In 2005 the Russian-speaking internet was one of the freest, strangest and funniest places on the planet. Twenty years later, mobile internet inside Moscow’s Third Ring Road runs on a whitelist while the President hosts a summit. This is the story of how that happened. We start in 1994, with a telecoms licence numbered 777 and blessed by a priest, a national domain registered inside a nuclear research institute, and men with pistols outside the domain registrar. From there we go through the padonki slang of Удафф, the imageboards, ЖЖ as the country’s public square, and the encyclopedia that wrote it all down: Луркоморье, Lurkmore. Its co-founder Дмитрий Хомак ran it for fifteen years, through oligarch tea parties, FSB men in jumpers, a drug-police block and extremism cases, and on 4 March 2022 he deleted it and left two words: stop the war. Alongside it we follow RuTracker, the pirate library the state declared “eternally blocked” and never managed to kill. Then the hammer comes down: the Bolotnaya winter, Дуров's dog in a hoodie and his loss of VK, the “protecting children from information” law, the Ревизор routers, the failed Telegram block, the sovereign internet boxes, and the slowdowns, VPN purges and whitelists of 2025-2026. Our guides for that part are Михаил Климарёв, the exiled telecom engineer who calls himself an impostor and spends his days making the blocks fail, and Эльдар Муртазин, a Moscow industry analyst who has stayed and who says, carefully and with a disclaimer at each end, that the attempt to control the RuNet is killing it. At the end we look at why this matters: for understanding how an authoritarian state takes something away from its own people, for understanding the Z-sphere, and for those of us living on the Russian border. Become our patron: https://www.patreon.com/theeasternborder Merch store + another option for memberships: https://theeasternborder-shop.fourthwall.com/ Follow what's going on here in the very border of Eastern Europe: https://bsky.app/profile/theeasternborder.lv Download all episodes for free on our website; pictures accompanying certain episodes can be found there as well! http://theeasternborder.lv/ Car4Ukraine Eastern Border Autumn Harvest Campaign! https://car4ukraine.com/campaigns/autumn-harvest-2026-the-eastern-border Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/theeasternborder. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
