Court sentences "father of the Russian internet" to prison

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Nuclear physicist and internet expert Alexei Soldatov, who was co-founder of the first Russian network provider Relcom, is to spend two years in a labor camp. This was decided by a court in the Saviolovski district of Moscow on Monday, July 22. The charge was abuse of office in connection with the administration of an IP address pool by the non-profit organization Russian Institute for Public Networks (RIPN). This was reported by theAPpress agency and the civil rights portalnetzpolitik.org, among others.Together with Alexei Soldatov, his former business partner Yevgeny Antipov was also sentenced to 18 months in prison on the same charges. Alexei Shkittin, another of Soldatov's ex-business partners and an international network expert, was also charged. What happened to him is unknown, according to netzpolitik.org. Shkittin's profiles on theLinkedInandXingplatforms suggested that he had been in Berlin.

The indictment accused Soldatov, Antipov and Shkittin of embezzling around eight million US dollars from RIPN by illegally passing on address blocks to the Czech-based internet company Reliable Communications , which Soldatov and Shkittin allegedly owned. The research network Meduzareportedon the criminal investigation, which began in 2019, on New Year's Eve of that year, suggesting that the actual background was different to that presented by the official authorities. According to Meduza, citing a RIPN board member at the time, the organization is said to have been on the verge of dissolution in 2019.

The Russian government feared that the administration of the top-level domain ".su", which stood for the former Soviet Union, could be transferred from RIPN to the non-profit "Internet Development Foundation" controlled by Soldatov. The report points out that a law for a "sovereign" Russian Internet came into force at the time. Among other things, the government wanted to bring top-level domains such as .ru, .рф and .su under its own state control.

Actually, .ru should have replaced the old .su before the turn of the millennium. However, this did not happen because the old top-level domain was still too popular. It is stilladministeredby RIPN and the Russian Institute for Development of Public Networks (ROSNIIROS).According to Andrei Soldatov, his father held no position at all at RIPN. He speaks of a "legal absurdity". The Meduza report stated at the time that although Soldatov's actions were difficult to understand, they were by no means illegal.

In any case, Alexei Soldatov rejected all the accusations made against him. His family speaks of a purely political verdict. Soldatov's son Andrei and his wife Irina Borogan wrote in anarticleon the website of the Washington D.C.-based Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) that the decision was tantamount to a death sentence for the 72-year-old seriously ill man, as the court had known about the Russian Internet pioneer's fatal illness. CEPA is a non-profit think tank that conducts research, analysis and education in favor of political and economic cooperation between the USA and Europe.

Prominent technology pioneer

As a trained nuclear researcher, Alexei Soldatov made a career at the renowned Kurchatov Institute in Moscow during the Soviet era. During the Cold War, the institute was regarded as a leading nuclear research facility in the Soviet Union. Scientists there not only worked on nuclear weapons, but were also involved in many other projects of national military importance. The spectrum ranged from nuclear submarines to laser weapons.

In return, the Kurchatov Institute enjoyed a degree of freedom that other Soviet research institutes could only have dreamed of. Among other things, there was a telephone connection for international calls. Soldatov was known among his colleagues for using computers more than anyone else for his work. After realizing his dream of setting up his own network at the institute, he gathered a team of programmers around him and set about connecting the Kurchatov network with other research facilities in the country in 1990. An English-language word-finding program came up with the dashing-sounding name for the new network: Relcom.

In August 1990, Relcom created a connection between the Kurchatov Institute in Moscow and the Institute for Computer Science and Automation in Leningrad, some 740 km away. Other research centers that were connected were located in Dubna, Serpuchov and Novosibirsk. The Relcom data network used ordinary telephone lines. The bandwidths were tiny compared to networks in the western world. At first, it was only possible to exchange simple e-mails. But the Relcom team was already looking further ahead and wanted to create a connection to the global data network. The first step was already taken on August 28: Kurchatov programmers exchanged e-mails with colleagues at a university in Helsinki, Finland. The isolated Soviet Union was thus connected to the global Internet via Relcom. Relcom, which had mutated from an institute project to a tech company, grew rapidly; for many, the name soon became synonymous with e-mail communication and the Internet as such.

Is suppression alien to the Internet?

But basically, according to Andrei Soldatov, it was a decidedly anti-Soviet idea to connect people in the Soviet empire not only with each other, but with the whole world. The Soviet Union was ruled by hierarchical thinking and the principle of prohibition and approval. So the first political challenge for Relcom was not long in coming: In August 1991, the secret service KGB organized a coup by CPSU officials against President Mikhail Gorbachev and blocked conventional media in the process. However, the putschists did not have the emerging Internet on their radar. At the time, Soldatov was in Vladikavkaz, over 1700 km south of Moscow. But when he reached his colleagues at the Kurchatov data center, he insisted on keeping the data network open at all costs.

This meant that the Relcom connections remained intact and news of resistance to the coup could spread not only in Moscow, but also in Europe and the USA. This flow of information was enormously effective because the network was completely horizontal, not hierarchical. On the very first day of the events, someone in the Relcom team had an idea that became known as "Regime N1": All users of Relcom accounts were to look out of the window and report exactly what they saw at their respective locations: only facts were required. In this way, Relcom gained a mosaic-like picture of events across the country and was able to disseminate users' eyewitness accounts as well as up-to-date news summaries. It became clear that tanks and troops had only appeared in Moscow and Leningrad. This also meant that the world knew that the coup could neither have any substance nor endure. This was a key moment for the young Russian internet, as Andrei Soldatov emphasizes.

What followed was the collapse of the Soviet empire in 1991 and the boom of the global Internet in the years that followed. Network communication also flourished in Russia. Soldatov's Relcom became one of many medium-sized Internet service providers. He himself enjoyed widespread respect for his expertise in network organization, both in Russia and abroad, helping to create the facilities that have since formed the technical backbone of the Russian Internet - including the allocation of domain names and IP addresses.

Short term in government

In May 2008, Vladimir Putin's second term as Russian President came to an end; he moved to the office of Prime Minister. Dmitry Anatolyevich Medvedev, who replaced him as president, initially presented himself as liberal and an enthusiastic friend of the international data network. He invited Soldatov to join his cabinet as Deputy Communications Minister, where he would be responsible for the Internet. Prime Minister Putin accepted the appointment. However, Soldatov only lasted two years in this position. He resigned in November 2010 because he did not want to support government plans that were being discussed at the time: This concerned the development of a national operating system for computers as well as the creation of a special national search engine that would separate the Russian Internet from the worldwide web. As Andrei Soldatov emphasizes, his father always believed in the horizontal concept of a global Internet.

Under the increasingly authoritarian regime of President Putin's third and fourth terms in office, Alexei Soldatov apparently made himself increasingly unpopular. In addition, his son had repeatedly published articles critical of the regime internationally as an investigative journalist together with Irina Borogan since 2008. This included commentaries on issues relating to terrorism and the intelligence services for the daily newspaper Vedomosti, which was initially run by the Financial Times and Wall Street Journal, as well as for Radio Free Europe and the BBC. Her research network Agentura.ru , founded in 2000 with several colleagues, follows the example of Steven Aftergood's "Secrecy News" at the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), which aimed to publish previously closed government documents of public interest and disclose information about intelligence service methods.

It is not clear whether there is a connection between the increasing surveillance of Alexei Soldatov and his son's activities - in any case, the internet pioneer has been the subject of criminal investigations since 2019. However, he continued to work on research projects, including on the topic of artificial intelligence. According to Andrei Soldatov, Andrei Lipov, head of the internet department in the Putin administration at the time, initiated the aforementioned investigations. Since 2020, Lipov has headed Rozkomnadzor, the supervisory service for information technology and mass communication. Lipov is subject to a number of internationalsanctionsas a result of Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine.

Andrei Soldatov describes Rozkomnadzor as the Russian agency for internet censorship and notes that Lipov has finally managed to put the uncomfortable internet expert behind bars on his way to the top. According to Andrei Soldatov, he himself has not seen his father since Irina Borogan and he moved into exile in the United Kingdom four years ago. He hopes, he adds, that he will have another opportunity to see him again. What did the regime see as his father's real crime, he wondered: was it his independent spirit, his genuine integrity - or the son living in exile while writing about the descent of his homeland into a dictatorship? (psz)