Russia, 1993 - The Road Taken, Part One

Twenty-five years ago this month something extraordinary happened in Russia.  Nobody knew it at the time, but the road to what is now known as “Putinism” started here.  A little more than two years after an abortive coup failed to topple Mikhail Gorbachev [but had the unintended consequence of hastening the Soviet Union’s demise], another crisis happened that may have rolled Russia back to Soviet times.

In September 1993, the Soviet Union hadn’t been on the ash-heap of history for two years when the Russian Federation faced its first constitutional crisis. The question was this - who was in charge – the country’s president, Boris Yeltsin, or the federation’s parliament?  With American support, Yeltsin had introduced an economic program that would turn the old Soviet command economy into one that is market-based.  The process of privatizing state-owned enterprises saw many of these enterprises concentrated firms in the hands of corrupt, politically-connected oligarchs.  Price and currency controls were lifted which led to hyperinflation [with money becoming virtually worthless], state subsidies disappeared.  This was called “shock therapy”.  There was a lot of shock, but not much therapy.  This was the basis of the disagreement between Yeltsin and the parliament.

In April 1993, Russia held a four-part referendum on the confidence of Yeltsin’s government.  In effect, it was a nationwide vote of confidence on Boris Yeltsin.  The referendum asked four questions:

1.      Do you have confidence in the President of the Russian Federation, B. N. Yeltsin?

2.      Do you support the economic and social policy that has been conducted since 1992 by the President and Government of the Russian Federation?

3.      Should there be early elections for the President of the Russian Federation?

4.      Should there be early elections for the People's Deputies of the Russian Federation?

Parliament liked things the way they were. There had been amendments to the Russian constitution [which had been around since the Brezhnev era] that temporarily allowed Yeltsin to rule by decree.  Those “emergency powers” had a sunset provision, with Yeltsin’s decree powers due to expire at the end of 1992.  The largest bloc of deputies in parliament was a combination of Communists, nationalists, and retired military officers.  They wanted a weaker president and a stronger parliament. Yeltsin had a very simple campaign – he asked for a “Da, Da, Nyet, Da” result, and that is exactly what he got.  Yeltsin saw the results of this referendum as a mandate to change the constitution.  After the referendum, Yeltsin released his vision of what the next Russian constitution should look like.  The Congress of People’s Deputies did the same.  Neither proposal looked like the other.

As Yeltsin and the Congress of People’s Deputies argued over what a new constitution should look like, the Supreme Soviet [a subset of the Congress of People’s Deputies that met more often] took it upon themselves to try to enact its own foreign policy and its own economic policy.  A contemporary Russian commentator noted "The President issues decrees as if there were no Supreme Soviet, and the Supreme Soviet suspends decrees as if there were no President."  In September 1993, Yeltsin tried to suspend his own vice president, Alexander Rutskoi.  Yeltsin cited “accusations of corruption” as the pretext for his action.  The Supreme Soviet refused to recognize this action.  Yeltsin proposed early elections for both president and parliament.  The Supreme Soviet ignored him.  Yeltsin appointed Yegor Gaidar as deputy prime minister.  The Supreme Soviet rejected him.  On September 21, Yeltsin upped the ante by announcing he dissolved the Supreme Soviet.  He didn’t have the authority to do so, but legal niceties didn’t stop Yeltsin.  He felt emboldened because the Russian people gave him a vote of confidence the previous April.  The Constitutional Court affirmed that Yeltsin couldn’t dissolve the parliament.  The Supreme Soviet removed Yeltsin [or so they thought].  Pro-parliament protesters stormed the national television center at Ostankino.   They also attacked the Moscow mayor’s office.  People died, and Yeltsin called in the tanks.

The seat of the Congress of People’s Deputies and the Supreme Soviet was the White House.  In 1991, this building was the symbol of resistance against the abortive coup against Mikhail Gorbachev two years earlier.  It was here that Boris Yeltsin mounted a tank to condemn the coup.  And two years after the coup, the army tanks opened fire on that same White House.  Boris Yeltsin was clever to categorize those who disagreed with him as Communists, Fascists, bandits, revanchists and relics from the Soviet era who wanted to turn back the clock to a time before the Soviet Union collapsed.  The “debate” thus framed, Bill Clinton supported Yeltsin’s action.  Yeltsin proved Mao’s axiom that “political power comes from the barrel of a gun”.  Yeltsin had the gun, he used the gun, and got the constitution he wanted.  He got a strong presidency, in which the president could appoint a prime minister and a cabinet and dismiss them at his pleasure.  His candidates for Prime Minister were subject to Duma approval, but if the Duma rejected a candidate for Prime Minister three successive times, the president had the power to dissolve parliament and call new elections.  He also got sweeping powers to issue decrees. 

Yeltsin’s newly-won power to appoint people without the parliament voting themselves out of a job is significant.  After the 1998 financial crisis that cratered the Russian economy, Boris Yeltsin was a very unpopular figure.  Between 1998 and 1999 he went through four Prime Ministers [Sergey Kirienko, Viktor Chernomyrdin, Yevgeny Primakov, and Sergei Stepashin] before settling on Vladimir Putin.  Under this new constitution, if a president dies, resigns, or is otherwise incapacitated, the Prime Minister becomes Acting President.  When Yeltsin chose Putin as his last Prime Minister, he also designated Putin as his successor.  At that time Putin was an unknown quantity.  But after his appointment as Prime Minister, the dominos to his ascent to ultimate power began to fall.  Without Putin, there would not have been the apartment bombings in 1999.  Without the apartment bombings and the naming of Chechens as the culprits, there probably would not have been a Second Chechen War.  Without a successful prosecution of the Second Chechen War, Putin’s popularity would not have skyrocketed.  And without this heightened popularity, it’s doubtful that Yeltsin would have felt comfortable enough to give up the presidency in favor of his designated successor. Yeltsin resigned the Russian presidency on December 31, 1999 with Putin becoming Acting President until he was elected president in his own right in 2000.

The new constitution created a bicameral legislature, which included a Duma and a Federation Council.  What has emerged since then is a “managed democracy”.  There is an opposition, but really in name only.  People can run for political office, provided they don’t make too many waves and obtain government approval to do so.  To keep Vladimir Putin in power, the ruling party [United Russia] has engaged in massive vote fraud to include voter intimidation, carousel voting, and blatant ballot box stuffing.  Vladimir Putin enjoys the spoils of this constitutional framework laid out by his predecessor.  

It is ironic that the man who benefits from this system [Vladimir Putin] was put in place by the guy [Boris Yeltsin] who was supported by Bill Clinton, the husband of the 2016 Democratic nominee for president [Hillary Clinton], who got on Vladimir Putin’s bad side and whom Hillary Clinton continues to blame for her electoral loss. 

