BBC Radio: Controlling Communications — From the Soviet Era to Moscow’s “Red Web”

PHOTO: Russian President Vladimir Putin at a Moscow forum on Internet entrepreneurship, June 2015 (Reuters)

Andrei Soldatov, the Moscow-based co-author of a new book on the Kremlin’s battle to control communications, and Natalia Rulyova of the University of Birmingham discuss Russia’s campaigns from the Soviet era to the 21st-century “Red Web”.

The host is Laurie Taylor of the BBC’s Thinking Aloud program.

Listen to discussion from 13:56

[Russia] saw the “Arab Spring” and they thought, “Well, the West just found another major tool to overthrow regimes in countries like Russia….Then [there are] the Moscow protests in 2012 and they thought, “Now we are quite certain that Western technologies will destroy political regimes.”…

In 2014, Putin made it very clear when he said, “The Internet is a CIA project.”