Review: The Red Web by Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan
BAKU - In the 1950s, the KGB destroyed a state of the art invention for fear of the chaos it could have on the Soviet Union. The young engineer who had designed it, Vladimir Fridkin, had not created a deadly virus or a nuclear bomb. What the KGB feared was a photocopier that allowed one to make copies of articles from foreign journals and enabled the free flow of information. This anecdote sounds insane today. Yet, for Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan, the authors of The Red Web: The Struggle Between Russia's Digital Dictators and the New Online Revolutionaries, the fate of Fridkin’s photocopier is an indication of the mentality that drives the Kremlin’s crackdown on the internet.
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