What I'm Reading - Two Sisters

The challenge for this blog is in finding something unique upon which to comment.  Rather than commenting upon Vladimir Putin and/or Russia yet again, I searched for something completely different [apologies to Monty Python].  Such an opportunity presented itself about a couple of months ago while I was driving to lunch.  I was listening to NPR, and there was a program [the name of which escapes me] where the host was talking about a new book.  The book in question is called Two Sisters: A Father, His Daughters, and Their Journey Into the Syrian Jihad.  Two Sisters is written by Norwegian journalist Åsne Seierstad, a writer who is known for her work as a war correspondent.  She has written other works as well, among them One of Us: The Story of a Massacre in Norway.  One of Us told the story of Anders Breivik, the self-described fascist who committed Norway’s worst act of terrorism in 2011 when he killed 77 people [most of whom were attending a Norwegian Labour Party youth camp].  Guess which book is next on my list? 

As the title implies, Two Sisters is the story of two Somali sisters who decided to leave the comfort of Norwegian society, give up everything and travel to Syria to join ISIS.  The two sisters Ayan [19] and Leila [16] [not their real names, BTW].  Ayan accompanied their parents to Norway in order to escape fighting in Somaliland [she was an infant at the time].  The rest of the Juma children were born in Norway.  Ayan and Leila were two well-adjusted young women who “seemed” to assimilate well into Norwegian society.  They attended good schools in the Oslo suburbs.  Ayan was part of the International Baccalaureate [IB] program [Editor’s Note:  both of my boys did that.  It’s very hard work].  She had fights with her mother about clothes that were ‘too revealing.” Leila played soccer.  There were teenage crushes, intense friendships, bands, football and summer camps are the stuff of any adolescence.  But in a homogenous society like Norway, Ayan and Leila were still “different.”

How did this journey begin?  Their mother Sara Juma was worried her daughters were becoming too “Norwegian”.  She and other Somali mothers in Oslo hired a tutor from a local mosque.  His job was to not only teach the children to read the Koran, but also how to be good Muslims in Norway.  At first Sara was pleased with the result.  Both sisters had taken the veil and became devout Muslims.  She saw her daughters were going to the local mosque regularly, and fasted during the observation of Ramadan.  There were little post-it notes with phrases from the Koran sprinkled all over their suburban Oslo apartment.  It was this association with the Koranic tutor that led to the radicalization of Ayan and Leila.  The author also details the story of Dilal, one of Ayan’s original core group of friends.  The least conservative of the four friends who attended those early Islam Net meetings together, even she found herself drawn in, eventually ending up in an abusive and controlling marriage with Ubaydullah Hussain, one of Norway’s most vocal radicals.  Dilal escaped her relationship, but her story is one of how even the most grounded of people can get “sucked in” to radicalism.  The author illustrates how groups such as Islam Net don’t only target the “isolated,” but also actively seek to isolate their targets from family or the local adopted culture.

The girls’ radicalization is unexplained.  But the author goes into detail about how they became involved with a group called Islam Net, a society of young, Salafist Muslims in Oslo.  The sisters voiced increasingly extreme views, broke up classes to pray or skipped school entirely.  The author points out that one doesn’t suddenly wake up one day and decide “today I will be a radical Muslim”.  It was a gradual thing for Ayan and Leila.  Conversely, their brother Ismael became an atheist, going as far to tell his sisters "I believe in Allah about as much as I believe in the spaghetti monster."  Ayan and Leila had been in regular contact with Ismael via text messages, but after Ismael’s expressions of non-belief, the sisters broke off contact.  Afterward, they contacted only their mother, who never pressed too hard on what was really happening lest ISIS be monitoring their communications.

One October morning in 2013 had begun like any other.  Leila was presumed to be at school while Ayan said she was going to be across town to visit a friend.  Little did their parents know that they had been planning for several months to leave Norway to join ISIS in Syria.  Sadiq and Sara received an email from the girls:

“We love you both sooo much and you have given us everything in life. We are eternally grateful for everything ♥.  We ask your forgiveness for all the pain we have caused you. We love you both sooo much, would do anything for you, and would never do anything to purposely hurt you, and is it not then fair and proper that we do everything for ALLAH swt’s sake and are grateful for what he has given us by following his rules, laws, and commands. Muslims are under attack from all quarters, and we need to do something. We want so much to help Muslims, and the only way we can really do that is by being with them in both suffering and joy. Sitting home and sending money is no longer enough. With this in mind we have decided to travel to Syria and help out down there as best we can. We know this sounds absurd but it is haqq and we must go. We fear what ALLAH swt will say to us on the day of judgment.

We have now left and will soon arrive inshallah. Please do not be cross with us, it was sooo hard for us to leave without saying goodbye in the way you both deserve. Forgive us inshallah, when we made this choice we did so with what was best for our ummah in mind, but also what was best for our family, and it might be difficult to understand now, but inshallah this decision will help us all on the day of judgment inshallah. We love you both sooo much and hope you will not break off ties with us, inshallah we will send a message when we arrive at the hotel and then you can call inshallah. We want to tell you again that we love you with all of our hearts and are sorry you had to find out this way, we have already asked too much of you but we have to ask a favor: for both our safety and yours no one outside the family can know we have left, this cannot be stressed enough. Please try to understand our actions inshallah. Praise be to Allah, the lord of the worlds ♥. Ayan & Leila ♥.”

The girls went to Turkey via Sweden.  The Jumas contacted the authorities in Sweden to try to intercept them, especially since Leila was still a minor.  But the Swedish authorities did nothing.  The system failed the Jumas.

I’m not very sympathetic with Sara, their mother.  She’s the one who wanted Ayan and Leila to not be quite so “Western.” When her actions lead to the introduction of her daughters to radical Muslims, she put it all on her husband to Sadiq to go to Syria, to find them and bring them back.  She wanted Sadiq to clean up the mess she made.  It’s not like Sadiq didn’t have enough on his plate.  He was on disability from his job and was studying to become an engineer.  Like a good husband, he did as Sara asked [or rather, demanded]. He emptied his bank account to make it happen.  Sadiq made the trip to Turkey.  He found when he got as far as Turkey that border smugglers don’t take American Express – they only take cash.  He found his girls in Raqqa, Syria and got to meet them.  He told both their mother wanted them to come home, but they had a surprise for him.  Both had married ISIS fighters and had children.  They didn’t want to go back to Norway.  For Sadiq’s troubles, ISIS arrested him, accused him of being a spy and tortured him for a couple of weeks [on orders from his new son-in-law].  He was released only after he convinced a sharia prosecutor that he was what he said he was – a concerned father who was looking for his daughters.  To add insult to injury, Sara went back to Somaliland after he returned to Norway without the girls.

Before they broke off contact with Ismael, Leila told him “You should know that we are happy and well, we are safe and Allah has provided us with plenty of rizq [gifts].”  There is no update on what happened to the girls after they last saw their father.  Since the book was published, the Islamic State [the so-called Caliphate] has since collapsed.  ISIS fighters have scattered to the fore winds.  Nobody knows whether the girls are alive or dead.  There is no “happily ever after” in this tale.

