Russia Jails the Father of Russia’s Internet

Alexey Soldatov, a Russian Internet pioneer and a founder of the first Internet provider in the country, has been sentenced by a court to two years in a labor colony on charges of “abuse of power.” Soldatov, 72, had been detained by a court in Moscow. He is terminally ill.

Very few in Russia believe in the government charges against a man widely known as a Father of the Russian Internet — and who is less well known as the father of Andrei Soldatov, one of this article’s authors.

Soldatov was accused of abuse of power when managing a pool of IP-addresses by an organization he had no position at. This legal absurdity was enough to see him imprisoned even though the court knew of Soldatov’s illness, which meant the court had no legal right to pass a custodial sentence. His family believes that the decision is essentially a death sentence.

Soldatov, a nuclear physicist by training, made his career in the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy, a leading Soviet nuclear research facility during the Cold War. In addition to research on atomic weapons, scientists at the Kurchatov were involved in many crucial defense projects, ranging from Soviet nuclear submarines to laser weapons. As a result, the institute held an exalted status in the Soviet Union.

Because of that, the institute enjoyed a degree of freedom unthinkable for other Soviet research centers. Among other things, it meant the institute had a phone line capable of making international calls, something unthinkable at almost any other institution.

Soldatov, who was known at the Kurchatov Institute for using computers more than anyone else to do his work, dreamt of building a network at the institute. He formed a team of programmers around him, and in 1990 they began to think about how they could connect the institute with other research centers in the country. They needed a name for this network, they ran a random word-selection program in English. The program came up with Relcom.

In August of that year, the Relcom network became a reality, making a connection between the Kurchatov Institute in Moscow and the Institute of Informatics and Automation in Leningrad, 460 miles away. Next, a connection was established with research centers in Dubna, Serpukhov, and Novosibirsk. The network used ordinary telephone lines, and the bandwidth was extremely narrow — the network was capable only of exchanging simple e-mails. But the Relcom team was dreaming of connecting with the world.

On August 28, 1990, the very first Soviet connection to the global Internet was made when Kurchatov programmers exchanged emails with a university in Helsinki, Finland. The isolated Soviet Union, thanks to Relcom, was now connected to the global Internet. Relcom rapidly expanded, and many began using the word Relcom as a shorthand term the Internet or email.

It was a very anti-Soviet idea — to connect people instantly both within the country and the world. The Soviet Union was a country where hierarchy was everything, and where any act required obligatory pre-authorization.

The first political test for Relcom came when the KGB organized a putsch in August 1991. The KGB blocked and banned traditional media, but they didn’t pay attention to the nascent Internet. Soldatov was far from Moscow, in Vladikavkaz, but when he called his people at the Kurchatov Computation Center, he insisted on one thing and one thing only: keep the line open.  

Relcom remained operational, disseminating news about resistance in Moscow and other cities to Europe and the US.  It was hugely effective because the network was completely horizontal — on the first day of the coup someone in the Relcom team came up with an idea they called “Regime N1”: to ask all subscribers of Relcom to look out the window and send back exactly what they saw — just the facts, no emotions.

Soon Relcom received a kaleidoscopic picture of what was happening throughout the country, disseminating the eyewitness reports from subscribers along with news reports. It became clear that the tanks and troops were present only in two cities—Moscow and Leningrad — and that the coup would not succeed.  

In the 1990s the new Russian Internet blossomed, and Soldatov’s Relcom became just one of many middle-sized Internet service providers. Even so, he remained widely respected, in the country and abroad, for his expertise in Internet governance. He also helped to established the organizations which provided the technical backbone of the Russian Internet ever since — including distribution of the domain names and IP addresses.

In 2008 President Medvedev, a big fan of Internet technology, who had positioned himself as a sort of liberal, invited Soldatov into his government as deputy minister of communications in charge of the Internet.

Soldatov survived only two years, and left in November 2010, unwilling to support government ideas then being debated, such as the development of a national computer operating system or a national search engine that would separate the Russian Internet from the global network. He always believed in the horizontal, global nature of the network.

That didn’t make him very popular. In 2019, he was put under criminal investigation, a decision initiated by Andrei Lipov, the head of the department on the Internet at the presidential administration.

Even under investigation, Soldatov kept working on several research projects, including AI.

Now, his accuser, Andrei Lipov, is the head of Roskomnadzor, the Russian Internet censorship agency, and Alexey Soldatov is in jail.

The Russian state, vindictive and increasingly violent by nature, decided to take his liberty, a perfect illustration of the way Russia treats the people who helped contribute to the modernization and globalization of the country.

His true crime in the eyes of this vicious regime? An independent mind, genuine integrity, and a son who lives in exile, while writing about the descent into dictatorship of their homeland.

I haven’t seen my father for four years, since I left Russia. I hope I still have the chance to see him once again.

Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan are Non-resident Senior Fellows with the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA.) They are Russian investigative journalists, and co-founders of Agentura.ru, a watchdog of Russian secret service activities. 

Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the position or views of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis.