The security services have played a central--and often mysterious--role at key turning points in Russia during the tumultuous years following the Soviet collapse: from the Moscow apartment house bombings and theater siege, to the war in Chechnya and the Beslan school massacre. In this riveting investigation, two intrepid journalists penetrate the secret world of the FSB and illustrate how the security services have evolved into a ruthless, violently powerful force that is inextricably woven into modern Russia's fundamental makeup, and has become more shadowy than its predecessor, the Soviet KGB.

From the time of the tsars to the waning days of Communist regime, Russian leaders tried to control the flow of ideas by controlling its citizens' movements. They believed strict limits on travel combined with censorship was the best way to escape the influence of subversive Western ideologies. Yet Russians continued to emigrate westward, both to seek new opportunities and to flee political crises at home. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, Russians' presence in Western countries - particularly the United States - has been for the Kremlin both the biggest threat and the biggest opportunity. It sought for years to use the Russian emigre community to achieve Russia's goals - espionage to be sure but also to influence policies and public opinion. Russia's exiles are a potent mix of the very rich and the very driven, some deeply hostile to their homeland and others deeply patriotic. Russia, a vast, insular nation, depends on its emigres - but it cannot always count on them. Celebrated Moscow-based journalists Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan masterfully look at the complex, ever-shifting role of Russian emigres since the October Revolution to the present day. From comely secret agents to tragically doomed dissidents, the story of Russian emigres is at times thrilling, at times touching and always full of intrigue. But their influence and importance is an invaluable angle through which to understand Russia in the modern world.

The authors of The Red Web examine the shifting role of Russian expatriates throughout history, and their complicated, unbreakable relationship with the mother country--be it antagonistic or far too chummy.The history of Russian espionage is soaked in blood, from a spontaneous pistol shot that killed a secret policeman in Romania in 1924 to the attempt to poison an exiled KGB colonel in Salisbury, England, in 2017. Russian emigres have found themselves continually at the center of the mayhem.Russians began leaving the country in big numbers in the late nineteenth century, fleeing pogroms, tsarist secret police persecution, and the Revolution, then Stalin and the KGB--and creating the third-largest diaspora in the world. The exodus created a rare opportunity for the Kremlin. Moscow's masters and spymasters fostered networks of spies, many of whom were emigrants driven from Russia. By the 1930s and 1940s, dozens of spies were in New York City gathering information for Moscow.But the story did not end with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Some emigres have turned into assets of the resurgent Russian nationalist state, while others have taken up the dissident challenge once more--at their personal peril. From Trotsky to Litvinenko, The Compatriots is the gripping history of Russian score-settling around the world.

The Internet in Russia is either the most efficient totalitarian tool or the device by which totalitarianism will be overthrown. Perhaps both. On the eighth floor of an ordinary-looking building in an otherwise residential district of southwest Moscow, in a room occupied by the Federal Security Service (FSB), is a box the size of a VHS player marked SORM. The Russian government's front line in the battle for the future of the Internet, SORM is the world's most intrusive listening device, monitoring e-mails, Internet usage, Skype, and all social networks. But for every hacker subcontracted by the FSB to interfere with Russia's antagonists abroad-such as those who, in a massive denial-of-service attack, overwhelmed the entire Internet in neighboring Estonia-there is a radical or an opportunist who is using the web to chip away at the power of the state at home. Drawing from scores of interviews personally conducted with numerous prominent officials in the Ministry of Communications and web-savvy activists challenging the state, Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan peel back the history of advanced surveillance systems in Russia. From research laboratories in Soviet-era labor camps, to the legalization of government monitoring of all telephone and Internet communications in the 1990s, to the present day, their incisive and alarming investigation into the Kremlin's massive online-surveillance state exposes just how easily a free global exchange can be coerced into becoming a tool of repression and geopolitical warfare. Dissidents, oligarchs, and some of the world's most dangerous hackers collide in the uniquely Russian virtual world of The Red Web.