The Death of Stalin - Banned in Russia

In October last year I heard about a “dark comedy” that was coming out called The Death of Stalin.  Much had been said about the movie during Brian Whitmore's Power Vertical podcasts.  I had been looking for when I could see the movie in theaters, but alas it wasn’t in the cards for residents of Northwest Florida.  The movie never made it here, so I had to wait.  Two weeks ago, my wait finally ended when I saw that it was available on iTunes. Being the Russian/Soviet history wonk that I am, I bought it and downloaded it.  Fortunately for me, the movie lived up to the hype. 

The movie doesn’t pretend to be historically accurate. However, when I saw the movie I couldn’t help but be reminded of Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar. Some details captured in the movie were documented in Montefiore’s book, some of which include:

-        Stalin’s love of Mozart’s Piano Concerto N^o. 23;

-        The color of Stalin’s dacha in Kuntsevo [dark green];

-        The giving of a bouquet of flowers to Beria’s rape victims after the deed is done;

-        Stalin’s love of Western movies and his Politburo having to endure late-night showings of them;

-        The late-night drinking and general buffoonery of Stalin’s Politburo for Stalin’s amusement [including the tomato Beria put in Khrushchev’s pocket];

As the movie begins, the NKVD is doing what it does best – the knocks on the door in the middle of the night when people were being taken away for crimes, real or imagined.  While people were being arrested in the middle of the night, there was a performance of Mozart’s Piano Concerto N^o. 23, to which Stalin listened.  When the performance was over, Stalin wanted a recording of the performance.  This was where the fun in the movie began.  When told the performance wasn’t recorded, the station manager had a fit.  He had to keep whatever audience was left from leaving the building, and he dispatched his assistant to round up people from the streets to fill the auditorium, so the acoustics would be the same as what Stalin heard on the radio.  When the pianist [Olga Kurylenko] refused to play again [her family was executed by Stalin], the conductor fainted and couldn’t be revived.  The radio people had to find another conductor.  When they found one, they woke him up in the middle of the night.  Since this sort of thing was happening to his neighbors, he assumed he too was being arrested.  But they made their apologies and brought him to the radio station.  He didn’t have time to change – he conducted the orchestra while still wearing his pajamas.  As the station master handed the recording to an awaiting NKVD goon, Kurylenko’s character slipped a note into the record jacket.  The note said:

Josef Vissarionovich Stalin –

You have betrayed our nation and destroyed its people.

I pray for your end and ask the Lord to forgive you.

Tyrant!

Stalin broke out laughing.  But as he was laughing, he coughed, uttered an expletive and crashed to the floor with a ‘thud’ that his door guards heard.  They knew Stalin’s habits.  They didn’t want to go to prison for disturbing Stalin.  But there he was, lying on the floor, having been felled by a stroke.

My feeling is that Iannucci must have assumed the people who would watch this film were Russian/Soviet history buffs like me.  When Stalin had his stroke and there is a need for a doctor to treat him, Beria quipped that it was too bad all the competent doctors were locked up [a reference to Stalin’s ‘Doctor’s Plot’]. Iannucci got this point right as well – Stalin pissed himself when he stroked out.  There was a point toward the end of the movie as Beria is being arrested and taken to “trial”, Malenkov insisted that Beria get a fair trial.  Khrushchev reminded him of Marshal Tukhachevsky and how he met his own fate unfairly in 1937.  If you weren’t well read in Russian/Soviet history, you wouldn’t get the reference, hence my conclusion about Iannucci’s target audience.  These events took place 65 years ago.  It seems to me that many people can’t remember things that happened last year.

What is accurately depicted is the mediocrity with which Stalin surrounded himself.  Any potential successor with any brains could possibly replace Stalin while Stalin was still breathing, so Stalin would eliminate him.  The likes of Malenkov, Bulganin, Mikoyan, and Kaganovich weren’t exactly what one would call “the best and the brightest”.  But at least they knew how to stay alive.  In the movie, Khrushchev would do this by having his wife write down every night what did and didn’t make Stalin laugh. Malenkov was so scared shitless he couldn’t remember who was alive and still in Stalin’s good graces and who was dead and discredited. The period between Stalin’s death and that of Beria [nine months] is compressed into a single week. Armando Iannucci doesn’t bother with making his actors adopt phony Russian accents. The only “Russian” accent one hears in the movie comes from Olga Kurylenko [I know, she’s Ukrainian]. 

Three characters stand out as having a clue – Simon Russell Beale’s Beria, Steve Buscemi’s Khrushchev, and Jeremy Isaac’s Zhukov.  Beale’s Beria is ruthless.  He relishes his role as Stalin’s most-willing executioner.  He gives his henchmen tips on how to kill the detainees. He makes no bones or apologies for having sex with wives willing to “do anything” to save their husbands [he was a serial rapist and pedophile]. He’s the first one to seize on Stalin’s incapacitation [and eventual death] as his opportunity to grab power. When he finds an unconscious Stalin laying in a pool of his own piss, he wastes no time in going through Stalin’s pockets to find the keys to the places where Stalin kept the execution lists. Buscemi’s Khrushchev isn’t quite as quick as Beale’s Beria to make a grab for the brass ring, but it doesn’t take him long to realize his survival depends on outmaneuvering Beria.  Once Khrushchev has this epiphany, he moves quickly to gain the support of Kaganovich [who asked him “how can you plot and run at the same time?”], Bulganin and Mikoyan [both after he lied about having Malenkov’s support against Beria], and Zhukov.  Isaac’s Zhukov isn’t afraid of anybody, most especially Beria [“I fooked Germany. I think I can take a flesh lump in a fookin’ waistcoat”.]  Both Beria and Khrushchev try to curry favor with Stalin’s daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva.  Vasily Stalin is an Air Force general who owed his position to his last name, and was also a drunken fool whom nobody takes seriously.

As the Politburo stood vigil over Stalin’s corpse in the Hall of Columns, Molotov asked “who invited the bishops?”  Since Molotov was portrayed by Michael Palin, I had flashbacks to a couple of Monty Python sketches [“The Bishop” and the “Dead Bishop/Church Police”].  Palin portrayed Molotov as the “true believer” in Stalinist orthodoxy.  When told by Khrushchev that he was on Stalin’s “list”, he thought he must have done something to deserve it.  Khrushchev tried to curry favor with Molotov, each agreeing with the other that Molotov’s Jewish wife was a traitor, right up until the very moment they saw Beria bring her into Molotov’s apartment.  Khrushchev immediately turned on a dime and proclaimed Molinka Molotova’s innocence.  I thought the act of releasing his wife from prison swayed Molotov to support Beria. But between that moment and Stalin’s funeral, Molotov had an epiphany [off-camera] and threw in his lot with Khrushchev.  Georgi Malenkov [Jeffrey Tambor] is portrayed as an indecisive weakling in way over his head.  History tells us Malenkov was one of Stalin’s favorites and was hip-deep in carrying out Stalin’s purges, and in life [as it was in the movie] he was close to Beria.

