Aleksandr Litreev was on a way to a business meeting last February when his life changed forever. En route to a hotel in Yakaterinburg, a day’s drive east of Moscow, Litreev was pulled over by police. When they asked him to hand over his phone, the then-24-year-old knew it was no routine traffic stop.
“They took me to a police station,” Litreev recalls, “and magically some drugs appear.” Litreev said he was arrested by around 10 armed policemen, beaten into confessing to ecstasy possession, and then detained for a month. He managed to flee to Estonia after being released into house arrest.
Litreev is a member of Russia’s liberal opposition. Rather than rousing people to the ballot box, he builds internet tools that help everyday Russians fight against an increasingly controlling state. As part of the tightest squeeze on freedoms in Russia this century, critical online media publications have been labeled foreign agents, and platforms like Twitter and Facebook are being pressured to purge their platforms of content the Kremlin disapproves of.
With Russia’s parliamentary elections running on Sept. 17 through Sept. 19, the Kremlin has stepped up censorship. It’s demanded keywords associated with the opposition be blocked from Google and Yandex, the domestic search giant, and that Google and Apple kick an opposition-made app from their app stores.
Litreev has been fighting back for years, creating an app that sends lawyers to defend arrested protesters and joining the “digital resistance” that countered the government’s attempt to block encrypted-messenger Telegram.
“If I go back to Russia now, I will get something like lifetime imprisonment,” Litreev said. “Not gonna happen.”
Before fleeing to Estonia, Litreev also worked with Alexei Navalny, who, for the last 10 years, has been the face of Russia’s opposition to President Vladimir Putin. Navalny was poisoned by Russian spies in August 2020 and has since been jailed. Navalny’s case shows how the Kremlin has lost any of the patience it once had: He was tolerated for nearly a decade — as a popular blogger, investigative journalist and later an opposition politician — before authorities attempted to eliminate him altogether.
“The things that are happening now have never happened before,” said Litreev, explaining that authorities poisoning an opposition candidate would have been inconceivable as recently as 2017. “And now we’re here.”
Digital wargames
In 2017, Litreev made his first significant venture into opposition politics. A YouTube expose from Navalny alleged that then-Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev had embezzled over $1.2 billion, sparking protests in Moscow and St. Petersburg that turned into a general rebuke of widespread corruption and political repression.
Litreev’s contribution was an app called Red Button. If protesters thought they were at risk of arrest, they could open the app and press the big red button it presented. That would automatically call a lawyer, who also receives the protester’s emergency contact details and a GPS signal of their location.
“It’s basically Uber, but for a lawyer,” Litreev said. It was used extensively by demonstrators at the time, which got the attention of Kremlin authorities. “That’s the point where pressure on me started,” he added.
Litreev, then 21 and fresh out of university, was motivated to join the opposition movement as he watched the Kremlin ratchet up internet restrictions. A 2014 law allowed the telecommunications regulator, Roskomnadzor, to block access to online media that called for “unsanctioned mass public events.” In 2016, Putin signed a bill requiring telecommunications companies to store their customers’ text messages and phone calls for up to six months.
The law was used as a pretext to ban Telegram, a platform created by eccentric Russian developer Pavel Durov that doubles as an instant messenger and a social media platform. It allows for encrypted messages between people, like WhatsApp, but also for public figures and groups to create “channels” that can have millions of followers. Russian authorities wanted control over Telegram, and stopping them became Litreev’s next project.
In 2018, the Kremlin ordered Durov to hand over keys that would allow the FSB, the successor to the Soviet KGB, to unscramble the app’s encrypted messages. Roskomnadzor’s stated goal was to fight terrorist attacks, like a 2017 train bombing in St. Petersburg, which it claimed were spreading thanks to Telegram and apps like it. Durov refused, calling the request both unconstitutional and technically untenable. What followed was a game of hide-and-seek that lasted for two years.
Roskomnadzor banned Telegram in April 2018, pulling down the app’s servers. Scores of Russian internet users — dubbed the Digital Resistance — countered by hosting Telegram on proxy servers, which Roskomnadzor found and banned too. For his part, Litreev helped create software that deployed millions of proxy servers at once, making it impossible for Russian authorities to manually pull them down individually.
“They got tired of banning IP address by IP address, so they started to ban whole subnetworks, ranges of IP addresses,” he said. “At some point, when we got our service hosted on Amazon and on Google Cloud, they accidentally banned a huge subnet which belongs to Google.”
Those attempts to ban Telegram were unsuccessful. Not only did the service remain accessible, its Russian user base actually grew. Meanwhile, with authorities hastily banning up to 19 million IP addresses, Google and Amazon services were briefly unusable throughout Russia.
Roskomnadzor had a choice: either block a huge range of IP addresses and risk more catastrophic blackouts, or rescind the ban on Telegram. “It was a fight for all or nothing,” Litreev said.
After two years, Roskomnadzor relented, lifting its Telegram ban last June on the grounds that the company would help it with terrorism inquiries in the future. The Digital Resistance won this battle, the latest in a war that had been going on since 2012.
