These have been good years for Putin’s security overlords. The war against Ukraine has licensed growing domestic repression and paranoia, and that has empowered the secret police in ways that were hard to imagine even a decade ago.
This spring, rumors began to circulate that the FSB’s gaze had now fixed on the Ministry of Digital Development and that some of its responsibilities could be transferred. This came amid reports that the FSB’s Second Service, responsible for repressing political dissent, was taking related steps to establish control over the internet industry.
In seeming confirmation of these reports, key figures in Russia’s cybersecurity industry, including Natalya Kaspersky, a prominent IT entrepreneur and former wife of the cybersecurity entrepreneur Eugene Kaspersky, discovered that the Second Service had compiled reports on them. This week, Russian news agencies reported that the ministry would soon get a new deputy head: a serving FSB officer.
This is all the more startling because it was once the most liberal department in the government, and one of the most efficient. But these days the Kremlin’s top priority appears to be granting more powers to the security services.
In the 1990s, as the country embraced capitalism, Russia’s nascent businesses badly needed to get connected — both across the country and with the outside world.
But Soviet telecommunications were in such a horrible state that even making an ordinary phone call from a town in central Russia to Moscow was a formidable challenge. The Ministry took a drastic and risky step: it stopped investing in research and development of Soviet telecommunications technologies altogether — against the wishes of the industry and the security services — and instead began buying Western telecommunications exchanges and equipment on a massive scale, while laying fiber-optic cables across the country.
Within five years the country had acquired modern telecommunications, and the Russian internet industry was thriving. In the 2000s, it would produce something few Western countries could match: online services that competed successfully with global giants such as Google and Facebook.
From then on, the IT industry was the fastest-growing sector of the economy. When the Kremlin adopted a more paranoid view of the internet in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, the Moscow protests and the annexation of Crimea in 2014, the Ministry duly complied, introducing internet censorship and starting an import-substitution program for Western technologies, although it acted without much enthusiasm.
A few former officers of the security services took key positions in the ministry, but mostly to oversee cyber security and surveillance programs. The IT industry survived, not least because the ministry kept talking to businesses via a network of government and non-government organizations it had helped to build in the previous years.
When Putin’s full-scale invasion failed to produce a swift victory, the Kremlin, now on a full war footing and gripped by paranoia, turned to the FSB to enforce societal discipline. The ministry was one of the targets.
In 2023, Deputy Minister Maxim Parshin was arrested on bribery charges. In 2025, he was sentenced to nine years in prison — a judgment that sent shockwaves through the ministry. The same year, Sergei Grebennikov, head of the Russian Association of Electronic Communications — a key part of the network through which the ministry engaged with the industry and helped draft legislation — was arrested on drug charges. When he was sentenced to seven years in prison, the FSB brought a separate treason case against him, and now he is facing the possibility of a life sentence.
And yet, the latest developments are a signal of something more serious. The goal no longer appears to be simply to discipline the ministry through repression.
There is a massive, brutalist rectangular building on Tverskaya, difficult to miss because of a giant convex globe framed by a hammer and sickle on its corner façade. It is the Central Telegraph, a telephone and telegraph exchange built in the late 1920s as the main communications facility of the Soviet Union. It also housed the Soviet Narkomat of Communications, later the Ministry of Communications.
There is a large office in this building whose doors remained closed from the late 1930s until 1990, as if the ministry’s personnel had been avoiding it out of superstition. The office once belonged to Genrikh Yagoda, Stalin’s notorious secret police chief and a skilled poisoner who was rumored to have used his skills to murder the writer Maxim Gorky. Towards the end of his career, Yagoda was appointed head of the Narkomat of Communications, a waystation on his ultimate journey to arrest, imprisonment and execution.
Gennady Kudryavtsev, the Soviet Minister of Communications, told these authors that when he was appointed in 1990, he was the first minister to be given Yagoda’s office. He discovered that everything had remained intact from Yagoda’s time — the furniture, the table, the safe. He even discovered the hidden lift built to take its occupant into Moscow’s secret parallel metro system, known as Metro-2, constructed for communist leaders and connecting the Kremlin with the suburbs.
Under Stalin, the connection between communications and the dark world of the security services and the military was always extremely close. After Yagoda, the post was held for years by a succession of generals from the security services and the army.
Are we now seeing a return to those years?
The Minister of Digital Development, tech-savvy and sophisticated Maksut Shadayev, has been trying for years to fend off the FSB’s advances and has carefully kept his distance from the internet censorship agency, which is officially part of the ministry but in fact answers to the Presidential Administration.
In 2026, his approach no longer appears to have much chance of succeeding as a long-term strategy. It’s a sad fate for a ministry that once aimed to shape all things digital and advance critical technologies heavily interwoven with future national prosperity. Once again, it seems the Kremlin is more interested in the road leading to the past rather than the future.
Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan are Non-resident Senior Fellows with the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). They are Russian investigative journalists and co-founders of Agentura.ru, a watchdog of Russian secret service activities. Their book , Our Dear Friends in Moscow, The Inside Story of a Broken Generation, was published in 2025.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