After Beria met his fate, Khrushchev emerged immediately as the guy in charge.  He told Svetlana she was going to Vienna whether she liked it or not.  When informed of this, she told Khrushchev “I never thought it would be you.”  Given his place in the pecking immediately after Stalin’s death, nobody else knew either.  Right before the credits rolled, Khrushchev and Kaganovich had the following exchange –

Khrushchev: I’m worried about Malenkov, though.  Can we trust him?

Kaganovich:  Can you ever trust a weak man?

The film was banned in Russia.  Moscow police raided the one cinema that dared show it.  Why was it banned?  Author Anna Aratunyan [The Putin Mystique] has a few ideas.  She spoke with quite a few Russians on the topic as relates to a Russian-produced movie called Matilda, which depicted Tsar Nicholas II as having an affair, and thus showed this canonized saint of the Russian Orthodox Church to be “human”. Her research told her that people objected to that film because it skewered a Russian “sacred cow”. In her talks with Orthodox groups about that particular film, their view is that “power is sacred”, no matter who wields it. And this kind of power that Stalin had was not institutional but personal, the only kind of power that Russia has only known. 

Additionally, she attributes opposition to The Death of Stalin to the Russian people’s inability to internalize that such a thing as how Stalin’s murderous reign could somehow happen in Russia. People can joke about their own political leaders in private, but to do so in such a public way crossed a line.  And there is one more thing to consider.  It’s ok for Russians to joke about their own leader among friends, but when a Scottish filmmaker [a foreigner] ridicules a Russian or Soviet leader in such a public way, that's not ok.  It’s REALLY not ok if that same Scottish filmmaker commits the sin of attacking a Russian “sacred cow” and getting it right.  How can one “mock” the "winner” of the Great Patriotic War?

She doesn't think the Kremlin has a strategy to ban certain things from the public as that would only to draw more attention to the thing being banned.  She posits there was some kind of massive social insecurity that fueled a backlash against The Death of Stalin.  She isn’t sure what the Russian “Deep State’s” motives were in banning the movie.  She does say the current regime has embraced the rehabilitation of Stalin, has mobilized patriotism and nationalism, so once that was let out of that Pandora's Box in the case of The Death of Stalin, the current regime feared a backlash.

The Death of Stalin mocks a part of the Soviet past, one that deserves mockery.  The movie is about succession and how one replaces a politically dominant figure.  In Stalin's time, there was no clear successor.  The same can be said about the entire Soviet experience.  But in this particular time the only political institution that mattered was one man - Stalin.  Today's political climate in Russia is similar.  Vladimir Putin dominates Russian politics like no other since...Stalin!  Sure, Dmitri Medvedev served a single term as Russian president, but the power behind that particular throne was still Vladimir Putin as Medvedev’s Prime Minister.  Once he was free from the constitutional shackles of term limits, Putin re-asserted himself at the top of the Russian political food chain.  As he enters what he himself calls his last term as president, there is no clear succession plan for Putin as there wasn't one for Stalin.  Given what has transpired during Putin's eighteen years in power [the longest since Stalin], one thing is certain that Putin will leave the Kremlin in the only way the Russians have experienced - “feet first”.  Perhaps the regime is insecure about parallels between Stalin’s rule and that of Putin.

What I'm Reading - Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice

Normally, I wouldn’t think twice about reading a book about high finance.  But this is no ordinary book.  The Boston Globe’s review of Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice “a tale of an accidental activist.”  This is a very accurate description of Bill Browder’s tale of Russian corruption and murder.  A “red notice” that gives the book its title is a tool a country uses to let other countries know they wish to arrest a person with an eye toward extradition.  It is a tool that Vladimir Putin’s regime uses to silence its critics outside of Russia.  The custom is this – if a country issues a red notice, countries that participate in Interpol [which is every country except North Korea] are obliged to honor the wishes of the requesting country.  The police don’t have to arrest the subject of a red notice, but countries cut the individual in question off from their bank accounts and, in theory, the entire global financial system.

The book tells of Browder’s story.  His grandfather, Earl Browder, was a Communist who ran for President of the United States twice [1936 and 1940].  Bill Browder himself was the son of left-wing academics.  But somehow, this son of academics with Communists in his family closet was interested in pursuing a life in business.  He worked for Bain Capital and the Boston Consulting Group.  it was at the latter group that he expressed an interest in making some kind of business mark in Eastern Europe, a place where his Communist grandfather had spent a lot of time.  Soon after beginning work in the London offices of BCG, the Iron Curtain crumbled.  There would be opportunities galore to help ex-Communists become capitalists. 

Later, as an employee of Salomon Brothers, he found many opportunities for foreign investment in Russia.  the Russian government had decided to give away most of the state’s property to the people. The government was going about this in a number of ways, but the most interesting was something called voucher privatization.  The Russian government granted each citizen one privatization certificate.  These certificates were exchangeable for shares in Russian companies.  And the companies for which the shares were literally being given away were very undervalued.  One of the higher-ups at Salomon Brothers got wind of what Browder found about Russian investment opportunities, and decided to drop lots of money in Russia.  Soon Salomon Brothers became the owner of $25 million worth of the most undervalued shares that had ever been offered anywhere in history.  Having made this mark at Salomon Brothers, Browder decided the time was right to form his own company, Hermitage Capital.

The book starts with a deportation.  Bill Browder was the founder and CEO of Hermitage Capital.  Since its founding in 1996, Hermitage Capital made a lot of money for a lot of people.  In 2000 the firm had been ranked as the best performing emerging-markets fund in the world.  In November 2005, Browder had taken a flight from the United Kingdom [his adopted home] to Moscow, where his company managed approximately $4.5 million worth of assets.  His main approach to investing had been shareholder activism. In Russia that meant challenging the corruption of the oligarchs, the twenty-some-odd men who were reported to have stolen 39 percent of the country after the fall of communism and who became billionaires almost overnight.  The oligarchs were stealing from their own companies, and Browder made it his mission in life to expose corruption among these Russian oligarchs in order to do right by his investors. 

Flights from London to Moscow were routine for Browder, but this flight in November 2005 was different – he was denied entry into Russia.  He was sent back to whence he came – London.  Browder tried to find out why he was suddenly persona non-grata in a country he routinely visited.  At first, he thought it was some bureaucratic screw-up.  Then he was told the Russians refused entry into their country on the grounds of “national security.”  Browder made a lot of enemies in Russia, but as long as those enemies [the aforementioned oligarchs] were also enemies of Vladimir Putin, Browder could crusade against corruption in Russia to his heart’s content.  After the arrest and conviction of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, then Russia’s richest man and an opponent of Vladimir Putin, Browder continued to name and shame the rich people who were kleptocrats.  Unbeknownst to Browder, these kleptocrats were “friends of Vladimir”.  Browder crossed a line he didn’t know existed.  Soon the Russian FSB wanted to deprive Hermitage of all of its assets.

