The internet was the last free zone in Russian society. Now Putin has it in his grasp

Vladimir Putin hates revolutions. In 1989, he was horrified when East Germans burned the Stasi headquarters in Dresden, where he worked as a young KGB agent. He took Russia’s 1991 revolutionary overthrow of the Soviet system as a personal betrayal. He scoffed at Georgia’s Rose Revolution in 2003, and derided Ukraine’s (failed) 2004 Orange Revolution. He loathed the crowds in Cairo, Tunis and Tripoli that formed the Arab Spring, and he continues to back his bandit client Assad in a bloody civil war against the Syrian revolution. And, most recently, when revolution came too close to home, he invaded Ukraine following the toppling of the Yanukovich regime.