Citat:
In 1955 a young Soviet physicist named Vladimir Fridkin created something amazing: a boxlike machine, more than 3 feet high and 2 feet across, with two cylinders on the top and the high-current generator attached, that produced a very first copy of a photograph in the Soviet Union. Fridkin proudly named the device the Electrophotography Copying Machine No. 1. The authorities seemed happy—Fridkin was featured in a television show praising the Soviet achievements in science and received a small bonus for his accomplishment.
Fridkin became very popular in his research institute as his colleagues kept coming to his room every day to copy articles from foreign journals. Two years passed, and then he got a visitor of different kind. A female KGB officer went to his office to remove the machine. The first copying device in the Soviet Union was smashed to pieces, and the parts were taken to a dump. The reason? “People who come over to you can copy some prohibited materials,” Fridkin was told. Photocopiers produced in the West eventually made it to the Soviet Union, but they were kept under lock and key, available only in the offices of the Communist Party.
More than 20 years later, the Soviet Union was preparing to host the Olympic Games in Moscow, in the summer of 1980. To host it properly meant to have international phone lines, lots of them. So in 1979 the number of international lines in the country was significantly increased. An international telephone exchange station, known as M9, was launched in the southwest of Moscow. The Soviet engineers were proud to make the breakthrough: The new channels provided automatic connection, without an operator, which was unheard of in the Soviet Union. But this didn’t last for long. Just a few months after the Olympics, the KGB requested that the automatic international connection be destroyed. The engineers argued that all lines could be held under surveillance and intercepted, if the KGB wanted, and asked not to cut off the connection. But the KGB persisted. The automatic connection was cut off in the Soviet Union for all but a few chosen organizations, approved by the authorities.
The Soviet approach to control the population relied heavily on control over information by all means, from spying on what people say and read to limiting people’s communications. Access to modern communications mean horizontal ties, people talking to people, exchanging news and ideas. But the Soviet state was based on the idea of hierarchy, or a vertical, in which everything had to be authorized.
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The August 1991 coup failed, and for the next 20 years the Internet in Russia developed free and uncensored. The security services tried to put it under some sort of control by forcing all Internet service providers to install black boxes on the networks. These black boxes, known as SORM, from the system of operative-research measures, provide backdoor access to all Russian communications, including the Internet for the Russian secret services. But the idea of the network was not affected. Everybody could participate without an authorization.
After Moscow protests in 2011-12, Vladimir Putin made it personal. In 2014 he said that the Internet was a CIA project and made sure to introduce repressive legislation to intimidate the biggest Internet companies in the country.
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In the spring of 2014, the company Vkontakte, the most popular social network in Russia, modeled after Facebook, was placed under control of the Kremlin, imitating the approach Putin had used against traditional media in the early 2000s. The founder of the network, Pavel Durov, was forced out of the country. Soon he was replaced as CEO by Boris Dobrodeyev. The choice was noteworthy—Dobrodeyev’s father, Oleg, is a head of the television state empire, the All-Russia State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company. And now his son headed the most popular social network in the country.
