went, protecting itself and its own interests. The relatively recent redefinition of treason was central to this, Borogan explained, as it allowed the FSB to take over e-surveillance in Russia’s near abroad.

Today the FSB operates outside parliamentary control. The government has no mechanisms to control the FSB, and the prosecutorial office has no right to ask the service for documents. It’s a grim picture of the absolute mutation of power:

Between the central office of the FSB and the Kremlin there are so many levels, there’s no transparency, accountability or contact point. There’s no independent media, no parliamentary control, no prosecutorial control.

All of this power has incubated in an ideological environment anchored on one idea: that Russia is surrounded by enemies. More grim still, the complex structure of the organisation leads Soldatov and Borogan to believe that the FSB isn’t even in charge of itself.

The way forward, if there is one, is unclear. Soldatov suggested that the only way for the government to regain control of the FSB would be to redistribute its various responsibilities. Richards was optimistic but Soldatov wasn’t hopeful: he thinks Russia’s younger generations see this and think it’s the way things should be, or the only way things can be.

Yet for the two 35-year-old journalists who have lived through Soviet rule, perestroika, the early post-Soviet era and Russia today, this doesn’t have to be the only way. 

The KGB, Russia’s notorious intelligence service, was dissolved in 1991 after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The void it left was soon filled by a new security service, the FSB, which has accumulated powerful backers and increasing authority ever since. This agency has become, in the words of former FSB Director Nikolai Patrushev, Russia’s “new nobility.”  Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan, co-founders of the secret services watchdog website Agentura.ru, will be speaking at the Frontline Club about their book The New Nobility which investigates Russia’s powerful and shadowy security and intelligence services.

Soldatov and Borogan worked for Novaya Gazeta from January 2006 to November 2008. Agentura.ru has been reported on and featured in the New York Times, the Moscow Times, the Washington Post, Online Journalism Review, Le Monde, the Christian Science Monitor, CNN, the Federation of American Scientists, and the BBC.

This event will be moderated by Susan Richards, a non-executive director and founder of Open Democracy. She is the author of two books on Russia and a specialist on Russian affairs.

This special event has been made possible through the Frontline Russia project.