Nuclear physicist and Internet expert Alexey Solzhenov, who, among other things, co-founded the first Russian network provider Relcom, is expected to spend two years in a labor camp. This verdict was made by a court in the Savyolovsky district of Moscow on Monday, July 22. The charge was abuse of position in connection with the management of IP address pools by the non-profit organization Russian Institute for Public Networks (RIPN). This has been reported by others, including the press agency AP and civil rights portal Netzpolitik.org. Alexey Slyakhtorov as well as his former business partner Yevgeny Antipov were sentenced to 18 months in prison on the same charges. Alexey Shkitin, another ex-business partner of Shlyakhtorov and an international network specialist, was also charged. According to Netzpolitik.org, what happened to him is unknown. Shkitin’s profile on platforms Linkedin And Zing suggested he was in Berlin.
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The indictment accused Soldatov, Antipov, and Shakitin of stealing approximately $8 million from RIPN by illegally sending address blocks to a Czech Republic-based internet company. Reliable Communications embezzled money, which is said to belong to Shlyakhtov and Shchetinin. About the criminal investigation that began in 2019 informed of On New Year’s Eve that year, the research network Meduza suggested that the real background looked different from that presented by official authorities. As Meduza adds, citing a former member of the RIPN board, the organization was said to be on the verge of dissolution in 2019.
Given this, the Russian government feared that the management of the top-level domain “.su”, which stood for the former Soviet Union, could be transferred from RIPN to the non-profit “Internet Development Foundation” controlled by Shlachtov. The report points out that a law for a “sovereign” Russian Internet came into force at the time. In this context, the government wanted, among other things, to bring top-level domains such as .ru, .рф and .su under state control.
Actually, .ru should have replaced the old .su before the turn of the millennium. However, this did not happen because the old top-level domain was still very popular. Today it is still run by RIPN or the Russian Institute for Development of Public Networks (ROSNIIROS). successful. According to Andrei Solzhenov, his father did not hold any position at RIPN. He speaks of “legal absurdities.” Meduza reported at the time that Shlyachtov’s actions were difficult to understand but in no way illegal.
In any case, Alexey Soldatov denied all charges against him. His family speaks of a purely political verdict. For a 72-year-old seriously ill man, this decision was tantamount to a death sentence because the court knew about the fatal illness of the Russian Internet pioneer – Soldatov’s son Andrei and his wife Irina Borogan wrote this in one of the Contribution On the website of the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), based in Washington, DC. CEPA is a non-profit think tank that conducts research, analysis, and education in support of political and economic cooperation between the United States and Europe.
Key technology pioneers
As a trained nuclear researcher, Alexey Solzhenov made his career at the famous Kurchatov Institute in Moscow during the Soviet era. During the Cold War, the institute was considered a leading nuclear research facility in the Soviet Union. Scientists there not only worked on nuclear weapons but were also involved in many other projects of national military importance. The spectrum ranged from nuclear submarines to laser weapons.
Alexey Soldatov is considered the father of the Russian Internet. In 2009 he attended the ICANN meeting in Seoul, the capital of South Korea.
(Image: Wenny Markowski, CC BY 2.0,
In return, the Kurchatov Institute enjoyed a level of independence that other Soviet research institutes could only dream of. Among other things, there was also a telephone connection for international calls. Solzhenov was known among his colleagues for using computers in his work more than anyone else. Having realized his dream of creating his own network at the institute, he gathered a team of programmers around him and in 1990 set about connecting the Kurchatov network with other research institutes in the country. An English-language word-search program suggested a snappy name for the new network: Relcom.
In August 1990, Relcom created a connection between the Moscow Kurchatov Institute and the Institute for Computer Science and Automation in Leningrad, some 740 km away. Other research centers that were connected were in Dubna, Serpukhov and Novosibirsk. The Relcom data network used ordinary telephone lines. The bandwidths were small compared to the networks of the Western world. At first only the exchange of simple emails was possible. But the Relcom team was already looking ahead and wanted to create a connection to the global data network. The first step in this direction was achieved on August 28: Kurchatov programmers exchanged emails with colleagues at a university in Helsinki, Finland. This meant that the isolated Soviet Union was connected to the global Internet via Relcom. The provider Relcom, which turned from an institute project into a tech company, grew rapidly; for many, this name soon became synonymous with email communications and the Internet.