Who was Sergei Magnitsky, and what was his “crime”?  Sergei Magnitsky was the head of the tax practice at law firm of Firestone Duncan.  He was an expert on Russian tax law.  Browder described his knowledge as “encyclopedic.”  After Browder pissed off the wrong people, he was being investigated [and eventually charged with] tax fraud.  Bill Browder retained his services, and in so doing Magnitsky uncovered $230 million of tax fraud involving some of the companies stolen from Browder’s firm, Hermitage Capital.  He discovered that some of Hermitage’s companies had been “stolen”.  The new “owners” of the stolen companies tried to get rebates of taxes paid by the Hermitage companies before they were stolen.  These rebates were paid.  

How does one “steal” a company?  The police raided Hermitage’s offices, seized a ton of documents, and then used a convicted killer to fraudulently re-register their companies.  The police took the company’s original seals, certificates of ownership, and registration files.  Once stolen, the new owners could act just like any other owners of a company. They could run it, liquidate it, take its assets, relocate it.  After that was accomplished, Hermitage became victims of what is called a “Russian raider attack.”  These typically involved corrupt police officers fabricating criminal cases, corrupt judges approving the seizure of assets, and organized criminals hurting anyone who stood in the way. 

What happened to Sergei Magnitsky?  After exposing the largest case of tax fraud in Russia’s history, Sergei Magnitsky was arrested by Russian police.  The charge – tax fraud.  In November 2008, Russian police arrested Magnitsky.  He didn’t think the Russian authorities would do anything to him because he hadn’t done anything wrong.  He was wrong.  The same people that he discovered were defrauding the Russian people were the same people investigating his case.  During his detention, he was denied bail.  The Russian Interior Ministry fabricated a “report” that Magnitsky had applied for a UK visa and had bought an airplane ticket to Kiev, and so he was labelled a flight risk.  He was refused any contact with his family.  He was subject to terrible living conditions.  He nearly froze to death in his cell.  As his detention dragged on, Magnitsky got very sick.  The doctors where he was detained diagnosed him with pancreatitis, gallstones, and cholecystitis.  A week before he was to undergo an ultrasound exam, he was moved to another facility that was not equipped to handle illnesses like those that afflicted Magnitsky.  He asked for medical treatment but was refused.  They deliberately withheld medical treatment from him. 

On October 14, 2009, he submitted a formal twelve-page testimony to the Interior Ministry in which he documented the full extent of the financial fraud. He provided names, dates, and locations.  On November 12, 2009 Magnitsky finally had his day in court. He first read his complaint about not receiving adequate medical care. The judge rejected it. He then read his complaint about the fabrication of evidence in his case file. The judge rejected this as well. As he began to read the complaint about his false arrest, the judge cut him off midsentence and rejected it too. In total, she rejected more than a dozen of Magnitsky’s complaints.  After his hearing was over, Magnitsky’s medical condition became critical.  He was transferred to a place called Matrosskaya Tishina to be treated.  But instead of being taken to the medical wing, Magnitsky was taken to an isolation cell and handcuffed to a bed.  Eight guards in full riot gear entered the cell and beat Sergei Magnitsky to death.  The “official” version of Magnitsky’s death was that he died of “heart failure, with no signs of violence.”

Executive Inaction vs. Congressional Action.  Throughout the Obama Administration, the President was rarely hesitant to take executive action to remedy a problem when faced with Congressional inaction.  In the case of Sergei Magnitsky’s murder by Russian police, the script was flipped.  When Bill Browder visited the State Department’s Office of Russian Affairs, he suggested the State Department use something called Proclamation 7750 against those Russian officials implicated in Sergei Magnitsky’s death.  Created during the Bush Administration in 2004, Proclamation 7750 allows the State Department to impose visa sanctions on corrupt officials.  Since the fall of Communism, corrupt Russian officials travelled across the globe, spending money like it was their last days on Earth.  Restricting travel for these individuals would get the Kremlin’s attention.  But when presented with this option, the State Department balked.  They didn’t want to upset the apple cart.  It was more important for them to document the Magnitsky problem that to actually do anything about it. 

Browder approached Senator Ben Cardin [D-MD] with the details of the Magnitsky case.  Sen. Cardin was chairman of the US Helsinki Commission, an independent government agency whose mission is to monitor human rights in former Soviet Bloc countries.  Once Browder gave Sen. Cardin all the details of the Magnitsky case, he pledged to provide any and all support to Browder’s efforts to sanction the Russians.  Sen. Cardin wrote to Secretary of State Clinton, asking her to invoke Proclamation 7750.  Attached to the letter was the list of the sixty officials involved in Sergei’s death and the tax fraud, and next to each name was his or her department affiliation, rank, date of birth, and role in the Magnitsky case.  The State Department ignored Sen. Cardin’s letter. 

Browder then testified before the House Human Rights Commission.  Rep. Jim McGovern [R-MA] chaired the commission.  After he heard the story of Sergei Magnitsky, he decided to up the ante.  He promised that not only would he support Sen. Cardin’s efforts on Magnitsky’s behalf, he would introduce legislation to codify the contents of Sen. Cardin’s letter to Secretary Clinton, and to make Obama say “no” during an election year.  Sen. Cardin and Rep. McGovern worked together on the Magnitsky Act.  Sen. Cardin told Browder he needed some Republican co-sponsors for the draft bill to go anywhere.  Thus cued, Browder got a meeting with John McCain, who agreed without hesitation. 

Context:  The effort to pass the Magnitsky Act came in 2012, an election year.  During one presidential debate, Mitt Romney was asked what he considered to be the United States’ biggest geopolitical threat.  Without hesitation, he answered “Russia”.  President Obama retorted “the 80s called, and they want their foreign policy back.”  If the Obama Administration supported passage of the Magnitsky Act, it would be admitting the “reset” policy was a failure.  The last thing any political campaign wants to do is to admit failure to anything.   But still they resisted.  However, the Obama Administration wanted to repeal the Jackson-Vanik amendment so that American businesses can be competitive in Russia when it became part of the World Trade Organization.  But he needed help from Congress.   Since Jackson-Vanik was still public law, President Obama couldn’t unilaterally get rid of it – he needed Congressional help.  He was told in no uncertain terms that if he didn’t support the Magnitsky Act, he wouldn’t get what he wanted regarding Jackson-Vanik.  John Kerry, who chaired the Senate Foreign Relations committee, tried to stonewall its passage – he wanted to succeed Hillary Clinton at Foggy Bottom.  But once the Administration heard of the quid pro quo [I’ll give you Jackson-Vanik repeal for support for Magnitsky], Kerry’s stonewalling stopped.  The Magnitsky Act passed both houses of Congress with overwhelming [veto-proof] majorities.  President Obama had no choice but to sign it into law, which he did in December 2012.

