My dad brought the internet to Russia. Now Putin’s jailed him

The first time I used the internet was in 1990. I was in Moscow, then still in the Soviet Union. I was 15 years old and, in a tiny office on the northwest of the city, my father walked me into the room with several computers and a bunch of engineers.
He told one of them to show me the internet. I did not really get it back then — it was all code on the screen, before internet browsers were widely available — and the engineer did not bother to decipher it for me, contemptuous of my technical ignorance.
It was a few months after my dad’s team of engineers had established the first connection to the global network of this isolated country, still very much behind the Iron Curtain. The effort took those engineers five years, done — ironically — in the most secret facility of the country: the Kurchatov Institute, a leading Soviet nuclear research facility during the Cold War. As a result, the institute held an exalted status in the Soviet Union. And because of that status, the scientists at the Kurchatov enjoyed freedoms unthinkable in other places.
My father Alexey Soldatov, a nuclear physicist, had dreamt of networks for decades, ever since his first and only fellowship abroad, at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen. After he returned from Copenhagen in 1984 he gathered a team that gradually built a network, which they called Relcom (RELiable COMmunication) — first within the Kurchatov, then connected to other research centres: in Dubna, Novosibirsk and Leningrad, then later to other cities in the Soviet Union. Finally, in August 1990, they made a first exchange of emails with Helsinki. As a result of all this, he was nicknamed “the father of the Russian internet”.
These Soviet scientists like my father were big fans of science-fiction novels, such as those by Isaac Asimov, and believed that the network would become a virtual global space for scientists and intellectuals to exchange their ideas. President Gorbachev’s perestroika was making these contacts increasingly uncensored.
But this was Russia, where politics will always find you even if you pretend to live in an ivory tower. The first severe political test of their new network came in August 1991, less than a year after those first email exchanges, when the KGB organised an attempted putsch.
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The KGB banned the media but missed the Relcom network. During the three days of the coup, my father insisted on keeping the line open. Relcom stayed online, disseminating news about resistance in Moscow to theworld.
I learnt of this story only afterwards. My parents had divorced after my father’s trip to Copenhagen; our relations have always been difficult and emotionally fraught. He did not approve of my choice of profession when I decided to go into journalism, and we would always argue about politics. But we both shared an interest in the power of open information.
When my partner, Irina Borogan, and I decided to launch an online watchdog of the Russian security services’ activities in the summer of 2000, calling it agentura.ru, my father provided funding and technical support.
It was only six months after Vladimir Putin, then the prime minister and President Yeltsin’s designated successor, had his first meeting with internet entrepreneurs, including my father, to talk about the need for government regulation of the internet. My father was there because in the 1990s he helped to set up most of Russia’s internet infrastructure.
Putin came to the meeting with a plan to implement state regulation of the Russian internet, immediately putting him at odds with the entrepreneurs. My father raised his hand, suggesting that the projects be “subjected to public discussion”. Putin agreed — and with that, the government proposal was effectively killed off. For a moment, at least, my father’s rational arguments seemed to work.
But open rationalism and Putin did not sit well together and in the 2000s things took a turn for the worse. I was still writing about the security services and when they disliked my reporting on the Moscow theatre siege of 2002, I found myself back in my father’s office, asking for advice after my first interrogation in the FSB Lefortovo prison.
Still, my father kept believing in the force of rational argument and agreed to the offer made to him in 2008 to join President Medvedev’s government as deputy minister of communications in charge of the internet.
We kept arguing. For instance, my father was very proud that he got Icann, the organisation that oversaw internet domain names, to approve the use of Cyrillic in web addresses. He believed it would make things more diverse. I argued that it would contribute to the isolation of Russia.
He managed only two years in the government then left for academia, unwilling to support the Kremlin’s ideas, such as the introduction of a “national search engine” as an alternative to the likes of Google. With his scientific approach, he believed it to be nonsense that would harm global connectivity.
This independent approach won him few supporters. In 2019 I got a call from a reporter friend, telling me that my father had been arrested. The head of the internet department in Putin’s government had denounced him, accusing him of orchestrating the transfer of a pool of IP addresses from Russia abroad. My father was put under house arrest, then bailed with no right to travel, a criminal investigation hanging over his head.
The following year I was forced to leave the country, moving to the UK. The summer of 2020 was the last time I saw him. We kept communicating on messaging apps. Now the legal troubles were mostly from my end — I had been put on a wanted list because of my reporting on the FSB’s role in the invasion of Ukraine. From his side, it was mostly about his teaching computational methods and modelling and his health, rapidly deteriorating. He got prostate cancer and has a severe heart condition.
This spring, his 2019 case was sent to court. On Monday my father, terminally ill and 72 years old, having spent much of his life helping build Russia’s internet, was sentenced to two years in a labour colony on charges of “abuse of power”.
The last time we spoke was the night before his verdict. We argued about modern science-fiction and his new interest in artificial intelligence. He told me the story of a meeting with some top Kremlin figures years back when they were all talking about the need to remove “negative things” from the internet, and how he raised his hand and suggested building something good on the internet instead. He sounded optimistic.
I cannot stop thinking of that now. A very stubborn man, he almost never agreed with me in our arguments. I very much hope I will have a chance to argue with him again one day.
Andrei Soldatov is a non-resident senior fellow with the Centre for European Policy Analysis