Who holds up the Internet holds up the world…Detail from the top of the old Singer building in the Art Noveau style designed by Russian architect Pavel Suzov with the glass globe statue by Estonian Amandus Adamson, known as Dom Knigi (House of Books) in the Soviet era and still today. Vkontakte has offices in the building. Photo by archer10 (Dennis).

As I reported before, Pavel Durov went into radio silence on Twitter and other social media in April about the time it appeared that Putin's oligarch thugs were muscling him to sell shares in his lucrative and popular Internet business. Oh, and there was that trumped-up car incident that could have sent him to prison for three years but was finally whittled down to a misdemeanor.

Evgeny Morozov and other under-the-radar Kremlin apologists always tell us that Russia doesn't censor the Internet. No, perhaps it doesn't crudely shut down Facebook completely, like Tajikistan might do, or block Youtube entirely, like Turkmenistan does.  Perhaps it doesn't directly and abruptly shut down Internet sites, although of course it does, it's just you can't get people to pay attention (i.e. the story of publicpost.ru). Or perhaps it doesn't shut down independent Internet service providers, such as they are.

But of course, the strategically-timed service outages at Live Journal (which then become an excuse people invoke even when it hasn't happened, like Morozov's funny claim about Navalny's blog which in fact wasn't down) and lots of other things not always visible are all about Internet control as I have explained in looking at how the Russian Internet professionals see their own business and role (not good).

So what happened to Durov isn't entirely clear, but Business Insider, which dutifully reprinted Julia Ioffe's coverage of Durov's offer to the infamous Edward Snowden of a job in his social network, should read Business News more often and understand the context.

Joshua Yaffe at Business News actually footed it to the old Singer building in St. Petersburg and poked around to see what's up. Two of Durov's original partners have sold their shares, 48% of the company, to oligarchs close to Putin. Maybe having Putin only own 48% of you isn't so terrible, but Durov was somebody who could shut down the Belarusian opposition pages on his service and promote sectarian political theories even before that – you don't start a big company in Russia without already accommodating to the powers-that-be at some level. Yaffe quotes Lobushkin, the only guy at Vkontakte who will talk to anybody:

The question is whether the government will now attempt to exert control
over VKontakte and other prominent social-media outlets. For much of
the spring and summer, Durov’s elusiveness only fueled the suspicions.
Standing inside a glass cupola on the top floor of the Singer House,
Lobushkin, the company’s spokesman, tried to sound unconcerned. For
either the state or VKontakte’s new shareholders to compromise the site,
he said, it was “not enough to control stock in the company or even
access to its profits.” For that, “You’d need to control Pavel. And to
control Pavel is very difficult.”

As for Durov himself, he broke his Twitter fast only briefly, on July 21st, to let us know that Kevin Spacey was telling his European and Russian fans where to find him on Vkontatke (well, how could you not!). Nothing else. (Getting American celebrities on to VK appears to be a targeted campaign; Tom Cruise writes on his new VK site that he received gifts.)

Oh, except offering to give Snowden a job — which he didn't do on Twitter but on his personal Vkontakte page on August 1.

Today, Edward Snowden — a man who has exposed the crimes of the American intelligence agencies against citizens of the whole world — received temporary asylum in Russia. At such moments you feel pride for your country and pity for the USA's direction — a country which has betrayed the principles on which it was once built.

We invited Edward to St. Petersburg and we will be glad if he decides to add on to the star team of programmers. In the final analysis, there is no more popular European Internet company than VK. I think Edward will find it interesting to be involved in protection of the personal data of our users.

What a douche.

So sure, it could be the usual Durov show-boating stuff, but funny that he emerges with that after his company has basically been taken over by the Kremlin. Oh, not really, because, um, controlling Pavel is so difficult and because,  you know, "sovereign Internet."

Vkontakte is a Facebook knock-off that yes, does load better and of course is in Russian. To join VI, you have to turn over your cell-phone number or you can't really use the service to see all the content and other people's profiles that may not be open to search. Of course Facebook tries to get your cell phone, too, but you don't *have* to turn it over to see your friends even with closed profiles. Once VK has your cell phone number, gosh, I don't know what else they do with it. *Waves*.

Facebook exists in Russian now, too, but Vkontakte was there first AND it has loads of pirated movies, which was its main attraction. That makes it also a sitting duck for Putin's new-found concern about piracy and recent anti-piracy crackdowns — which I view as utterly fake, as all that has happened is that Putin as found a new way to rent-seek and extract bribes and fines from businesses with yet another thing (it could have been violation of the fire code). To be sure, VK busied itself deleting a lot of the movies after the law went down.

