Soldatov Aleksei Anatolyevich

Soldatov Aleksei Anatolyevich

Biography

Aleksei Anatolyevich Soldatov was born on November 25, 1951 in Moscow.

In 1974 he graduated from the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute.

In 1979 he defended his thesis, in 1987 - his doctoral dissertation.

After graduation, he worked at the Kurchatov Institute Research Center, where he successively held the positions of engineer, junior researcher, head of the laboratory, deputy director of the department, director of the computing center.

From 1995 to 1997 he was an adviser to the general director of FAPSI.

In 1997, he became director of the Institute of Information Systems of the Kurchatov Institute. Dean of the Faculty of Nanotechnology and Informatics of MIPT, Head. Department of Informatics.

2008-2010: Work in the Ministry of Telecom and Mass Communications

In 2008-2010, Soldatov was Deputy Minister of Communications and Mass Media of the Russian Federation in the team of Igor Shchegolev.

In the ministry, Aleksei Soldatov oversaw the strategic and scientific and technical development of the industry. His sphere of activity included the development and launch of e-government, the creation of technology parks in the country. In addition, he oversaw a project to obtain a Cyrillic domain. RF, as well as legislative activities to regulate the relationship of subjects on the Internet.

2010: Transfer to MSU

In November 2010, he was appointed Vice-Rector of Moscow State University named after M.V. Lomonosov.

2011: Accusation of seizure of zone. RF

On January 26, 2011, at the disposal of CNews^[1] turned out to be a draft decision of the commission created at the Coordination Center of the National Internet Domain (CC, domain zone regulator. RU and. RF) to investigate possible abuses during domain registration in the zone. RF. The commission, which included, in particular, State Duma deputies from United Russia Alexander Khinshtein and Alexander Kogan, considered the decision of the CC Council on the beginning of the open registration of Cyrillic domains on November 11, 2010 to be hasty and not fully worked out. Moreover, according to the commission, the CC was forced to do this under pressure from a state representative on the council - the then deputy minister of communications and mass media of the Aleksei Soldatov (he is the founder of the first Internet provider in the USSR - Relkom).

During the investigation, the commission discovered that Soldatov's sister, Irina Rassolova, owns a 14% stake in the registrar Regional Information Center (Ru-Center, data from the Unified State Register of Legal Entities). Its shareholders are also two more people who were members of the CC council at the time of the launch of the zone. RF: Ru-Center CEO Alexei Lesnikov (23% of the shares, data from the Unified State Register of Legal Entities) and the general director of the Technical Center of the Internet (maintains the root register of domain zones.RU,.SU and.RF) Alexei Platonov. According to the commission, Platonov is the general director and owner of a 50% stake in Fiard, which owns 49% of Ru-Center. Platonov himself confirmed to the commission his affiliation with Fiard and Ru-Center, Soldatov refused to communicate with the commission.

The Commission does not exclude that these persons influenced the management of the CC "in order not to give progress to the investigation of abuses," thanks to which Ru-Center, during the registration of domains in the zone. RF, was able to "seize" a large number of domains. In particular, in the first hours after the start of open registration, Ru-Center registered 60 thousand domain names, of which the registrar then held closed auctions for 24 thousand each (this was done if more than one preliminary application for the same domain name was received in Ru-Center before the start of open registration). According to the commission, such actions violate CC rules prohibiting registrars from setting different prices for domain registration for different clients, and obliging registrars to register domains on the basis of requests from customers.

In addition, since the.RF zone has a ban on changing the owner of the domain within a year after the start of open registration, after the auctions, Ru-Center remained the administrator of the sold domains in the root registry of domain names. Auction winners were registered as administrators only in the internal register of Ru-Center, which, according to the commission, does not give them domain ownership rights and is misleading clients. The leadership of the CC opposed the actions of Ru-Center only after the resignation of Soldatov, trying to block the domains put up for auction.

The Ru-Center confirmed that the sister of Aleksei Soldatov is a shareholder of the company, assuring that the Deputy Minister of Communications did not in any way lobby for the company's interests in the CC council.

