Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan on the Evolution of Russia’s Security Services
By Alex Thomas, MALD 2023 Candidate, The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy
As the war in Ukraine enters its eighth month, the role of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) has shifted significantly. Towards the beginning of the war, Putin envisioned the FSB as helping facilitate regime change in Ukraine as Russia’s Special Operation Forces rolled through the streets of Kyiv. The goal was to put a new pro-Kremlin leader in place in Ukraine, but as Ukraine has put up significant resistance, Putin’s vision of the FSB’s role has evolved markedly. Further, Russia has tightened internet censorship and media control to help accomplish Putin’s political objectives both domestically and abroad.
On September 22, Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan first spoke with the Fletcher community about internet surveillance and censorship in Russia in an event co-hosted with the Hitachi Center for Technology and International Affairs. Their first panel was chaired by Professor Josephine Wolff and centered around the factors driving the Russian authorities to increase pressure on independent media, journalists, and social media platforms since the invasion of Ukraine began.
“What we are seeing now is a major shift in how the Kremlin is able to control attempts to undermine its political process,” Soldatov said.
“We observe that now the Kremlin sees the major threats to its narrative as coming from within, not from Western websites or articles from Radio Free Europe. Even further, it’s the ordinary Russians experiencing and posting phenomena online that seem to be more dangerous than activists in the streets.”
After Soldatov’s opening remarks, Borogan went on to speak about the more technical aspects of the Kremlin’s growing control of Russian society.
“Ultimately, our research and studies have shown that Russian citizens vastly prefer global platforms and media apps like YouTube as opposed to local ones that were more within the Kremlin’s control,” said Borogan.
“This posed a challenge to the Kremlin, and the beginning of the war showed how the Kremlin’s censorship attempted to move Russians off of global platforms and onto Russian social media where they were able to exert more control.”
After the conversation, Professor Wolff emphasized that “there is so much uncertainty about how Russia’s rules and restrictions around the Internet are actually being implemented and enforced on the ground, and that the reporting Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan do is absolutely invaluable for scholars of Internet censorship and control. [Soldatov and Borogan’s] work helps us understand what the state of Internet access in Russia actually is and how it is changing over time.”
To help make sense of the evolution of the FSB’s activities both in Ukraine and in Russia, Soldatov and Borogan joined students from the Fletcher School on September 23 to discuss the “New Iron Curtain” falling on Russia and the inception of Putin’s new police state. In their follow-up conversation, chaired by co-director of the Russia and Eurasia Program Chris Miller, Soldatov and Borogan spoke to the Fletcher community exclusively about Russia’s security services.
Professor Miller noted that “the visit of these two distinguished journalists provided an opportunity for the Fletcher community to learn from their many years of reporting on key issues in Russian politics. Their work on internet control and security services is at the cutting edge of research into these topics.”
