Andrei Alekseyevich Soldatov is a Russian investigative journalist and Russian security services expert.
What new knowledge did you gain whilst writing the book?
Journalists tend to be pessimistic, and we are no exception.
The building on the compound was first erected in 1884 for a Russian Orthodox Church seminary.
The seminary was turned into a prison for adolescents.
Then, in the 1940s, it was transformed again.
The building stood on the outskirts of a small village, Marfino, which had just one cobblestone road.
37 from city center stopped there twice a day.
In 1947 the village was suddenly surrounded by newly erected walls and transformed into a Soviet secret research facility.
It was named Object Eight and known informally as the sharashka of Marfino.
They could not leave, but their conditions were better than the rugged prison camps of the Soviet gulag.
Abram Trakhtman was the chief of the acoustic laboratory.
He wore a green uniform with gold shoulder straps and a cap with a blue crown.
The blue had been embraced by Russian secret services since the days of the tsars.
An engineer by training, Trakhtman had enjoyed a very successful career up until January 1950.
He was born to a Jewish family in a small Ukrainian town in the Pale of Settlement.
He was given his own laboratory.
He always wore the gold insignia of his Stalin Prize on his uniform.
Yet now Trakhtman found himself in a dangerous situationjust when he thought he was on the verge of advancement.
Only two months before, Trakhtmans laboratory had achieved a major success.
They helped catch a government official who was providing sensitive secrets to the Americans.
(Solzhenitsyn was later sent off to a labor camp.)
The suspected caller was arrested.
In 1950 the anti-Semitic campaign reached the ranks of state security.
It was clear to him that his plans were being deliberately and repeatedly delayed.
Days passed without any decisions being made.
Trakhtman was rarely seen in his laboratory, the half-moon chamber.
His subordinates concluded that he was afraid to address their questions about the fate of the new project.
Finally Trakhtman was told he would not get any convicted engineers for his new sharashka.
Despairing, Trakhtman tried to raise the stakes.
That was a mistake.
The general who had given him permission for the new institute proceeded to cancel it.
Trakhtman was stripped of his rank of major and expelled from Marfino.
In late January he went back to the compound one last time.
For Trakhtman, research on speech recognition was over.
The most promising project of his life was ruined.
But the general did not forget about Trakhtmans subordinates at Marfinos acoustic laboratory.
Kuchino, about twelve miles east of Moscow, was set on an old prerevolutionary industrialists estate.
Long before the term was fashionable, they determined that they wanted to be the dictators of data.
He was repeatedly turned down.
The institute occupied a few miserable barracks in the rear of a large factory in the west of Moscow.
It was an inauspicious beginning: he could hardly carry out scientific research in the barren little room.
Fridkin was intrigued by the possibility that he could build a Soviet copying machine.
In his small office he experimented.
He tried to make a copy of a page, then of a photograph.
When the director of the institute saw this he exclaimed, You do not understand what you invented!
When they managed to do this, the first copying machine in the Soviet Union was born.
It was named the Electrophotography Copying Machine No.
Even though the machine was primitive, nobody doubted the significance of the invention.
The institute director called the ministryin the Soviet centrally planned economy, a government ministry oversaw every such institute.
At twenty-four years old, Fridkin was appointed deputy chief.
He was featured in a television show praising the Soviet achievements in science.
He was also paid a bonus for his accomplishment.
Although Fridkin felt much better, he still wanted to be a physicist.
At last, in 1955 he was given a job at the Institute of Crystallography.
When he moved there, his copying machine followed him.
Fridkin became a very popular person in the institute.
Then, one day in 1957, a nice young woman from the KGB section walked into his room.
Fridkin had known her.
But she brought bad news.
I have to take away your gadget and destroy it, she said.
Fridkin asked whether she knew that this was the first copying machine in the Soviet Union.
I know, but people who come over to you could copy some prohibited materials, she replied.
The party maintained a stranglehold on power and a chokehold on information.
In a few years the factory in Chisinau ceased production.
Fridkin knew that the quality of the machines produced by the Chisinau factory was not very high.
But it was hardly a reason to stop making them.
In many factories and institutes a special staffer operated the photocopier under the watchful gaze of the KGB.
It happened in Fridkins institute too.
Stalin died in March 1953, and the brutal, totalitarian system of mass repression slowly began to relax.
The mood in Soviet society started to change.
Many gulag prisoners were released and returned home by 1955.
The secret speech lasted four hours.
In a few years Khrushchev loosened state controls in a period that became known as the Thaw.
But the Thaw did not last.
In 1964 Khrushchev was ousted and replaced by Leonid Brezhnev, who effectively ended reforms.
In the autumn of 1965 arrests of intellectuals and writers began in Moscow and Ukraine, and censorship tightened.
The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 effectively marked the end of the Thaw.
But one feature of the period did not disappear.
The circulation of uncensored information became an essential part of the dissident movement, if not its main goal.
Soviet dissidents didnt have Fridkins machine nor a Western-made Xerox.
In the Soviet Union the state had always held the upper hand when it came to distributing information.
All other sources, like independent media or the church, were outlawed.
The Bolsheviks wanted newspapers to organize and mobilize the masses, not to inform them.
There was no way to turn the loudspeakers off.
For many decades Soviet citizens had no choice in what they could listen to or read.
They lived all their lives to the echo of the words and formulas dictated by the state.
The Soviet regime rigidly controlled public space.
Radios were jammed, and dozens of jamming transmitters were positioned along the borders.
It was a fast-growing industry.