How did Vladimir Putin react?  Not well.  The Magnitsky Act is a source of extreme resentment by Putin.  But he’s really pissed because the law penalizes those whom he allows to continue their acts of corruption without any consequences.  He’s been trying in his own way to get the Magnitsky Act repealed.  But so far, the only concrete “retaliation” has been to ban American families from adopting Russian children.  One other action taken by Russia – they put a dead man on trial.  In March 2013, Bill Browder and Sergei Magnitsky [who had been dead since November 2009] were tried for tax fraud.  Not even Stalin put dead people on trial.  Of course, the two were found guilty.  Browder was sentenced in absentia to a nine-year prison term.

Though not covered in this book, Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya met with Donald Trump, Jr. at Trump Tower to lobby for the repeal of the Magnitsky Act.  Since the Magnitsky Act was enacted, Vladimir Putin has made its repeal one of his top foreign policy priorities.

Browder had the last laugh.  “We found their Achilles Heel.  Following the money and freezing the money is by far the most effective tool there is when dealing with a kleptocracy.”  Since the Magnitsky Act became law, other countries have followed suit.  Among the most recent, Canada’s Justice for Victims of Corrupt Foreign Officials Act became law on October 19^th of this year.  Putin’s reaction was "the issue is simply used for fanning anew anti-Russian hysteria."  he US Magnitsky Act has since been broadened to be world-wide.

Score one for the good guys…

What I'm Reading - The Red Web: The Struggle Between Russia’s Digital Dictators and the New Online Revolutionaries

Russian journalists Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan wrote their first book, The New Nobility: The Restoration of Russia's Security State and the Enduring Legacy of the KGB, in 2010.  It was about the rise of the FSB in the era of Vladimir Putin from the ashes of what was once the KGB.  Five years later, they wrote second book, The Red Web: The Struggle Between Russia’s Digital Dictators and the New Online Revolutionaries.  This book could easily have been titled The Russian Surveillance State: How Old Habits Die Hard from Soviet Times to the Present.  One would suspect from the title this book concentrates on just the Internet in post-Soviet Russia, but this book is much more.  Soldatov and Borogan document in great detail the breadth of the old Soviet KGB technical surveillance apparatus, how and where it began, and how techniques and equipment have adapted to the Internet age.

The story begins in a residential district in southwest Moscow, wherein lies a nineteen-story gray-and-white building known as Phone Station M9.  Half of Russia’s Internet traffic passes through this building.  The building has another occupant on its eighth floor – the FSB.  The FSB is the successor organization to the Soviet Committee for State Security – the KGB.  Throughout the building are little boxes marked SORM [which is an acronym for the Russian words for “operative search measures”].  These are the devices which the FSB uses to monitor Russian web traffic.  First invented by the KGB to monitor telephone calls, these SORM boxes monitor e-mails, Internet usage, Skype, cell phone calls, text messages and social networks [Twitter, Facebook, etc.].  It is with these SORM boxes the Putin regime monitors political opposition.  In 1991 Russia inherited a dysfunctional and broken communications system with barely a connection abroad, and today the Pew Research Center approximates that 73 percent of those questioned in Russia said they had online access, compared to 63 percent for China and 87 percent in the United States.  In a country of over 200 million people, that’s a lot of Internet traffic to monitor.

“Prison of information.” Soldatov and Borogan describe the old Soviet Union as a “prison of information”.  They describe the infrastructure that was put in place by the Soviet security apparatus to build this “prison of information”. 

-        Marfino [located northeast of Moscow] stood a building that was once a seminary.  During Stalin's time, this former seminary was transformed into a Soviet secret research facility.  Their mission was to create a secure telephone system for Stalin.  In 1952, while working at Marfino, Vladimir Fridkin made the Soviet Union's first working copy machine.  Three years later, the KGB smashed Fridkin’s copy machine to bits in order to prevent the copying of "prohibited materials".  Such was the paranoia of the Communist Party that they had to maintain a stranglehold on information.

-        Kuchino.  In December 1953, eighteen prisoners were transferred from Marfino to Kuchino, another security service compound twelve miles east of Moscow. It became the KGB’s main research center for surveillance technologies, including the all-pervasive Soviet system of phone tapping and communications interception. They also figured out how to intercept a human voice from the vibrations of a window. Kuchino was the main research facility for Stalin’s secret services in the area of special, or “operative,” equipment—ranging from weapons to radio sets to, most importantly, listening devices.  The engineers employed therein, and at the Scientific Research Institute of Dalny Svyazi in Leningrad, conducted much research in the field of speech recognition.

-        The Computation Center of the Academy of Sciences on Vavilova Street in Moscow applied computers to the speech recognition work.  This evolved into a private company called the Speech Technology Center in 1993.  With generous funding from the FSB, this company created technology that could to store many millions of items of biometric data, such as voice samples and photo images, and match them to individuals by searching the world’s communication channels, including video files. The voice recognition technology can identify the speaker, regardless of language, accent, or dialect, based on physical characteristics of the voice.

-        Kurchatov Institute [which included the Computation Center] held a prestigious status in the Soviet Union.  Much of the work to get the Soviet atom bomb was done here.  Additionally, it worked on other crucial defense projects, to include laser weapons and development of Soviet submarines. The Soviet Internet was born here.  It was here the Soviets made their first connection to the Internet. Alexey Saldatov, the father of one of this book’s co-authors, was a key player in making the Soviet Internet a reality.  The elder Soldatov was the head of the Computation Center.  He had done an internship at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen. During his time there, he knew of computer scientists that created a network that connected computers.  He had a team of computer programmers that adapted a bootleg copy of Unix [and called it Demos] to the Soviet’s first supercomputer with a Soviet-made copy of an IBM mainframe.  They created a local area network at Kurchatov.  Once they did that, they expanded to a larger network that connected Kurchatov and the Institute of Informatics and Automation in Leningrad, 460 miles away. After that, connections were established with research centers in Dubna, Serpukhov, and Novosibirsk. The network used ordinary telephone lines. 

Almost a year after that first global Internet connection was made, the abortive Communist coup against Mikhail Gorbachev took place.  The Internet connection to cities outside of Moscow and beyond the borders of the Soviet Union proved extremely important because the coup plotters neglected to take down the computer network.  Large amounts of uncensored information flowed in and out of Moscow, and the coup plotters unknowingly helped the other side by demonstrating an old way of thinking, to control radio and TV.  The KGB didn’t think to censor the nascent computer network – it never occurred to them, and at this time this was a network they couldn’t control.  This is ironic because the much of the money that made the Soviet Internet a reality came from the KGB.  The ‘net’ didn’t foil the coup attempt all by itself, but it was an important new tool in the toolbox against oppression.

Russian Internet tools.  The Russian security services have quite a few tools in their Internet suppression toolkit.  Among these tools are:

-        A nationwide system of online filtering and censorship was put in place by 2012 and has since been refined.  Internet filtering in Russia is unsophisticated; thousands of sites were blocked/blacklisted by mistake, and users could easily find ways to make an end-run around it. At the same time, very few people in Russia were actually sent to jail for posting criticism of the government online.

