It was 2003, and I was sitting on the floor of my tiny New York apartment when I read that Boris Berezovsky, a Russian entrepreneur who was highly critical of President Vladimir Putin, had been arrested in Britain. I threw my newspaper across the room. It was the moment I realized that Russia would, tragically, be returning to a place of censorship, oppression and fear.
At least I was back in the United States, starting up a software company. My days living and working in Russia were far behind me. What was happening there could never happen here, I thought then.
The pain of watching Russia lose its briefly held freedoms has made me particularly attuned to what is happening at the intersection of tech and the Trump administration. That history is why I got a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach when I saw the photo of tech chieftains — people who control the social media outlets that so many Americans use to form their political views — paying homage to Donald Trump at a White House dinner. Or when I realized that Mr. Trump is reportedly handing TikTok, which 20 percent of Americans rely on for their news, to a consortium of investors that includes companies owned by his billionaire allies. Or when my teenage son saw a TikTok about the suspension of comedian Jimmy Kimmel and told me how it reminded him of tales I have told about life in the Soviet Union.
Of course, the situation is not nearly as dire today in the United States as it was in the Soviet Union or is today in Mr. Putin’s Russia. We do still have a free press. You’re reading it. But I see how fragile our freedom is becoming. And I have witnessed firsthand how state-run media can brutalize a population.
I moved to Moscow in 1990 from the U.S. fresh out of college and full of optimism. The firm I was working for was investing in the conversion of defense facilities into civilian production — tanks into tractors, swords into plowshares. My colleagues, our investors and I were so hopeful about what glasnost — namely President Mikhail Gorbachev’s experiments with freedom of the press — could mean for Russians and for the world. The official Soviet newspaper, Pravda (or “Truth”), was still full of lies. The Russians I knew primarily purchased it to use as toilet paper, which was in short supply.
For the first time in decades, media organizations were no longer forced to publish propaganda. My friends and I talked at first in hushed tones, and then more openly, about once-forbidden topics like Stalin’s terror and the war in Afghanistan, both featured in Moscow News, a paper with then-soaring circulation numbers. I’ll never forget when Moscow’s gray streets lit up with kiosks full of lilies and roses as people began to engage in private economic activity, illuminating the promise of a free press and a free economy.
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