It recently became known that Alexei Soldatov, a scientist, ex-deputy minister, and one of the founders of Runet, who was convicted last year in a case of abuse of power, was sent to the Ryazan region. In an interview with T-invariant, his son Andrei Soldatov, editor-in-chief of the website “Agentura.ru”, told us what might be behind his father’s case, what FSB supervisors at large enterprises and universities are really doing, and why, despite the large number of convicted scientists and representatives of the IT sphere, no sharashkas 2.0 have appeared in Russia.
Alexei Soldatov
Born in 1951. Graduated from MEPhI with a degree in theoretical nuclear physics. For almost 35 years he worked at the Institute of Atomic Energy named after I. V. Kurchatov. He worked at the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy for almost 35 years, rising from research associate to deputy director. He also worked as Dean of the Faculty of Nanotechnology and Informatics at MIPT, Vice-Rector of Lomonosov Moscow State University, and Deputy Minister of Communications and Mass Communications of the Russian Federation. Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences. He is one of the founders of the Internet in Russia: in 1990, the first USSR network with Internet access was created at the Kurchatov Institute under his leadership. From 1992 to 2002 he was the founder and president of Relcom, the first ISP in the country. From 2008 to 2010 he was Deputy Minister of Communications and Mass Media of the Russian Federation. In July 2024, Soldatov was sentenced to two years in prison for “abuse of power” (the original charge in 2019 was “large-scale fraud”).
Andrey Soldatov
Born in 1975. Graduated from the Faculty of Journalism of the Moscow State Social University. Worked in various media outlets (Segodnya, Izvestia, Versiya, Moskovskie Novosti, Novaya Gazeta, etc.). Editor-in-Chief of the website “Agentura.ru”, which he created together with his colleagues in 2000. The journalist’s main investigations concern the Russian security services and Runet. Co-author of several documentary books published abroad and in Russia. In 2020 he left the Russian Federation. In March 2022, a criminal case was opened against Soldatov (“fakes” about the Russian army), and in June of the same year he was put on the wanted list.
Pedagogical repression
T-invariant: How does your father feel now? What is his condition?
Andrei Soldatov: He is 73 years old and, to put it bluntly, his health is not the best, so it’s a difficult situation for our family. We try to live with some small positive news. The good thing already is that he survived the stage and got safely to the colony in the Ryazan region. At least it’s the Ryazan region, not the far north.
T-i: Does he get visits?
AS: He hasn’t had visits so far, but he can talk on the phone sometimes. Well, and FSIN-letter works, he can write to him.
T-i: Although a verdict has been handed down, little is still known about the circumstances of the case. What was the nature of the charge? And what are the real reasons for this sentence?
AS: My father was directly involved in the emergence of the Internet in Russia. This means that he was also actively involved in creating the technical infrastructure that allows the Russian Internet to exist. It includes IP addresses, domain addresses, the technical center of the Internet, and other things that are not visible to the average user, but without which the Internet does not work. And at some point, people close to the Kremlin felt that these things should be under strict state control, effectively nationalized – which is what has been happening for the last few years.
But my father is a man with a different background and education. He believed that the network is global, that networks should self-regulate. The idea of strict government control over absolutely everything was not close to him. But it is close to the people who are now responsible for regulating the Internet in Russia. That is why he left the Ministry of Communications and was engaged in teaching until his arrest.
Officially, the accusation is that when RosNIIROS, which was in charge of distributing IP addresses and domain names (my father was directly involved in its creation when he worked at the Kurchatov Institute), was disbanded, the IP addresses ended up in the Czech Republic. And the Czech Republic is a Western European country, a member of NATO, and so on. This excuse was invented and used to start criminal prosecution. At first, they tried to charge them under the traditional article “fraud” for Russian businessmen. Then they realized that “fraud” didn’t work at all and changed it to “abuse of official powers”. Which is also rather strange, because my father did not hold any executive position in RosNIIROS. Well, the law works the way it does now. And that is why my father is now in a colony in the Ryazan region.
But there was also a story about domains. The point is that my father once saved the .su domain. By rights, it should have been destroyed: this is what happens to domains of countries that cease to exist. There is no Yugoslavia. My father, thanks to his authority in international organizations, was able to explain that there are many people who were users of the Soviet Union’s Relcom. And that people living in the USSR could use this domain. He did not, of course, put any political sense into it. He just assumed that it was a pity to kill something that worked. But the state at some point considered that now this domain has a symbolic, political meaning and should be under the control of the state. So another conflict arose between the state and my father.