Is harassment inherent in the Internet?
Basically, says Andrei Soldierov, connecting people in the Soviet empire not only to each other, but to the whole world was a decidedly anti-Soviet idea. In the Soviet Union, hierarchical thinking and the principle of prohibition and approval reigned. So the first political challenge for Relcom was not long in coming: in August 1991, the KGB secret service organized a coup by CPSU officers against President Mikhail Gorbachev and blocked traditional media in the process. However, the putschists were not aware of the emerging Internet. Soldierov was in Vladikavkaz, 1,700 km south of Moscow, at the time. But when he arrived at his employees at the Kurchatov data center, they insisted on keeping the data network open at all costs.
This meant that Relcom connections remained intact and news of resistance to the coup was able to spread not only in Moscow, but also in Europe and the US. This flow of information was extremely effective because the network was entirely horizontal, not hierarchical. Already on the first day of events, someone in the Relcom team came up with an idea that became known as “Regime N1”: all users with Relcom accounts should look out the window and report exactly what they saw in their respective locations: the facts asked were exhaustive. Relcom received a mosaic picture of events across the country and was able to broadcast users’ eyewitness accounts and breaking news summaries. It became clear that tanks and troops were seen only in Moscow and Leningrad. The world also knew that the coup had neither substance nor solidity. As Andrei Solzhenov emphasizes, this was a watershed moment for the young Russian Internet.
Then came the collapse of the Soviet empire in 1991, and the boom of the global Internet in the years that followed. Network communications also flourished in Russia. Solzhenov’s Relcom became one of several medium-sized Internet service providers. Widely respected both in Russia and abroad for his expertise in network organization, he helped create the facilities that have since become the technical backbone of the Russian Internet—including the allocation of domain names and IP addresses.
Brief involvement in government
In May 2008, Vladimir Putin’s second term as Russian president ended; he moved to the office of prime minister. The president who replaced him, Dmitry Anatolyevich Medvedev, initially looked liberal and presented himself as an ardent friend of international data networks. He invited Slyakhtorov to join his cabinet as deputy communications minister and be responsible for the Internet. Prime Minister Putin announced the appointment. However, Shlyakhtorov remained in this position for only two years. He resigned in November 2010 because he did not want to support government plans that were being discussed at the time: the development of a national operating system for computers as well as the creation of a special national search engine that would separate the Russian Internet from the global network. As Andrei Slyakhtorov emphasizes, his father always believed in the horizontal concept of the global Internet.
Under the increasingly authoritarian regime of President Putin’s third and fourth terms in office, Alexey Solzhenov clearly became increasingly unpopular. In addition, his son, as an investigative journalist, has repeatedly published articles critical of the regime internationally since 2008 together with Irina Borogan. This included commentaries on terrorism and intelligence issues for the daily newspaper Vedomosti, initially carried by the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal, as well as for Radio Free Europe and the BBC. Your research network was founded in 2000 with several partners agencya.ru According to his own statements, Steven follows the example of the aftergoods “Privacy News“In the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), which included publishing previously sealed government documents of public interest and disclosing information about intelligence methods.
It is unclear whether there is a connection between the increased surveillance of Alexei Solzhenov and the activities of his son – in any case, the Internet pioneer has been the subject of a criminal investigation since 2019. However, he continued to work on research projects, including on the topic of artificial intelligence. According to Andrei Solzhenov, the mentioned investigation was initiated by Andrei Lipov, who at the time was the head of the Internet department in the Putin administration. Since 2020, Lipov has headed the information technology and mass communications supervisory service, Rozkomnadzor. Lipov is subject to a number of international regulations restrictions As a result of Russia’s aggressive war against Ukraine.
Andrei Solzhenov describes Roskomnadzor as a Russian Internet censorship agency and notes that on his way to the top, Lipov has eventually managed to put inconvenient Internet experts behind bars. According to Andrei Solzhenov, he himself has not seen his father since he and Irina Borogan went into exile in the United Kingdom four years ago. He adds, he hopes he will get another chance to see him again. He asked himself what the regime sees as his father’s real crime: was it his independent spirit, his genuine integrity – or the son living in exile while he wrote about his homeland’s descent into dictatorship?
(PSZ)