-        Distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks by “hacker patriots” - when an attacker uses a multitude of infected computers to access a website at the same time, and the site often crashes as a result

-        Pro-Kremlin hacktivists and trolls were hired to attack and harass liberals online

-        SORM devices – the little black boxes control information online and obstruct a free press and political opponents.  first versions intercepted and recorded phone calls for the Soviet Union, but now Internet service providers (ISPs) install the latest generations of SORM onto Internet lines so that the FSB can intercept content (not just metadata) from email, internet traffic, mobile calls and voice-over internet such as Skype.  All Russian operators and ISPs were required to install the black boxes, about the size of an old video tape recorder, which would fit on a rack of equipment, and permit connection to the regional departments of the FSB.

-        Kompromat - compromising material released to the public to blackmail activists, embarrass opponents & business rivals, influence elections, and create confusion.  Kompromat used against journalists and others most likely came from content that SORM intercepted.

-        Coercion - The main subjects of Soldatov and Borogan’s book, online service providers including ISPs, media outlets, aggregators, mail services and social networks, are constantly angling for a position from which it is safe to conduct business. They are Putin’s willing executioners.  They are told that if they don’t provide the access to communications that the FSB desires, they won’t have the ability to do business in Russia.  The threat of being dragged into criminal proceedings – or, indeed, of losing one’s business – serves to activate what is perhaps the most commonplace survival mechanism in today’s Russia: self-censorship.

-        Blogger Law – There are many popular blogs in Russia, and is one of the few areas in cyberspace where lively and relatively free political debates take place.  This was a rewrite of anti-terrorist statutes that required blogs with 3,000 or more followers to register with the government.  This registration gave security services a way to track bloggers, intimidate them, or close them down. 

Face recognition software – The Russians, through a company called Ladakom-Service, have developed facial recognition software, and have been using it wherever there are gatherings of large numbers of people, whether they are sporting events or at the Russian subways.  At the entrance to sporting events, spectators go through metal detectors, ostensibly in efforts to find weapons.   While the spectators are patted down by security, their pictures are taken.  The cameras rapidly capture each face into a green digital frame and then identify different characteristics of the face, including such distinctive features as distance between the eyes. A computer connected to the camera then evaluated each person based on a complex algorithm, and within seconds the person’s name was established and they were given a unique number. Near the metal detectors sits an operator with a laptop.  He monitors every face closely. One window on his screen shows the live camera acquiring the face images, another part of the screen shows the captured images, and a program was constantly running to match the captured images with people in a government passport database, one of the biggest in the country. When the match was successful, a photograph just taken appeared along the bottom of the screen with the person’s full identity.  The same company in 2011 had installed this technology in the entrance hall of one of the busiest metro stations in the city. As people stepped on the subway escalator, their faces entered a frame and were captured by video cameras. The images are rapidly linked to their identity in security service databases. There was no notification to anyone that they were being recorded. The system is so advanced that a scan of 10 million images would take no more than seven seconds. The facial images and video are sent to the Metro system’s situation room, the Interior and Emergencies Ministries, and to the FSB. 

Putin’s “Willing Executioners”.  The authors point out that engineers in Soviet Union [and today’s Russia] are not trained in ethics like medical doctors are.  They were taught to be servants of the state.  These engineers were focused on the technical needs of the Soviet Union, and they did not [and still do not] question the uses of their technical creations in service to the state.  These people are much more comfortable being told what to do without question – they have a much better understanding of the mechanical world than “the often-unruly reality of freedom”.  They have little or no understanding of politics.  The authors questioned one such engineer named Sergei Koval.  When questioned about what he thought about regimes around the world using his technology to suppress dissent.  His reply - “All this talk about technology catching dissidents is just bullshit.  It’s typical of the kind of psychological warfare the Americans use against their opponents. I think all these arguments about human rights are completely hypocritical.  We just come up with the hardware. It’s just technology that is developed with law enforcement in mind. Sure, you can use it against the good guys just as easily as you can use it against the bad guys. One way or another, these governments will be able to use surveillance technology, whether we supply it or not.… If governments listen in on people’s conversations, it’s not the microphone’s fault!”

Who are the “hacker patriots” and Putin’s on-line trolls?  During the 2000s the Kremlin had created large pro-Kremlin youth organizations, which mostly consisted of youth recruited in Russia’s regions. Two of the most important organizations were Nashi (“Ours”), the oldest movement, built up under direct guidance of Surkov, and Molodaya Gvardiya (“Young Guard”), the youth wing of the pro-Kremlin political party United Russia.  These people aren’t government employees, hence the Kremlin’s ability to maintain the façade of “plausible deniability” whenever they are accused of stirring up trouble.  A Ukrainian hacktivist group named CyberBerkut, which consisted of supporters of the country’s former president Viktor Yanukovych, who had fled to Russia after the Maidan forced him from office, claimed to have hacked the email accounts of Ukrainian NGOs.  They “obtained” emails from Ukrainian NGOs to “prove” that the targeted NGOs were not only in touch with the US Embassy but also received funding from American foundations.

“Digital Sovereignty”.  In the aftermath of Edward Snowden’s disclosures about the practices at NSA, an idea sprang from the Russian State Duma.  The idea was that meant Russian citizens should be forbidden from keeping their personal data on foreign servers.  The pretext of this “fear” of the surrender of Russian citizens’ data to American intelligence agencies.  In order to keep that from happening, the Kremlin wanted Facebook, Google’s services, Twitter, Gmail, and YouTube to have their computer servers on Russian soil.  What this really means is that once the servers of these social media are on Russian soil, the Russian security services can put in their own internet controls.  They wanted the SORM boxes installed on these social media services.  Since 2011 the FSB complained they had no way to chat messages and emails on Facebook and Gmail.  “Digital sovereignty” was their ticket to access.  According to the authors, the Russian government announced in March 2015 that Google had indeed located servers in Moscow.

The Panama Papers.  In 2016 the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), which consists of reporters based all over Europe and the former Soviet Union, from Azerbaijan to Romania to Ukraine to Russia, had gotten their hands on an extensive trove of documents detailing offshore Panamanian companies that government officials and oligarchs all over the world—Russians included—used for illegal purposes, including fraud, tax evasion, and evading international sanctions.  The Russian journalists identified multi-million-dollar accounts owned by Sergei Roldugin, a personal friend of Vladimir Putin.  Putin saw the publication of the Panama Papers as a personal attack on him funded by the United States Agency for International Development [USAID].  The Russians, especially Vladimir Putin, thinks of USAID as a CIA front organization that plots to undermine the Putin regime.  WikiLeaks claimed the OCCRP targets Russia and other former Soviet countries and is paid by USAID and George Soros.

