The Russian Sleuth Who Outs Moscow's Elite Hackers and Assassins
Ten years ago, Roman Dobrokhotov sat down in the front row of a Kremlin auditorium, surrounded by a polite audience of journalists and dignitaries attending a speech by Russia’s then-president Dmitri Medvedev. Medvedev was only a few minutes into his address on the importance of the country's constitution—which he had just amended to allow Vladimir Putin to serve as president again—when Dobrokhotov stood up, turned around, and addressed the audience himself.
“Why listen to him? He’s broken all our human rights and freedoms,” Dobrokhotov said in a loud, clear voice. “And he tries to tell us about the constitution!”
Dobrokhotov still remembers the faces of the people around him. “They tried to pretend they couldn’t hear, but the acoustics were actually very good,” he says. In a typical scene of Kremlin doublethink, Medvedev told the crowd that the young heckler should have the right to speak, even as security guards covered Dobrokhotov's mouth and hauled him out of the room.