2012: Appointment as Head of the Informatization Department of Moscow State University

Since 2012, Aleksei Soldatov have been work as an adviser to the rector - head of the Informatization Department of Moscow State University.

2019: House arrest

On December 25, TASS, citing the press service of the Tver Court of Moscow, reported that Aleksei Soldatov was sent under house arrest. He is suspected of fraud on an especially large scale.

Aleksei Soldatov sent under house arrest until January 28, 2020

{{quote 'The court refused to satisfy the petition of the SCh of the Main Directorate of the Main Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia in Moscow to choose a preventive measure in the form of arrest and sent Alexei Anatolyevich, suspected of fraud, under house arrest, "Olga Bondareva, press secretary of the court, told the news agency. }}

According to her, the petition was considered on December 13. The term of house arrest to Soldatov is set until January 28, 2020.

According to Meduza, the case involves the transfer of approximately 490 thousand IPv4 addresses worth more than 600 million rubles from the Russian Research Institute for the Development of Public Networks (RosNIIROS) to the Czech company Reliable Communications, co-owned by Soldatov. RosNIIROS, which has long been one of the key institutions for managing the Runet, has historically had a large pool of IPv4 addresses, which have recently become a shortage - in November they completely ended in Europe.

2020: Extension of house arrest

First extension of house arrest

On January 27, 2020, the Tverskoy District Court of Moscow extended Soldatov's house arrest for two months.

Second extension of house arrest

On March 25, 2020, the Tverskoy District Court of Moscow again extended the term of house arrest to Soldatov - until May 28, 2020.

Lawyer in the case of ex-Deputy Minister of Communications Soldatov: there is a feeling that the investigation has driven itself into a dead end and is stalling.

The investigation has not yet presented any materials, including evidence of the guilt of the defendants in the case of Aleksei Soldatov. TAdviser was told about this by the lawyer of one of the defendants in the case of Alexei Shkittin Sarkis Darbinyan on May 8, 2020. Read more here.

Third extension of house arrest

On May 26, 2020, the Tverskoy District Court of Moscow once again extended the term of house arrest to Soldatov - until July 28, 2020.

Release from house arrest

Ex-Deputy Minister of Communications Aleksei Soldatov, accused of "embezzlement by deception of the right to IP addresses," was released from house arrest on September 28. This was reported by the publication "Medusa."

Aleksei Soldatov and Yevgeny Antipov, who is also involved in the case, were released on recognizance not to leave, two interlocutors familiar with the details of the case told Meduza. This information was confirmed to the publication by the Aleksei Soldatov lawyer Natalya Davydova.

... Aleksei Soldatov and Yevgeny Antipov changed the measure of restraint to a recognizance not to leave from September 28. The defense filed repeated petitions, filed complaints about the unreasonableness of detention under house arrest, and we were heard. The law works, - said Davydova to Meduse.

At the end of 2019, Aleksei Soldatov was accused of "embezzlement by deception of the right to IP addresses," but the conflict over the rights to the.su domain was called the true reason for this case.

At the end of 2019, Aleksei Soldatov was accused of "embezzlement by deception of the right to IP addresses," but the conflict over the rights to the.su domain was called the true reason for this case. In September 2020, the state represented by RosNIIROS received the rights to manage the.su domain - at the request of the presidential administration, their organization was transferred to the Internet Development Fund (FREE), which managed this domain for almost 20 years, according to one of Meduza's interlocutors.

In the database of the Address Space Administration Internet (IANA), RosNIIROS is indeed listed as the manager and administrator of the.su domain, although at the time of the appearance of the criminal case against Soldatov, the domain administrator indicated the FREE. On September 18, a message was published on the RosNIIROS website that the.su domain zone was 30 years old and now more than 100 thousand sites are registered in it.

In 2019, the.SU domain was included by the Russian government in the Russian national domain zone, and a year later it was again transferred under the control of RosNIIROS, it was reported.

There is also information that since August 1, RosNIIROS has been performing duties to register domain names in the.su zone.