The Bolotnaya protests.  In 2008, Vladimir Putin was constitutionally ineligible to serve a third consecutive term as Russian president.    Putin sidestepped this constitutional inconvenience by having Dmitri Medvedev [Russia First Deputy Prime Minister] run in his place.  Medvedev appointed Putin as Prime Minister.  Medvedev was/is Putin’s puppet.  In September 2011, Medvedev announced he wouldn’t run for re-election and endorsed Putin as his successor.  Many people in Russia were disappointed at this turn of events.  There wasn’t great love for Medvedev since he was part of Putin’s United Russia machine.  The disappointment came in that this decision [“the castling”] was made by two men behind closed doors.  The Russian electorate wouldn’t get the chance to make a decision between Putin or Medvedev.  These people saw this development as a lost chance for thaw, liberalization, or democratization, modernization.  

Parliamentary elections took place in December 2011.  An organization named Golos is the only independent election watchdog organization in Russia, and Golos uncovered voting fraud in the parliamentary elections.  The method exposed is known as “carousel voting”.  Voters of United Russia [Putin’s political party] would go from polling station to polling station and stuff ballot boxes.  These people were given false identity papers so they could vote at different polling places, and they had ballots marked for United Russia.  In different parts of the country, election observers reported results that exceeded 100 percent. The same people who were angered by Medvedev being dumped were further angered by the exposed vote fraud.  On December 10, fifty thousand protesters against election fraud gathered on Bolotnaya Island in Moscow.  The protests were mobilized by Twitter and Facebook, technology made in the West.  It was a nightmare for Vladimir Putin.  In his worldview, everything is vertical – organized from the top down.  There’s always [in his view] a “boss” to reach out and crush when things become inconvenient.  But these protests were united by horizontal methods [think “whack-a-mole”].  Putin can whack a lot of moles, but he can’t get them all.

The 2016 Election.  Putin believed Hillary Clinton had been a driving force behind the Bolotnaya protests in December 2011. He also believed that she and her people at the US State Department were behind most of the Western anti-Russian moves—from the US sanctions, to the activities of the Russian opposition, to journalistic investigations exposing corruption in Russia [specifically the Panama Papers].  The authors listed instances where Russia used cyber warfare against in-country dissidents, Kremlin “enemies” in former Soviet states, and other countries they see as opposed to Russian interests [France, Germany].  The authors see the Russian meddling in the 2016 as “our turn” to get a taste of Russian statecraft.   Unlike the Chinese [whose government directly supervises cyberattacks], the Kremlin uses all kinds of informal actors for plausible deniability - from patriotic hackers, to Kremlin-funded youth movement activists, to employees of cybersecurity companies forced into cooperation by government officials.  The authors briefly discuss the actions of Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear, and the havoc these groups created inside the Democratic National Committee.

Disruptive tactics.

-        The use of rank-and-file hacktivists not directly connected to the state in order to help the Kremlin maintain plausible deniability;

-        Guidance and protection from criminal prosecution, provided by the president’s administration alongside the secret services;

-        Hacked information was published as kompromat (i.e., compromising materials) online as a way of smearing an opponent.

One has to listen to Putin’s words [and those of his spokesman Dmitry Peskov] very carefully, because they are very adept at parsing words. When they emphasize that no Russian government bodies were involved in hacktivist activities, they have some plausible deniability.  The Russian government isn’t directly involved in these activities.  The Russian government outsources these activities to informal actors—hackers’ groups and companies.  One thing the Russians didn’t count on was that in May 2016, that the cyber expert community is now able to deduce the sources of cyberattacks, including those made by Russia. If an attack could be attributed to a hacking group with a known history of attacking similar targets and this group’s attacks consistently worked to benefit one particular country, cyberattack investigators put two and two together and make a conclusion.  After the Russians were expelled from the DNC computers, they went on to the next step – kompromat.  They released the Democrats’ dirty laundry, as provided to them by WikiLeaks.  The “laundry” that was released is documented here, as it was in newspapers across this country.

Why did WikiLeaks side with the Russians?  The arrangement was mutually beneficial.  In return for WikiLeaks doing the Russians’ dirty work in digging up dirt on the Democrats and helping disrupt the 2016 campaign, the Russians allowed WikiLeaks to re-locate their servers to Russia.  Perhaps this was WikiLeaks way of protecting their own operations from Western snooping-interference-penetration [pick your favorite verb, it’ll fit].

Putin’s Gift.  Vladimir Putin’s gift to the US was cynicism.  He grew up in the Soviet era where officials never trusted the people.  People are unreliable who need to be managed and controlled.  Putin and those like him think that people can’t come together voluntarily to do something for the common good.  People who try to do something not directed by the government – his government -  are corrupted by either foreign governments wishing to do Russia harm, or are corrupted by corporations [greed].  Nobody is to be trusted.  Large sections of America distrust government and the media, and the Russians exploited the distrust.  Russian trolls on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube spread conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton.  Despite the Russian efforts against Clinton [and all the dirt they found], the authors characterized the election thusly:

“The Russian hackers did not compromise polling stations, nor did they affect the critical infrastructure of the United States during the presidential campaign. Donald Trump found himself in the White House for a number of very serious reasons, most of them originating in the United States, not from abroad.”

While the US electoral infrastructure was not compromised, what was compromised was trust – trust in media, trust in politicians [which wasn’t high to begin with].  The Russians exploited weaknesses in the American system that were already there.  In an article published last week on the website Project Syndicate, former CIA analyst Kent Harrington wrote that Russia was able to “stoke discord along economic, racial, and political lines” by inundating Google and Facebook with automated messages from tens of thousands of user accounts.  And Harrington also attributes the gullibility of the American body politic to civic illiteracy.  The hacker patriots and Putin’s online trolls described by Soldatov and Borogan created English-language sites and Facebook pages that closely mimicked those created by U.S. political activists.  Harrington attributes the lack of civics education in American schools to a decline in the public’s understanding of issues and the political process, and made them susceptible to disinformation, what is now referred to as “fake news”.

In the authors’ view, though, not all hope is lost.  The Russians have many technical means at their disposal to control political thought.  Putin’s people can coerce their opponents, jail them, smear them, harass them, monitor them, and sometimes kill them.  But Putin’s worldview of a vertical power structure inhibits his regime’s ability to control the Internet in Russia because Internet content isn’t generated by the owners of websites and social media.  Internet content is generated by the users, and anyone with a laptop or a cellphone can participate.  As much as he would like it to be so, Vladimir Putin can’t be everywhere.  He would have to control the mind of every single Internet user, which is not possible.  As a final example of Putin’s inability to control information, the authors cite the “little green men” in Ukraine.  Russian conscript soldiers serving in Ukraine are doing more damage than Western media in exposing Putin’s lies about Russian meddling in Ukraine.  These soldiers are doing so by merely posting images they themselves took in Ukraine.  The Internet enabled these soldiers to do so.  If Putin can’t control his own soldiers, who can he control?