[At the St. Petersburg Economic Forum, President Putin discussed Internet freedom with global business leaders as the Russian parliament initially approved a draft anti-piracy law despite an outcry from Russian Internet companies and free speech activists, Kommersant reports. Meanwhile, the FSB investigated an online hoax involving Russian Railways chief Vladimir Yakunin the Federal Security Agency (FSB) and determined that the fake email claiming Yakunin’s resignation was sent from a server based in Moscow. Earlier this month, bloggers published pictures of Yakunin’s luxurious dacha outside of Moscow, supposedly taken by one of his builders. — Ed.]
On 20 June, Russian President Vladimir Putin organized a discussion with the international business community at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum about whether or not freedom should be restricted on the Internet. Andrei Kolesnikov, special correspondent for Kommersant, talked with Vladimir Yakunin, president of Russian Railways, who has turned out to be the official who most suffered from the Internet on the eve of the conference. In fact, Mr. Yakunin admitted that previously, when he had worked in intelligence, he had spent every day for 22 years living in the kind of situation as he experienced the previous day.
In the hall where the awards ceremony was to take place in a few hours for the Global Energy Prize, Vladimir Fortov, president of the Russian Academy of Science, rehearsed the ceremony together with the Japanese scientist Akira Yoshino, who in 1981 invented the lithium-ion battery which one could say today powers the whole world.
Mr. Yoshino, like Mr. Fortov, were getting up from their chairs at the same time, then sitting down, moving their lips, and portraying the nervous speech of a prize-winner, and it seemed they were really nervous as if the ceremony was already taking place. I got Yoshino’s autograph; he was happy to sign a battery that I took out of my cell phone using a marker pen. He said that he was signing a battery for the first time. It seemed even strange.
Then the director asked Vladimir Fortov if he needed another rehearsal.
“No,” he replied hesitantly.
“I think so, too, said the director.
Everyone left the half-darkened hall and only the president of the Russian Academy of Science remained who it seemed had nowhere to hurry to at the forum. Here, in this half-dark hall, he finally had been left alone and felt himself to be a completely free man, it seemed. That’s something not everyone can manage, especially at the St. Petersburg Economic Forum. And for the president of the Russian Academy of Science, this was an entire strange sensation.
On the floor above, the president of Russia, minimally free in his own actions, was meeting with the Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, who was laughing heartily at the jokes of the Russian president, and not forgetting to say how happy he was to have an opportunity to talk again about human rights.
Mr. Rutte did not appear to be free in the topics he wanted to discuss with the Russian president. Meanwhile, Vladimir Yakunin, president of Russian Railways, walked by, for some reason covering his telephone with a notebook. He was supposed to be signing an agreement with a Kazakh colleague on the creation of the Unified Transport Logistics Company. Vladimir Yakunin in turn did not seem to be a man ready to speak freely with journalists.
But before this agreement, where the Russian president was supposed to be present for the signing, Putin met with Zhang Gaoli, the first deputy premier of the State Council of the People’s Republic of China.
Vladimir Putin introduced to his Chinese colleague the members of the Russian delegation at the talks, Mr. Gaoli remained polite and distant. But when the turn came to Igor Sechin, president of Rosneft, Zhang Gaoli suddenly beamed:
“Oh, this is our very good friend!!”
Oh, how well I know these shining eyes! This is exactly the way the eyes of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez shone when he would catch sight of Mr. Sechin from somewhere far away. And the eyes of Stephen Greenlee, the vice president of the American ExxonMobil, would demonstrate the same thing. And how many more like them!
Were the efforts of Igor Sechin worth the shining of these eyes? I am sure that they were not. He was absolutely calm and free. Evidently this is what real male friendship is all about. From what else could the eyes shine so! And how such friendship gets started, at whose will, is not ours to fathom. Someone will say: these eyes all seem to shine too much the same way. Is there some sort of technique here or something? But I don’t think so.
Then Zhang Gaoli beamed.
“Of course,” Mr. Putin commented. “He looks like a Chinese man.”
The Chinese leader looked at Igor Sechin.
Sechin smiled and put his fingers to his eyes, then pulled the skin away at his temples to turn his eyes into slits.
Thus Igor Sechin illustrated the president’s thought.
But Vladimir Putin sensed that it seemed he had said too much and added:
“I think he spends more time in China than in Russia.”
Igor Sechin nodded; oh, no, of course not – on the other hand, yes, quite a bit…
Mr. Putin recalled that Rosneft had signed an agreement with a Chinese government oil company to deliver hundreds of millions of tons of oil for $60 billion
Mr. Gaoli, who didn’t tear his soulful gaze from Igor Sechin, was looking at about as much now.
The signing of the railroad agreement was next on the agenda. The main signatory, Vladimir Yakunin, had been here already for an hour. As before, he was not hurrying to talk to journalists, to put it mildly. But in the hallway on the second floor, he made an exception for Kommersant.
It is impossible to say that Vladimir Yakunin was entirely calm.
“How did you get through yesterday?” I asked him.