T-i: Usually criminal cases of this kind can be divided into three types. The first is with a political motive. The second is when personal conflicts are behind a case that looks like a political or criminal case. And the third – when special services become a tool for solving business interests. Sometimes it’s intertwined. What kind of case against your father?
AS: The situation here is more complicated due to the fact that it has been going on for many years. The motives in 2019 are different from those in 2024, when my father’s case was brought to court and he was convicted. Now there are already other resonses for persecuting both scientists and people from the IT field. For example, now we see that repressions are often educational in nature. There is a certain sector, this sector needs to be put under strict control, to remind people who is the master of the house. And some iconic (and sometimes just random) victims are chosen, because the point of such educational measures is that you do not understand the logic, but are simply afraid. They pull out some people, organize criminal cases based on the materials provided by the FSB. And often people who fall under these repressions may have nothing to do with anything at all. Or they may be deputies of people who need to be taught a lesson. Everyone understands that in Russian conditions, when a deputy goes to prison, he is under pressure, he is questioned about what he knows about his superiors. All this creates a situation in which people forget about any autonomy.
T-i: Are you referring to Maxim Parshin, the former deputy minister of digital communications?
AS: Not only. Other people from the Internet area, the Internet sphere, are sitting. For example, Sergei Grebennikov, who has a completely different story and other charges. This is such a signal to certain people that it’s time to engage only in short-term planning of their lives and to behave very carefully. How effectively does it work? Of course, very well. We can also see this in the weak mobilization of the scientific community to help people who fall under repression. How few people from the Academy of Sciences and other organizations are now standing up for scientists. Even if the level of repression still seems pretty vegetarian to some (it hasn’t seemed that way to me for a long time), the level of fear that this repression is causing is already higher than it was in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
T-i: Do you see such a “pedagogical” component in your father’s case?
AS: I think this motive may have emerged at some point. I still don’t understand why the judge gave my father a real sentence when even the prosecutor asked for a suspended sentence. I don’t really understand the logic. And so, not understanding the logic and not knowing for sure, I can only assume that this pedagogical, educational effect was also taken into account.
T-i: And personal motives, personal revenge?
AS: I’m not in Russia at the moment and I can’t make sense of it all. But, of course, personal motives can take place. More and more often these personal motives are masked by national security interests. This is extremely convenient. We see in many other cases.
T-i: Is it true that in the Medved pre-trial detention center, in the same cell, your father met with Vsevolod Opanasenko, one of the biggest players in the supercomputer industry?
AS: Yes, that’s true.
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Vsevolod Opanasenko, the founder of T-Platforms, lived under a criminal case for five years. He was unexpectedly released on parole in January 2025. In the article “Sanity Check: How and Why Law Enforcement Agencies Destroyed Russia’s Supercomputer Industry” we told you how the “Russian Jobs” of the Putin era, a manufacturer of computing machines at the top of the world’s TOP-500, who worked successfully on the international market, managed to get out of the US blacklist, but got burned for supplying cheap computers for traffic police exams in a trumped-up case.
T-i: A dramatic, iconic story: two people from different generations, who played a huge role in the development of the computer industry in Russia, meet in a detention center.
AS: This clearly characterizes the state of the industry. It is possible to seize and imprison people with such names, although, obviously, the public danger of both Father and Opanasenko in case they are at large tends to zero. Nevertheless, the state considers it necessary for these people to be in the most humiliating and terrible situation a person can find himself in.
T-i: You said that even in your father’s case you can’t understand how the decision is made: the judge gives a real sentence, although the prosecutor’s office asks for a suspended sentence. In Opanasenko’s case there is also an inconsistent chain of actions: they put him in jail, let him go, put him in jail again, let him out again. Do you understand how the decision-making system itself works?
AS: In all such high-profile stories, several agencies are always involved. Operational support (translated into Russian – collection of initial compromising material) is usually handled by a specialized division of the FSB. If we are talking about the IT sphere, this is most likely Department “P” of the FSB Economic Security Service, i.e. the department for counterintelligence support of industrial enterprises.
These are operational units, they do not conduct investigations. Either the Investigative Committee or an investigative unit of the Ministry of Internal Affairs conducts the investigation. And then there are various collisions. For example, operatives may temporarily lose interest in the case. And the investigators have to find a way out of this situation. They cannot, unlike the operatives, abandon the case, they need to bring it to some logical end. If they close it, it will create a problem for these particular investigators. That is why in Russia, cases almost never end in nothing. This is considered a misuse of Investigative Committee funds.
But since everything lasts for a very long time, later the operatives may have a renewed interest in the person or his company or department. They may again go to the investigators and say, “Let us revive this situation.” That’s why cases last for years. Even my criminal case has been going on since 2022. And no one knows what is going on there.
During these years, interests appear, then disappear, new operatives appear, investigators change. Each of these people may have different thoughts about the unfortunate person who is either under house arrest or in jail. And we only see the consequences of what different thoughts all these people have in their heads.
Gravedigger Curators
T-i: Even a few years before the war, many technology companies and scientific institutes were given curators by the intelligence services. What was their role, how was this curatorship organized?
AS: Usually these are officers of the apparatus of seconded FSB officers, they used to be called officers of the active reserve. This is an old practice, but in recent years it has become much more active and has acquired a completely different scale. In Soviet times, they worked with research institutions that were part of the USSR military-industrial complex system, and they were the people in charge of the regime. They dampened unnecessary initiatives, prevented mistakes, but most importantly, if they put their signature on some document, they guaranteed something, took responsibility. The current system is seriously different from this Soviet practice, because the P Department employees have other tasks. They can masquerade as people who give guarantees, but their true task is to look for spies. That’s why they have these strange words in the name of their unit – counterintelligence support. They don’t need to show their supervisor that there are no spies at all: that would look bad for them and their career prospects. And they need to gather compromising material in case management needs to do something about this enterprise.
When the moment comes, some general will ask: “What do we have on such and such a manager of such and such an enterprise?”, and he will call a seconded employee with a folder and ask him to show what is in that folder. And no matter how great the relationship between this employee and the head of the enterprise was, no matter how much they drank together, or went to the bathhouse, or were family friends – at the moment of the call to the carpet, personal relations will not matter. The FSB officer will instantly remember why he was put in this position, come running with a daddy, and the manager will have problems.
A curator will never, under any circumstances, give anyone any guarantees. I know only one case when an honest FSB officer said that he did not see any problems at such and such an enterprise, although he was urged to find these problems. In the end, the management simply sent another officer from his unit – and the problems were found.
T-i: So now every university that has a curator must realize that this person will not help it, and moreover, will bury it?
AS: Yes.
T-i: We know that intelligence agencies in other countries are also very fond of controlling the situation in universities. In particular, American universities have this problem. The experts of our publication have repeatedly said that they have to meet periodically, explain themselves, tell and so on. And, in general, this is a fairly typical situation, typical of scientific and technological organizations. What is the difference here in comparison with Russia?
AS: That’s really true. Especially in the United States in the last 15-20 years. In American universities (including universities that work under U.S. military-industrial complex contracts), an interesting situation has developed: American students, after graduating from university, simply leave, do not stay to continue their scientific work. Chinese students, on the other hand, stay. Often some laboratory gets a serious contract, and the head has no one to work with but Chinese graduate students. The journalist Daniel Golden wrote an excellent book Spy Schools about this. And, of course, American intelligence agencies, aware of this problem, tried to play different games. But they encountered a serious tradition of American universities. For example, Harvard has taken a radical position: no activity of intelligence services on the university campus is inadmissible. We know that FBI officers are now approaching foreign undergraduate and graduate students (mostly of Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian origin). These students would turn to me, “What should I do?” I told them, “Go to your supervisor.” And the supervisors, to their credit, always said the same thing: “We know about this problem. Let’s go to our legal department and raise this issue. This is not what you agreed to when you came to work for us. We’re going to deal with it.” In other words, the democratic tradition of American campuses continues. Let’s see what will happen under Trump. In Russian conditions, of course, we are dealing with completely different traditions. We have never had such a practice of protecting undergraduate and graduate students, and there is nowhere for it to come from. And now the situation is only getting worse.
T-i: Recently, the Ministry of Education and Science proposed a number of amendments to the law “On Science”, which refers to the mechanism of control by intelligence services in the case of R&D or R&D collaborating with foreign colleagues (T-invariant spoke in detail about the essence of the amendments in this article). In your opinion, how good an idea is this in terms of preventing problems? Will they make things easier for scientists and technology companies that are now walking around under threat?
AS: In 2022, criminal cases against journalists for spreading fake news about the Russian army went viral. And confused editorial boards at some point just said, “OK, if you’re handing out indictments in droves, appoint us official censors. Then we won’t have to guess whether we can write the word “war” or whether we can put the name of some general in there. If, as in Soviet times, the issue comes out with a censor’s stamp, we won’t be afraid that we can frame our journalists.
Now a similar thing is happening in the scientific field. People are desperate for some kind of guarantee. How can you fully work if in a few years your actions may be recognized as a crime? How can you engage in scientific exchange, publish articles together with an author from the same UK? Since you do not designate these things in the law, as is done in normal countries, designate them with the help of a curator.