The first ruling
Russia is often grouped with China as a troublesome autocracy. A common misconception related to this comparison is that Russia has always had a fiercely censored internet. But unlike China’s internet, which was built from the ground up not to rely on Western companies or users, Russia’s internet largely grew freely from the mid-’90s.
That began to change in 2012, when Putin became president for the second time.
Much like the US, Russian presidents were bound by the constitution to serve no more than two consecutive four-year terms. So in 2008, when Putin swapped places with Dmitry Medvedev, becoming prime minister while Medvedev assumed the presidency, many suspected it was a ploy to circumvent constitutional limits. Those suspicions were confirmed when he announced his intention to run as president again in 2011.
When Putin’s United Russia party retained a majority in the parliamentary elections two months later — elections local monitors and the EU said were fraudulent — protests erupted. Tens of thousands demanded free elections and the release of political prisoners. But what concerned the Kremlin wasn’t the demonstrators, but how they managed to organize themselves. These protests were the biggest the country had seen since the ’90s, and they were powered by social media.
“The driving force back then was the internet — social media, Facebook and Twitter,” said Andrei Soldatov, a journalist and co-author of The Red Web, a book that details Russia’s tightening grip on internet freedoms. “That was the moment the Kremlin started paying attention to this new threat, and it was absolutely clear that it was the big thing for years to come.”
Online freedoms began unraveling a month after Putin took office in 2012. The Russian Duma (the lower house of the Federal Assembly) started drafting an internet restriction bill that lawmakers claimed was necessary to protect minors from child sexual abuse material, online drug markets and content that encouraged self harm. In practice, it allowed government authorities to create an internet blacklist.
Roskomnadzor now had legal cover to pull down websites it didn’t like. Today, the internet in Russia is still markedly more open than it is in countries like China, Egypt and Vietnam. But Russia’s strategy of censorship is more subtle, focused less on suppressing speech than on oppressing competition.
“The idea is not to prevent you from getting information,” Soldatov said. “The idea is to discourage you from participating in political activities of any kind, online or offline.”
The Kremlin’s aversion to political opposition explains why political protests are often followed by a tightening of controls. The Moscow demonstrations of 2011 and 2012 led to the first internet restriction bill, and Telegram was targeted in 2018 after protests were organized on the platform.
Then, in 2019, the opposition began translating online engagement into electoral victories.
A new era
Activists, journalists and opposition politicians had proven adept at maneuvering around the digital barriers the Kremlin had been throwing up since 2012. Navalny continued to use his prominent online platform to trouble authorities. Though demonized on state TV, many of his YouTube documentaries on shadowy Kremlin activities racked up hundreds of millions of views. Older Russians who regularly watched Russian television thought Navalny was a menace. Many middle-class, internet-savvy Russians, however, were receptive to his cause.
Though the Kremlin punished Navalny in various ways, convicting him on trumped-up fraud charges and barring him from running for office, authorities showed some restraint in suppressing his movement.
“Navalny was tolerated for a decade,” said William Partlett, a professor at Melbourne Law School who researches post-Soviet societies and is authoring a book on Navalny. “He was exposing high-level corruption among very important, powerful people in the inner circle of the Kremlin. And he was allowed to do that, and I think the idea was, ‘we can manage this guy.'”
That changed in 2019. Navalny, unable to run for Moscow city council himself, encouraged his followers to adopt the “smart voting” doctrine. It meant voting for anyone other than the ruling United Russia party, be they liberals, avowed communists or hardcore nationalists. The plan worked: The “systemic opposition” won 20 of Moscow’s 45 seats, reducing the United Russia Party’s majority from 38 to 25.
The same system was used successfully in regional elections, ousting three United Russia governors. In a world where freedom of expression is fine up until the point where it infringes on Kremlin control, this was all unacceptable. Navalny’s opposition movement was powered by online platforms, from Telegram to Twitter, and now it was producing tangible offline results.
“Now the question for Putin becomes, is the internet manageable?” Partlett said.
The Kremlin cracked down hard. An online libel law was enacted last December, allowing sites to be blocked and people to be jailed for “defaming” public figures. Specific activists and journalists have been targeted: one journalist was jailed for 25 days for retweeting a photo that carried the date and time of a planned protest, while a video of police violently interrogating blogger Gennady Shulga was leaked by the police themselves, Shulga said, “to show people what the authorities can do.”
Navalny’s treatment played out in front of the world. He was poisoned in an airport in August 2020, then flown to Berlin, where he recuperated. After returning to Russia, he was immediately imprisoned. Meanwhile, Putin amended the constitution in April to allow him to rule as president until 2036.
Taking on big tech
Litreev talks about his exploits like a nimble David outmaneuvering a lumbering, sluggish Goliath. He knows the battle will be perilous but expects he and his fellow activists will ultimately prevail.
“The level of expertise and level of professionalism on the government side is much lower than our side,” he said.
Litreev points to a spat between Twitter and Kremlin as evidence. In March, Roskomnadzor demanded Twitter take down thousands of tweets dating back to 2017 that encouraged illegal activity — which includes child porn,…