CHAPTER 2

       PUTIN’S TROLLS

      VLADIMIR PUTIN, A NATIVE OF LENINGRAD, NOW ST. PETERSBURG, was born in 1952 in the lingering shadow of World War II. His father had been badly wounded in combat and his mother barely survived the 900-day siege of Leningrad when the Nazis tried to starve the city into surrender. The death toll in Leningrad was 640,000, including one of Putin’s brothers. Both parents got factory jobs after the war and Putin grew up in a walk-up communal apartment building where he recalled chasing rats in the stairwells. “There was no hot water, no bathtub,” Putin said many years later. “The toilet was horrendous. It ran smack up against a stair landing. And it was so cold—just awful—and the stairway had a freezing metal handrail.” A bright boy, Putin attended a school for the city’s best students. He also studied judo, earning a black belt, a skill that invested the diminutive young man with a quiet confidence.

      After earning a law degree at Leningrad State University, Putin joined the KGB in 1975. “I was driven by high motives,” he said of his choice of profession. “I thought I would be able to use my skills to the best of society.” He had an undistinguished career, however, making it only to the rank of lieutenant colonel. He served in counterintelligence, monitoring foreigners in Leningrad, and then as an officer in Dresden, a backwater assignment, where he almost certainly attempted to recruit Westerners who came to East Germany. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, Putin returned to his native city and attached himself to the administration of the reformist mayor, Anatoly Sobchak, one of his old law professors. A fluent German speaker, Putin established a reputation as a competent but colorless bureaucrat who worked well with foreigners. His real skill was his ability to vault upward, almost unnoticed, on the coattails of powerful patrons.

      In 1996, after Sobchak lost his reelection bid, Putin moved to Moscow, holding a series of positions in the administration of President Boris Yeltsin, until he was appointed director of the FSB, the intelligence and security agency that was rebuilding its power following the dismantling of the KGB. In August 1999, Putin was appointed prime minister in the chaotic Yeltsin administration, marked by the increasing decrepitude and alcoholism of the president. When Yeltsin resigned on December 31, 1999, Putin—looking very much like a nervous, pale junior staffer—became acting president. He won election to the post three months later with 53 percent of the vote.

      The rich and powerful around Yeltsin had backed Putin’s rise because they believed he was malleable, but Putin, as ruthless as he was cunning, viewed them as a threat to his rule. He gradually used the powers of the state and the court system to bring the oligarchs under control, imprisoning those who crossed him and seizing their property. The man who’d once seemed destined for the background became the new tsar, and the country’s media, also brought to heel, portrayed the vigorous Putin as the embodiment of Russia’s revival, a state that he had returned to its proper place as a global power able to rival the United States—“the main enemy,” in the parlance of the KGB.

      Seen from Moscow, the operation to sway the U.S. election had a long prologue. It was carried out by a regime that has fine-tuned the politics of grievance into a sophisticated propaganda weapon. Putin believes the United States engineered the breakup of the Soviet Union, eagerly plundered the fallen empire’s spoils, and has been using its influence ever since to keep Russia weak. His innovation has been to sharpen and magnify those charges into his raison d’état—and to point to them to show why responding to U.S. aggression was not only justified but a necessity.

      His resentments, nurtured over many years of perceived slights and betrayals, had found a particular focus in his animus for Hillary Clinton. As Russians voted in the parliamentary election on December 4, 2011, videos documenting widespread fraud at the ballot box rocketed around the internet. The next day, Clinton offered her view on the sidelines of a conference in Bonn, Germany. “Russian voters deserve a full investigation of all credible reports of electoral fraud and manipulation,” she told reporters. “The Russian people, like people everywhere, deserve the right to have their voices heard and votes counted.”

      As she spoke, activists in Moscow were readying a protest of the election results in the city center. They had registered an expected five hundred attendees with the police; five thousand showed up, the biggest anti-government demonstration of the Putin era. The frustrations of an urban middle class that increasingly yearned for not just material well-being but also for political freedom burst into the open. It would take months for the protests, which soon drew some hundred thousand participants, to subside.

      Putin was furious. To him, the fact that the first protests erupted just hours after Clinton’s remarks was far from a coincidence. His German biographer Hubert Seipel described Putin’s anger that day as a seminal moment in shaping his disdain for Clinton and his conviction that the United States sought regime change in Russia.

      “I saw the first reaction of our American partners,” Putin told supporters a few days later. “The first thing the secretary of state did was to characterize and evaluate the elections and say that they were dishonest and unfair, even though she had not yet received the materials from the [election] observers. She set the tone for certain actors [in] this country—she gave them a signal. They heard that signal and, with the support of the U.S. State Department, began their active work.”

      Putin would survive the challenge and eagerly start pushing back—with the same tools he accused the West of using against him.

      FEBRUARY 2016 BROUGHT ST. PETERSBURG SNOW FLURRIES AND ICE fog, a curtain of crystals in the frigid air. The districts that hug the northern bank of the Neva River had for decades been dotted with factories that rose during the nineteenth century. The area had seen its fortunes fade with the Soviet Union’s collapse. But its tree-lined streets, historic apartment buildings, and green spaces had maintained their charm, and the closed factories gradually gave way to office buildings beckoning a digital-friendly generation of Russians and internet start-ups.

      The shuttered factories had been well situated alongside the ancient waterways that braided Russia’s intersection with Europe. But now, with steamships replaced by fiber optics, those with enough know-how, funding, and cleverness could access different sorts of currents. The firm that leased the four-story building at 55 Savushkina Street seemed to be among this new breed of Russians who in their own modern ways were following in St. Petersburg’s mercantile tradition.

      The name of the company, the Internet Research Agency, sounded vaguely impressive if uninspired. A street sign in front of the building warned cars to slow down for children crossing on the next block. A short stroll away, on a verdant island in the Neva, were tennis courts, a museum, and a palace overlooking the water that served as a summer retreat for Tsar Alexander I. Not that the tech-savvy employees of the Internet Research Agency had time for such diversions. Each morning they filed in for cubicle-bound jobs that combined two of their generation’s consuming pastimes: crafting posts for social media and clicking refresh to see whether their creations had gone viral.

      On February 10, 2016, as the fog outside thickened, employees received new instructions for an important project. An internal memo directed the company’s “specialists” to devote their social media skills to a single target—the U.S. presidential election. The aims were explicit: “use any opportunity to criticize Hillary and the rest (except Sanders and Trump—we support them).”

      The Internet Research Agency memo represented a distillation of a remarkable effort only alluded to in the company’s name. Since its founding, the agency had devoted inordinate attention to studying the political climate in the United States, with special focus