Although I am an optimist by nature, I am afraid that this approach will not work in this case. Because the FSB system works on other principles, which I have already mentioned: you need to accumulate compromising materials on any enterprise, on any research institution, in case you need to do something with that enterprise.
And don’t forget one more thing. We somehow focus so much on the word “secrecy.” But now there is a completely different definition of treason, it is much broader than what we lived with before 2012. It used to be that you had to prove that classified information was passed on, that this classified information was passed on not to someone but to a spy organization. None of that is required now. The information is simply recognized as damaging to Russia’s national security – that’s all. If the state security agencies decide that the information is damaging, that’s it.
Control is more important than progress
T-i: How do you assess the prospects of the scientists who have already been victims of such persecution? There are more than twenty of them, many of them already at an advanced age. If a person in his 60s or 70s gets 10-15 years in a penal colony, it is clear what will happen to him. Is it possible, for example, to agree on their exchange?
AS: I can quite easily imagine the arguments that the FSB officers will use when they prove that this cannot be done. The first argument is obvious: these people were involved in crucial developments that are important for Russia’s national security, and therefore they cannot be extradited to countries that are hostile to Russia. The second argument is that FSB officers worked with these people for quite a long time, and, from the point of view of Russian law, this means that these prisoners have information about the counterintelligence methods that were used against them. That constitutes state secret in itself.
T-i: The information about how they were handled is secret, it can’t be shared?
AS: That’s exactly right. That is why so many problems were always faced by the lawyers who worked on these cases. Because the methods themselves (how interrogations are conducted, how developments are conducted, what materials were in the operational case, what materials were in the criminal case, what people were involved) are, from the point of view of the FSB and Russian law, state secrets. That is why Ivan Gershkovich, the American journalist who was accused and convicted of espionage in Russia and then exchanged last year, was practically never interrogated. There was only one and a half interrogations. Because the FSB knew from the beginning that he would be exchanged and did not want him to tell America how they worked with him.
Well, the third argument has more to do with the scientists themselves. We know very well that these are people who grew up in the Soviet system and got used to living by certain rules. And for them and their families, it’s a very complicated story – they don’t want their cases to be “political.”
T-i: You mean that when it comes to an exchange, the case automatically takes on a political coloring, even if it didn’t really happen and even if the scientist doesn’t consider his case political?
AS: Of course. Moreover, in Russia, all these terms have been emotionally colored since the 1917 revolution. That’s why even the emotionally colored word used in the criminal code is “treason.” Initially this article appeared as treason against the cause of the revolution, then “cause of the revolution” was changed to “state”. But the emotional coloring remained, and, moreover, it is intuitively understandable to people who work in this sphere.
T-i: We really have almost no information from defense lawyers, and often we simply don’t know the position of the accused. A person is ready to write a petition for pardon to Putin for every holiday, but is completely unprepared to discuss exchange options or requests to be included in some lists. But the scientists have received long sentences. The prospects for their exchange or release on parole are almost nil. Will the Russian authorities use their brains and knowledge, and will new sharashkas appear?
AS: I’ve heard talk about this since at least November of last year. But so far I don’t see any evidence or facts that would confirm that work is being done in this direction. We see that even people who are being held in detention are not being tried. And apparently, it is not by chance that Maxim Parshin asked to go to the SVO: he was clearly not involved in any development. So I would cautiously say: if there is such a thing, it could be somewhere very secret.
T-i: It turns out that smart people are sitting in harsh conditions, but they don’t work in the orphanages for the regime. Then why do the security services need all this? They deal with people who do not want any political component, are not political activists, do not make any declarations and generally consider themselves patriots of Russia. What pragmatic sense does it make to keep them in prison?
AS: It makes quite practical sense. The Russian security services learned something in the 1990s. In particular, they learned not to waste their resources. If you look at the number of people working in Russian Internet censorship and compare it to the number of people working in Internet censorship in the same China, you will see a huge difference. Roskomnadzor is a small agency. At the same time, as we can see, it acts very well. Why? Because there is always an element of repression that intimidates people. And people start to self-censor. The same way the system of self-censorship works in the scientific environment.
It was possible, for example, to go the way of the East German Stasi. The Stasi had certain norms about the number of agents per square kilometer. If you go to the Stasi museum and look at a map of Berlin, you will be amazed. There was an apartment where there was a Stasi agent. It’s an insanely expensive system. You have to keep files on all these people, you have to meet with them, you have to do the paperwork, you have to pay them money – it’s expensive in terms of controlling society. The system, which was invented partly on the back of the knees by the Russian security services, does not require such a large number of people.