“What of it?” Yakunin asked me back. “For 22 years (that is, evidently when he worked in intelligence—AK), I lived in such an atmosphere every day! Who would think that that such a story would lay me low?! They can’t wait!”
“You don’t think that it could be some sort of misunderstanding?” I wondered. “ A mistake? A draft that somehow got mailed out by accident?”
“But it’s a forged document!” exclaimed Yakunin. “You understand – it’s fake! Last night God knows from where (evidently from Irkutsk or from a plane—AK), Dmitry Anatolyevich Medvedev called me! They themselves were all in shock there! We also figured there was such a possibility of course – carelessness, a draft, a mistake…It just didn’t add up! The document was properly formatted..Somebody took the trouble.
“You aren’t bothered by the fact that the IP address from which the document was sent was registered in Irkutsk and the delegation headed by Dmitry Medvedev was also in Irkutsk at that time? Maybe it’s a mistake nonetheless?”
“But don’t you think that somebody wanted to smear Irkutsk especially?” Yakunin said, looking at me sharply. “They knew Medvedev was going there! They were prepared in advance, that’s obvious!”
His pain, of course, did not subside.
“Now it’s at least clear where it’s coming from!” Yakunin added. All of this began with Akulinino, with that dacha! Do you think it’s easy to keep silent through all this nonsense! And what, do you think I’m going to just answer the one person who wrote all that? But how do you think we were taught? It’s better to sit for four days in an ambush in order to beat everything! That’s why yesterday I replied to everyone with a brief ‘Thank you!’ And yesterday it became clear to everyone where it was from!” he said.
At the end of the conversation, Yakunin asked: what is the Internet, a territory of freedom or the threat of insecurity?
“It seems that it is freedom?” he answered himself. “But in reality? In reality it can be as it happened in my case!”
The only thing that is not subject to any doubt in this story is that you don’t envy his case.
Interestingly, the discussion an hour later about approximately the same thing turned out to be the most interesting at the St. Petersburg meeting between Putin and the world business figures from the G20.
It began with Putin himself asking questions of the major business people of the world. He wondered whether there was anyone in the room who believed that no regulation on the part of the government was necessary at all, and asked those who believed that it was needed to raise their hand.
There wasn’t a single person who didn’t raise their hand. It turned out that everyone was for regulating the economy and business, although flexibly. The business people hardly thought that in reality, but having displayed weakness in one instance, they began to pay for it further.
“So when does flexibility end and the diktat of the government begin?” said Mr. Putin, making business the victim of his own indecision.
The president of Russia apparently meant that the flexibility of regulation does not have to be called a diktat for a very long time.
The topic of freedom continued to be developed, and in fact in the direction that Mr. Putin wanted it to. One of the Russian businessmen who was no hurry to give his name announced that off-shore companies were a natural extension of the freedom of business and had a right to exist and played a positive role in life. Putin raised his head from papers he was about to delve into.
“We need only sunlight, that is, transparency, the ray of disinfectant in the event of evasion of taxes!” the businessman concluded.
“All the leaders of the states with whom I met in recent days,” said Mr. Putin “are for de-off-shorization, although they are also in agreement with you that sunlight is medicine for the economy. But all of them are for exposing the end beneficiary. The world is headed in that direction. And there will be no other way!”
Vladimir Putin has now ceased finally to speak in the name of Russia, and has now spoken on behalf of the whole world.
That was going to happen sometime.
In fact, he told one Western businessman, playing dumb, that “as you know, all matters in our country are decided by consensus.”
After that, the president of Russia unexpectedly had a fundamental conversation about the freedom to disseminate information on the Internet with Viktor Vekselberg, co-chairman of one of the groups who is preparing the “business G20” in St. Petersburg in September of this year.
In fact it was Vladimir Putin who asked the room the question on this topic.
“Likely it would be interesting for you to hear foreign colleagues on this issue?” Viktor Vekselberg mildly countered, looking at the chair of the meeting, Aleksandr Shokhin, who had proposed to Vekselberg that he speak on this topic.
“Well,” Mr. Putin said, interrupting him. “Your opinion is interesting to me, too! You start, and they will continue!”
Viktor Vekselberg then had to start. And what he said turned out to be worthy of real respect.
“Openness and general access to information systems are the foundation of the stability of the economic and global system,” pronounced Vekselberg. “This has to be dealt with carefully.”
“But that’s not a complete answer!” said Putin, from all indications predictably agitated. “But rights holders?! And if instructions on how to commit suicide are published on the Internet or how to manufacture weapons of mass destruction?! And if rights to artistic and animation films are stolen?! This deprives other people of their lawful earnings!”
Viktor Vekselberg could have simply agreed. No one would have judged him for that.
But he said:
“There’s a big difference between regulation of ownership rights on the Internet and the vital activity of civil society.”
“Victor!” Putin interrupted him. “Edison invented electricity, and his relatives to this day receive money for that! Do you agree?”
Vekselberg didn’t argue with that, either.
But Vladimir Yakunin was grateful to the president of Russia that he thinks exactly this way about freedom on the Internet, and not differently.