Galina Soldatova, director of the FREE and wife of Aleksei Soldatov, confirmed the information about the transfer of all rights to manage the domain in RosNIIROS.

Transferring the.su domain was, of course, not our initiative - we worked with this domain for many years and invested a lot of effort in preserving it. But under the new leadership, RosNIIROS decided to regain all authority over the domain, and we gave them away, "Soldatova said.

RosNIIROS did not answer for Medusa's questions.

Co-owner of the FREE and defendant in the criminal case Alexei Shkittin says that the request to give the rights to the.su domain came directly from the presidential administration.

After the law on the sovereign Runet came into force in November 2019, according to which the.su domain became part of the "national domain zone," the command to take it under its control came from the presidential administration in RosNIIROS. FREE director Galina Soldatova was forced in a rather threatening form to transfer all rights to manage the domain, hinting that otherwise she could be in the same dock with Aleksei Soldatov. I did not give my consent to the transfer of the domain, but there were no special options to fight, "Shkittin told Meduza.

At the same time, Shkittin noted that FREE has been acting as an administrator for the.su domain for many years, and although RosNIIROS was listed as the domain manager in the IANA database, in fact, FREE also performed this function.

There was an officially executed agreement on this matter between RosNIIROS and FREE, "he says.

But the presidential administration feared that during the liquidation of RosNIIROS, the functions of the.su domain manager would be transferred to the FREE "and he would become its full owner, as a result of which the state would completely lose control over.su," one of the federal officials explained in a conversation with Medusa.

Alexey Platonov from the RosNIIROS council previously also told Medusa that the reason for the presidential administration to intervene in the conflict between RosNIIROS and Soldatov was not so much the situation with the transfer of IP addresses as "concern for the fate of the.su domain." According to the law on sovereign Runet, the.su domain is indeed part of the "national domain zone" and "coordination of its activities" should be carried out by a non-profit organization, one of the founders of which is the Russian Federation. The Internet Development Fund is not suitable for these criteria.

2024: Sentence - 2 years in prison in the case of "theft of IP addresses"

On July 22, 2024, the Savelovsky District Court of Moscow sentenced in the case of the former Deputy Minister of Communications and one of the founders of Runet Aleksei Soldatov. He received two years in prison on charges of "stealing IP addresses."

The investigation into Soldatov was initiated in 2019. Initially, the investigation believed that the ex-deputy minister, as well as his business partners Yevgeny Antipov and Andrei Shkittin, fraudulently transferred the rights to IP addresses previously owned by the Russian Research Institute for the Development of Public Networks (RosNIIROS) to the Czech provider Reliable Communications. Later it was established that the defendants did not receive the consent of the general meeting of the founders of RosNIIROS to the transaction on the transfer of IP addresses to Reliable Communications, in connection with which "they caused significant harm to the rights and legitimate interests of the institute, depriving it of the status of a local Internet registrar." Soldatov and Shkittin were beneficiaries of Reliable Communications.

𝓲

wikimedia.org

The criminal case was initiated under Part 4 of Art. 159 of the Criminal Code - fraud committed by an organized group or on an especially large scale. Such acts are punishable by imprisonment for up to ten years. In December 2019, Reliable Communications returned the IP address to RosNIIROS. After that, the case was reclassified to the organization of a crime (part 3 of article 33 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation) and abuse of authority (part 1 of article 201 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation).

As a result, Soldatov received two years in a general regime colony: the verdict was passed under the article on abuse of power. According to his lawyer Ekaterina Chuparnova, Soldatov suffers from severe chronic diseases, in connection with which he needs to constantly take a large number of drugs, regular monitoring by a cardiologist and oncologist. Whether the defense plans to appeal the verdict is not specified as of July 22, 2024.^[2]

Scientific contribution

Chairman of the Supervisory Board of the Internet Development Fund. Aleksei Soldatov is known as the founder of the Runet and is one of the leading theorists in the field of electronic structure of matter and nuclear-electronic processes. He published more than 50 scientific articles, which were widely known and recognized both at home and abroad. Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences.

Family

Married. He has two children. Sister - Irina Rassolova.

Notes