In 1949 350 short-wave transmitters tried to jam the Western radio broadcasts.
All of them were erected to jam what amounted to no more than 70 Western transmitters.
Soviet-produced radio sets had some frequencies disabled.
To be found in possession of a quartz with the wrong frequencies was a potentially criminal offense.
Soviet-made radios were required to be registered with the government, a rule that was canceled only in 1962.
The ordinary and casual exchange of news with foreigners was also restricted.
Not surprisingly, the Communist Party wanted to force Soviet citizens to censor themselves.
And the intimidation was effective.
The somebody else was the state and its vast networks of informers.
The peculiar structure of Soviet society helped the authorities in this.
The military-industrial complex was an enormous archipelago of institutes, factories, and government ministries.
By some accounts, it made up 30 to 40 percent of the Soviet economy.
These laboratories and offices were known only by a post office box number, such as NII-56.
Any mail would be addressed to that box number, not to the real name of the facility.
Often the state designated an entire city closed.
There a certain kind of vague doublespeak took hold and became part of everyday conversations.
In this way the Soviet population was co-opted into becoming a part of the system.
In such a system the government did little to encourage telephone use.
Kopelev, who left the Kuchino sharashka in December 1954, became a passionate Soviet dissident in the 1970s.
Dozens of phone calls were made from there every day.
But when the KGB found out, they cut off his home phone line.
Every night Kopelev walked down the stairs to the first floor of his apartment building.
Inside the room there was a phone, but the room was locked.
He said that Jewish refuseniks were making international phone calls.
But Andropov could not keep it all imprisoned.
The samizdat book was passed to Alexander Paritsky, who was then thirty-seven years old.
He lived with his wife, Polya, and two daughters in a small apartment.
Kharkiv was mostly known for a huge tank factory.
Paritskys father and brother were both imprisoned under Stalin, but he was by no means a dissident.
He was constantly reminded, however, that he was a Jew.
He had a modestly successful career as an engineer at a local research institute.
Paritskys sister, Dora, brought the dog-eared samizdat manuscript to him.
By the next morning Polya and I became Zionists.
We decided to emigrate to Israel, Paritsky recalled.
The next day he announced their decision to an astonished Dora.
Soon he left his job and became an elevator repairman.
In July 1976 he applied for an exit visa for himself and his family.
Paritsky began getting letters from Jews in Israel and soon got his first phone call from abroad.
My wife and I arranged to see him, to find out the reasons.
On August 27, 1981, Paritsky was arrested near his apartment in Kharkiv.
The Chronicle of Current Events reported his case.
The KGB added to his indictment that Paritsky was using international telephone lines for spreading anti-Soviet information.
At the court, the prosecution presented a woman, an operator at the international telephone communications hub.
She testified that during her duty her client complained about the poor quality of the line.
He was sentenced to three years in jail and sent to the labor camps.
Only in April of 1988 were Paritsky and his family allowed to leave the Soviet Union.
In 1979 the number of international lines was significantly increased.
When, on July 19, 1980, the Games opened in Moscow, Gennady Kudryavtsev felt especially proud.
Kudryavtsev had carried out a project to expand the international phone lines.
He had delivered them on time.
The KGB had resisted the expansion.
The KGB was still reluctant to allow more phone lines to hit up the outside world.
Then Kudryavtsev suggested adding another way for the KGB to control conversations.
The method of intercepting all calls was introduced, and the KGB was finally satisfied.
No matter how many more lines were opened, they could listen to any call.
The Games were boycotted by sixty-five countries in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Still, the regime did not want to let people have the option for long.
He knew that the summons to the Central Committee had to do with the international lines.
I heard already that the KGB people went around complaining about international phone lines, he said.
The lines had been his triumph, but now he was being asked to take them down.
For channels to some countries, the cut was even more drastic.
In a month Kudryavtsev destroyed his own creation.
The changes made automatic connection almost impossible, and customers, including foreign embassies, noticed it.
Finally Kudryavtsev found a way to take control of a telephone station on Leninsky Prospect.
He redirected the lines of those who were allowed to use automatic international connection to this single station.
In a year the chosen organizations, approved by the authorities, found that automatic international connection was restored.
For the rest of the country it was notand remained that way for many years.
It was against his engineers nature, and it tortured him for years.
Kudryavtsev took that rather seriously.
But I checkedthe lift shaft was still there.
Gorbachev said, But what should be done specifically for Ivanovo?
As he later recounted, his intention was to “infiltrate the Soviet Union with personal computers.”
My friends told me that I had to talk to Yevgeny Velikhov.
Velikhov had recently been elected a vice president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, the youngest ever.
Yes, that is correct.
So, you will not address the meeting of the presidium.
Not knowing how to reply, Fredkin simply said, Thank you.
Still, it was not easy.
Fredkin made every effort to break the ice.
He spoke of the large technology gap between the Soviet Union and the United States.
But the suspicious audience first asked him why he cared about Soviet technological problems.
Fredkin impressed the audience.
The meeting with Andropov lasted an hour.
It was the same Andropov whose subordinates, a year before, had Kudryavtsev cut international phone lines.
At that time nobody and least of all Andropovthought personal computers should be made available to ordinary Soviet citizens.
Back home Fredkin worked on lifting the US export controls on sending personal computers to the Soviet Union.
I realized that nothing would happen until someone broke the ice.
Velikhov immediately produced the purchase order.
The dam was broken, Fredkin recalled.
For almost the whole of its history the Soviet Union had been a prison of information.
Then the information finally broke free.
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