TThe first time I used the Internet was in 1990. I was 15 years old in Moscow, then part of the Soviet Union. I was taken to a small office in the northwest part of the city, to a room with a few computers and some engineers.
He asked one of his engineers to show him the internet. I didn’t understand much about the internet at the time because before internet browsers, everything was just code on the screen. The engineer looked down on my technical ignorance and wouldn’t even try to decipher it.
This was a few months after my father’s team of engineers had established the isolated country’s first connection to a global network. Behind the Iron Curtain, engineers worked on this research over the course of five years. Ironically, it was carried out at the country’s most secretive facility: the Kurchatov Institute, the Soviet Union’s main nuclear research facility during the Cold War. This gave the institute a high status in the USSR, and this status allowed the scientists at the Kurchatov Institute freedoms unimaginable elsewhere.
My father, Alexei Soldatov, is an atomic physicist who dreamed of a network for decades, ever since he was the first and only foreign researcher at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen. After returning from Copenhagen in 1984, he formed a team and gradually built a network. They called it Relcom (RELiable COMmunication). First, they connected with other research centers in the Kurchatov Institute, then in Dubna, Novosibirsk, Leningrad, and then with other cities in the USSR. And finally, in August 1990, they exchanged e-mails with Helsinki for the first time. As a result of all this, he was nicknamed the “Father of the Russian Internet”.
Soldatov worked at the Kurchatov Institute, a Soviet nuclear research facility, during the Cold War.
Sergey Karpkin/Reuters
Soviet scientists like my father, who was a big fan of science fiction novels such as those by Isaac Asimov, believed that this network would become a virtual global space where scientists and intellectuals could exchange ideas. Perestroika These contacts were increasingly conducted without censorship.
But this is Russia, and politics will always find you, no matter how much you pretend to live in your ivory tower. Their new network’s first severe political test came in August 1991, less than a year after their first email exchange, when the KGB staged an attempted coup.
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The KGB banned the media, but the Relcom network was ignored. During the three days of the coup, my father insisted on keeping the lines open. Relcom stayed online, broadcasting news of the resistance in Moscow to the world.
I learned this story later on. My parents divorced after my father’s trip to Copenhagen. Our relationship was always difficult and emotionally strained. When I decided to become a journalist, my father did not approve of my career choice and we always argued about politics. But we were both interested in the power of open information.
Andrei Soldatov, an expert in Russia’s security services, relied on his father’s expertise when setting up an investigative website.
In the summer of 2000, when my partner Irina Borogan and I decided to launch agentura.ru, a website for online monitoring of the activities of Russian security services, my father provided us with funding and technical support.
This was just six months after Vladimir Putin, then prime minister and presumptive successor to President Yeltsin, met for the first time with internet entrepreneurs, including my father, who was there because he helped build much of Russia’s internet infrastructure in the 1990s, to discuss the need for government regulation of the internet.
While Putin was prime minister, he appeared to agree with Soldatov’s opposition to state internet regulation, but his government placed the scientist under house arrest in 2019.
Valery Sharifulin/Sputnik/EPA
When Putin brought a plan to implement state regulation of the Russian Internet to a meeting and quickly found himself at odds with the entrepreneurs, my father raised his hand and suggested that the project be “open for public debate.” Putin agreed, thereby effectively defeating the government’s proposal. At least for a moment, my father’s rational arguments seemed to hold water.
But blatant rationalism and Putin did not sit well together, and things got worse in the 2000s. I was still writing about the security services, but they didn’t like my reporting on the 2002 Moscow theater siege, and after my first interrogation in the FSB’s Lefortovo prison, I returned to my father’s office and asked for advice.
President Medvedev visited the Kurchatov Institute in 2009. Soldatov became Minister of Internet Affairs in the government.
Konstantin Zavradzin/Getty Images
But my father continued to believe in the power of logical argument, and in 2008 he accepted an offer to join President Medvedev’s government as deputy minister of communications in charge of the Internet.
We continued to argue. For example, my father was very proud of getting ICANN, the organization that manages Internet domain names, to approve the use of Cyrillic characters in web addresses. He believed that using Cyrillic characters would make things more diverse, whereas I argued that it would isolate Russia.
He served in the government for just two years before moving to academia, unwilling to support Kremlin ideas such as the introduction of a “national search engine” to replace Google-like search engines, which he believed to be nonsense that would undermine global connectivity, with a scientific approach.
This independent approach found few supporters. In 2019, the journalist got a call from a friend informing him that his father had been arrested: Putin’s internet chief had accused him of orchestrating a scheme to transfer a pool of Russian IP addresses overseas. He was placed under house arrest and then released on bail with no right to leave the country, facing a criminal investigation.
On the left is Andrei Soldatov, with his father Alexei behind him.
The following year, I was forced to leave the country and emigrated to the UK. The summer of 2020 was the last time I saw him. We continued to communicate via messaging apps. The legal troubles were mainly on my side: I was wanted for my reporting on the role of the FSB in the invasion of Ukraine. On his side, it was mainly his teaching of computational methods and modelling, and his rapidly deteriorating health: he has prostate cancer and suffers from severe heart disease.
His 2019 case was sent to court this spring, and on Monday my terminally ill 72-year-old father, who has spent most of his life building Russia’s internet, was sentenced to two years in a labor camp for “abuse of power.”
The last time we spoke was the night before his sentencing. We discussed his newfound interest in modern science fiction and artificial intelligence. He told me a story about meeting with high-ranking Kremlin officials a few years ago, where they were all talking about the need to remove “negativity” from the Internet, but he raised his hand and suggested they build something good on it instead. He was optimistic.
I still can’t stop thinking about it. He was a very stubborn guy and rarely agreed with me when we argued. I really hope I’ll have the chance to argue with him again someday.
Andrey Soldatov is a non-resident senior fellow at the Centre for European Policy Analysis.