Durov is famous not only for throwing fistfuls of cash out of the window (and blocking people like me on Facebook when I inquired about his blocking of the Belarusians and his political quackery) but for this:

When Alisher Usmanov, an Uzbek-born Russian mogul who owns 40 percent of
VKontakte, tried to buy out Durov and his partners, Durov posted on
Twitter what he called his “official answer”: a photo of him holding up
his middle finger to the camera. Usmanov later ceded his voting rights
to Durov.

This sounds like some sort of big power move. For example, as a lowly blogger, I don't take on Alisher Usmanov although I write about Central Asia. It is above my pay grade. I was blocked by Facebook's community manager when I asked whether his ownership of shares in Facebook could compromise the privacy of Russian opposition members increasingly using the service.  

But Durov giving him the finger isn't some evidence of some super power status. It's just that Putin finds it useful to keep Usmanov off balance. Pavel Durov could hardly give the finger to Alisher Usmanov without somebody else having his back, and that someone would have to be Putin (so I reason mathematically).

Did the demise of the Kremlin's gray cardinal, Vladislav Surkov, who had taken an interest in the Internet and "innovation" as part of "Medvedev's reforms" (note scare quotes) also sink Durov's star? Well, I recall Durov always kept his distance and even mocked Surkovskaya propaganda — and Yaffe notes that distance-keeping. When Durov posted his famous dog caricature when asked to close down Russian opposition groups; VK pages, and refused, and resisted goons coming to his door, and swore to the people that he would never let the Kremlin take their Internet, I was sanguine. It would be a matter of time. It would not be accomplished by goons coming to the door. I remembered what happened to the Belarusian opposition leader Andrei Sannikov's group on Vkontakte the minute Sannikov was put in jail — poof.

Durov is a figure for the opposition who is not too much directly opposition like Navalny:

Moreover, he enjoys a high level of trust, perhaps contemporary Russia’s
rarest currency. “The machine of VKontakte appeared right before our
eyes,” Saprykin says. “There’s a whole generation who could say they
grew up together with VKontakte. And behind that is one person, one
brain, who was able to create all of this.”

Well, this one person, one brain wants to abolish all laws and move to a Bit Coin kind of currency. You know who else did that? Lenin.

Yaffe explains the intricacies of how the takeover occurred through United Capital Partners who bought out Durov's two partners, and how they are related to Igor Sechin, Putin's top silovik or power minister who spends as much time dealing with China as he does controlling oil, gas and Internet flows.

Yaffe concludes his interesting report as follows:

On June 23, Durov momentarily resurfaced to post on VKontakte his
reaction to the Duma’s anti-piracy law. He praised the successes of
technology companies in Russia, writing that this “miracle” was based on
two factors: “a talented, educated population and the lack of excessive
regulation in the Internet sphere.” Now, he wrote, “One of those
factors is ceasing to exist.” He posed a question: Could a talented
workforce, in spite of efforts at state control, enable Russia’s
Internet to continue to thrive? “If the answer turns out to be
positive,” Durov wrote, “then truly our strength is limitless.

It's true that Russia has a lot of talented programmers — that's one thing the Soviet state produced. The first time I ever saw hypertext and LANs was in Russia, not America. But many of these talented programmers have fled to Silicon Valley where they can earn a better living and have a better lifestyle (it's not about being politically free — these are not the first and second waves of Russians, who fled Bolshevism and Stalin's purges and World War II, or third-wave Russians, many of them persecuted Jewish and other minority intellectuals, but the fourth wave, which is the nationalist noveau riches and people who take their Orthodoxy military-industrial strength).

Skolkovo was an effort to stop that brain-drain and even reverse it, but it failed and now its leaders are under indictment; experimental things in Russia often end in tears.

While I don't think Snowden will marry Anna Chapman while he is still pining for his pole-dancing girlfriend, I won't be a bit surprised if Snowden moves to St. Petersburg where he is less accessible to the Western press and can feign liberal treatment by the Kremlin working for Durov. Durov's offer isn't made under duress in the cellars of the Lubyanka — it's the sort of hipster thing that he would do anyway to be provocative to appear independent of the Unipolar World of America, a good thing to do when you are the off-brand competing with the name brands — and when you have to try to keep your business afloat in Russia.

But what a great way to hide an Internet takeover, eh? Disguise it as a pioneer in the "sovereign Internet" of Russia resisting the Big Brother of the American NSA that violates everybody's privacy…