Andrey Winter Biography

It soon became clear that the traffic of the local provider Kherson Telecom is now heading through the little-known Internet provider Miranda to Russian networks. In Russia, few people heard about Miranda, and the company does not have customers there. This Internet provider has a special task-it provides the Krym from the moment of occupation. After the annexation, most large Russian corporations avoided the presence in the Crimea, fearing sanctions.

But someone needed to work in the occupied territories, and the decision was found-to create new Crimean enterprises that were not affiliated directly with Russian business. However, the Kremlin could not allow these new enterprises to depend on local personnel - they needed the experience and managerial skills of Russian specialists. And this meant that Russian managers had to make a personal choice: to move to Crimea or not.

One of those who made this choice was Ivan Winter, at that time the summer vice president of Rostelecom, who agreed to launch a new telecom operator in Crimea. Ivan Winter History of Winter is the key to understanding modern Russia, because without people like it, the system would not work.

He is an important screw in the authoritarian machine, and there are thousands of others, the same as him, hired workers and specialists, at first glance deprived of political motivation, but proud of their professionalism. Winter is not a political appointment and not a pro -Kremlin activist. In the middle of X, he graduated from the Irkutsk State Technical University with a degree in Radio -Engineer and quickly realized that telecommunications were destined to become a prosperous industry in Russia.

It was then that the Minister of Communications Vladimir Bulgak, also a radio engineer by education, ended the implementation of the most important project in his life. Bulgak understood that Russia desperately needed modern means of communication, and domestic industry cannot produce them. The purchase of foreign equipment instead of the outdated Sovetskaya brought benefits to consumers and business, but the price was high - many Russian communications enterprises went bankrupt, leaving thousands of employees without work.

Nevertheless, by a year, a modern connection appeared in Russia, in which Rostelecom dominated, controlled by the state. Three years later, Ivan Winter came to the company as a leading engineer. He was an ambitious specialist aimed at making a career in the company, and in the middle of X received the degree of MBA at the Moscow Technical University of Communications.

For several years, winter rose to the senior vice president of Rostelecom for the development of communication networks. But by the year this position required not only technical skills - now it also assumed assistance in the re -election of Vladimir Putin for the third term. For the first time from the moment Putin came to power, mass protests triggered by mass falsifications in the State Duma election began in Moscow.

The ruling party "United Russia" shamelessly chewed, and this was widely covered by journalists and activists throughout the country. In the year, the presidential election was planned. To reassure the protesters, Putin promised to install video cameras in polling stations throughout the country, so that what was happening there could be monitored online from anywhere in the world.

This politically important task was entrusted to Rostelecom, and to realize Putin’s promise to Ivan Winter. Winter agreed, and coped with the task - for the election of the camera appeared in plots throughout Russia. Winter did not give interviews to reporters, so it is difficult to understand what happened at that moment in his head. Perhaps he explained to himself that he simply developed and introduced a technical project, which he was taught as an engineer.

Or maybe he even told himself that he helped make the elections transparent. This was the first major political project of winter, and soon others followed it. The second was even more expensive than Putin’s heart: winter was instructed to build communication networks for the Olympic Games of the year. Again, at first glance there is nothing wrong with providing telecommunications for the Olympic Games.

True, all officials knew very well that it was Putin’s personal project. In addition, in countries with such regimes as Russia, the Olympic Games are only second -turn sport, and first of all, it is a policy and a demonstration of power. In preparation for Sochi, the FSB worked tightly with signalmen, setting means of electronic surveillance on all types of communications. But perhaps winter believed that this was not his business.

However, to continue to pretend that you did not participate in politics, it became more and more difficult, and the third project made it completely impossible. In April, Rostelecom announced plans to open a branch in the newly occupied Crimea and invest 15 billion rubles in the development of the network. True, soon Rostelecom changed his mind-perhaps because of the fear of Western sanctions-and instead decided to launch a new operator.

It was called Miranda-Media, and the general director of the new company was appointed Ivan the winter, who had to leave Rostelecom for this.For five years, from a year, winter led Miranda, the largest telecom operator on the occupied Ukrainian peninsula. In the year, he was finally allowed to return to Russia, and Rostelecom again hired him as vice president, responsible for telecommunications in the Volga region.

Winter continued to climb the career ladder and in January of the year received a promotion. This time he headed all Rostelecom digital projects-including video surveillance, transport and housing and communal services. It sounded like an engineer’s dream - the use of digital solutions in almost all areas of life with an almost unlimited budget in such a huge country as Russia.

But here politics intervened again. In February, Putin began a full -scale war with Ukraine, and winter was again called up for service. But the new “Miranda” was not the same - the operator was set the task to serve the ties occupied during the war in the south and east of Ukraine, the task, which included the introduction of electronic surveillance and censorship. So the talented engineer Ivan Winter became one of the key figures of the occupation administration.

When we collected the material for our book “Battle of Runet”, we spent a lot of time in conversations with Russian engineers working on surveillance technologies, trying to understand why they do not care how these technologies are used. They always repeated the same argument: "If the governments eavesdrop on the conversations of people, this is not the fault of the microphone." In their opinion, engineers do not bear any responsibility for the consequences of their actions.

We were very worried about how, to put it mildly, infantilism among adults and smart people could exist. In the end, we came to the conclusion that this is because engineering education in the Soviet Union was concentrated exclusively on technical matters, and there was no importance to ethics. The engineers, first of all, were supposed to serve the Soviet military-industrial complex.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian engineering education was never reformed - and as a result, it continues to produce many very good engineers who do not think about anything that lies outside the fiber -optic cable. And now, when the Kremlin has begun the most destructive war over the past decades, it is these engineers who help the Kremlin establish the occupation regime in the captured territories, it is these engineers, without hesitation, do what the military and special services say to them.

They feel non -involved in war and the death of civilians, because these men and women taught not to see what the use of the technologies they have implemented leads to. Meanwhile, Ivan Winter, a technocrat and a network development specialist, is busy closing in these networks access to Google services and global social platforms. Published in English in Cepa.