The scientist who set up the first Soviet Internet connection, engineer Alexei Soldatov (Moscow, 72 years old), is not enjoying his final years surrounded by his family at home, but in a prison where he has even slept on the floor surrounded by dozens of prisoners. His situation is so serious that a member of President Putin’s Human Rights Council, Eva Merkachiova, has even described the events as like a martyrdom“What has happened to this elderly, sick professor can be considered torture. His wife is worried that he could die at any moment,” the activist said. His son, independent journalist Andrei Soldatov, is perplexed on the other end of the phone from exile: “We do not understand why such cruelty.”
“He is terminally ill, has undergone two cancer operations and suffers from chronic heart failure and other serious ailments,” Merkacheva stressed, denouncing that Soldatov slept “on the floor, without a mattress, in a cell for 40 people.” “Some compassionate prisoners gave up their sweaters and towels to make him a kind of mattress,” she added.
Following Merkacheva’s outcry, the father of the Russian Internet (popularly known as Runet) was sent to the Matrosskaya Tishiná prison hospital. “This is, well, a temporary respite,” his son told this newspaper.
“Now he only shares a room with one person, before there were dozens and they all smoked,” adds Andrei Soldatov, whose father also suffers from a serious lung disease and requires the help of inhalers.
However, he is concerned about the care Alexei is receiving. “He gets one injection a day, but it is not clear what kind of medicine it is. They give him pills, but we don’t know which ones either. As you know, in this prison system the doctors are not very good and the staff do not explain what they do,” laments his son.
Alexei Soldatov set up Russia’s first Internet service provider in 1990. A nuclear engineer by training, his team at the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy linked their institution with other centres in the country and sent the first Soviet e-mail abroad, to the University of Helsinki, on 28th of that year.
Although he was part of the government during Putinism as deputy minister of telecommunications (2008-2010) under President Dmitry Medvedev, he did not go very far due to his opposition to creating a vertical Russian Internet capable of separating itself from the global one on the orders of the Kremlin. Finally, in 2019, he was accused of alleged appropriation of Internet domains by the head of the presidential department for the Internet, Andrei Lipov. The accuser would later be promoted to head of the Internet censorship agency, Roskomnadzor.
“I think my father’s case is related to the policy of the Russian authorities to nationalize the Internet infrastructure in Russia. I think it has nothing to do with me,” says Andrei Soldatov, a well-known Russian investigative journalist who lives in exile because he is on the Kremlin’s wanted list.
“I have not contacted Merkacheva or anyone else because, as a wanted criminal, I do not want to make the situation worse,” says Soldatov, an investigator in the Kremlin surveillance network and founder of the Agentura platform. Because of their situation, father and son cannot even speak on the phone, although Alexei Soldatov can at least count on the help of his wife.
The engineer founded Russia’s first Internet provider, RosNIIROS (Russian Research Institute for the Development of Public Networks), in 1992. Although many of its clients were educational and scientific institutions, the company was private. Soldatov named his domains .SU.
Over the years, as in other spheres of Russian reality, the Kremlin has not allowed anything to escape its control. In 2019, when it mandated by law that the Russian Internet network should be state-owned, Putinism declared the .RU and .RF (Russian Federation in Russian) endings “national domain zones.”
Soldatov’s company managed almost half a million .SU addresses that year. It was then that the scientist and his partner Alexei Shkitti notified their users that the company would cease to operate as a local registrar (LIR) and would be grouped into a larger regional company, Reliable Communications, based in the Czech Republic.
The Kremlin made a move and brought Soldatov to trial. A year later, in 2020, and already under house arrest, the scientist transferred the .SU domains to the state. In exchange, the court downgraded the charge from “fraud” to “abuse of authority in an organization” and set him free with the promise not to leave, although the scientist always lived with the threat of prison hanging over his head.
“It was a big surprise for all of us, for the whole family, that the court decided to send him to prison all of a sudden, it was a big surprise,” his son said by phone. “We couldn’t understand the cruelty of the sentence,” he added.
Alexei Soldatov’s family is waiting for the hearing of the appeal in his case, which will take place in the coming months. “We know that in Russia there are no acquittals, but maybe at least they will change the prison to a milder form,” his son hopes.
The scientist also has the support of members of Putin’s human rights committee. “For all that this scientist did at the Kurchatov Institute (he worked there for 35 years!) for the Internet in Russia (which we all use, including researchers, judges and employees of the penitentiary system), would it be possible to find at least a drop of mercy and not imprison a dying person?” Merkacheva wrote on her personal Telegram account, adding: “Forgive them, Lord, for they know not what they do.”
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