They often grab completely random victims and thus intimidate everyone to the point of self-censorship and self-censorship. You don’t need to embed a huge number of FSB agents to control every single person. It is possible to bring the scientific community to such a state that scientists themselves begin to proactively come to FSB agents and ask what can and cannot be done. This system works quite successfully.
Returning to your question – yes, brains are not used, scientific research is slowed down, and research is conducted worse than it would be in a normal situation. But it’s a matter of choosing priorities. If there are people in power who see the world from the point of view of threats, they consider security and controllability to be more important than scientific and technical research.
Resources of the new nobility
T-i: You have a section of publications on your website called “The New Nobility”, which is devoted to the change of elites in Russia. This topic seems important to us, too, so we are following the legitimization of Putin’s daughters Ekaterina Tikhonova and Maria Vorontsova in the academic and technological environment: how they receive their official statuses and begin to lead important processes. What happens when this new nobility is fully entrenched? Will they be more effective than their parents? Will they take the course to liberalize Russia’s domestic policy and normalize relations with Europe?
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AS: I think these kids are effective as long as their parents are alive and in power. And, by the way, this explains why they are treated quite well in this environment, despite the fact that they don’t have any scientific achievements. Because they provide direct access to the resource. And if you are Vladimir Putin’s daughter, you provide access to the very top. The resource is what matters at the moment.
I observed something similar in an environment that is a little closer to me from the point of view of a journalist. When reforms were underway in Russia’s special forces, I was very surprised that the special forces of the military intelligence service, which is traditionally suspicious of the Chekists, took a favorable view of the fact that Putin’s former security guard Alexei Dyumin had been appointed commander of Russia’s special operations forces. When I asked military special forces officers about it, the answer was: “He provides access to a resource. We as military cannot get the resources that he can get for us, because he has direct access to the head of Putin’s personal security. He can provide us with weapons and new training bases – everything we need.” That is, they were extremely pragmatic about it – and they won. They received excellent equipment, uniforms and weapons.
The same thing happens with the children of officials and oligarchs. If they provide access to a resource, they are treated well. But I strongly doubt that these people can be made into real heirs. Because the Russian system of coordinates does not really assume that any guarantees can be inherited or delegated to the next generation. How can this be done? Will the Kovalchuk children, for example, be able to be as influential people as their parents. I don’t really understand how this can be organized. There are no mechanisms, no tradition: this is not medieval England after all. And it is not a state governed by the rule of law, where this can be enshrined at the level of law.
Besides, we should also realize that there is also a psychological effect. We are dealing with children of people who earned their first money in the 1990s. These are people with a very specialized mindset. They don’t have much, shall we say, respect for their own children.
They even have a kind of contempt for children. They say that we are cool, we know how to play different games, we survived the terrible 1990s, we are successful. And maybe we will make children responsible for some trust, but we will not entrust them with something really important and serious.
Сейчас этим детям уже много лет, но у них нет реального опыта работы с рисками. Они не принимают решения по ключевым вопросам. И как они будут выживать в условиях серьёзных кризисов, никто не знает. Соответственно, им даже их родители не очень доверяют, а смежники тем более будут относиться к ним с подозрением. И я предполагаю, что с уходом старшего поколения возникнет очень серьёзный кризис, потому что дети не справятся с этой ситуацией — когда ты не знаешь, как работать без гарантии папы.
T-i: You recently had a publication about how China has gained access to engineering universities in Russia over the past three years. But it was at that time that the Russian authorities said: “The West doesn’t want to cooperate with us in the scientific sense, okay, let’s turn to the East.” And significant scientific directions went from Russia to China. Now there are a lot of joint programs. Both at Baumanka and Fiztech, students study Chinese. What do you think about the consequences of this reversal?
AS: There is no great love there. Russian security services remain paranoid about Chinese intelligence. This is evidenced by the criminal cases and the fact that Chinese companies are still not allowed into some relatively safe areas, such as telecommunications. And there is no 100 percent openness in China toward Russian business. Even the yuan, which Russians use to pay with China, is labeled in the Chinese banking system as coming from Russia: there are certain risks of falling under secondary sanctions. So there is no desire in either Russia or China to merge into a single entity and start a full-fledged scientific exchange. Yes, the Chinese are taking advantage of the opportunity and inviting employees from Russian technical universities. But how long will this last? Since we are dealing with two rather paranoid regimes, hardly very long. And, unfortunately, the victims of this paranoia will not primarily be states, but people.