The Red Web: In Putin’s Russia, Internet watches you

While the Soviet Union may be long gone, much of its mentality still lingers. A desire for control continues to motivate the Kremlin to impose an authoritarian regime not only in Russian media and politics, but especially on the Internet. Fighting Moscow’s online regime has proven to be a herculean—possibly even futile—task.

This is the sobering conclusion in The Red Web: The Struggle Between Russia’s Digital Dictators and The New Online Revolutionaries by Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan.

The two veteran Russian journalists have closely examined the inner workings of digital politics in their homeland for decades, and as they write in the book’s final pages: