The Red Web: The Kremlin's War on the Internet

Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan are Russia's foremost investigative journalists on the security services and the internet, and The Red Web is the definitive account of how the Kremlin built its infrastructure of digital control. Drawing on years of investigation and unique access to sources inside Russia's security apparatus, they trace the FSB's systematic construction of a surveillance state online — from the SORM technical surveillance system built into every Russian ISP, to the blocking and filtering infrastructure, to the troll factories and bot networks deployed to shape domestic and foreign information environments.

The book's significance for practitioners goes beyond Russia-watching. It documents, step by step, how an authoritarian state converts control of information infrastructure into an instrument of political power — a model that has since been studied and partially adopted by states from China to Iran to Turkey. Understanding how the Kremlin built its digital control architecture is essential for understanding both the capabilities it projects externally and the template it has provided for authoritarian information control globally. Soldatov and Borogan write with the authority of people who have spent decades investigating these systems at personal risk — which makes this one of the most credible accounts available.