Senior FSB official’s son linked to company supplying Russia’s Internet censorship systems, investigation finds
An investigation by journalist Andrey Zakharov has found that the son of a senior Federal Security Service official holds a position — and likely a financial stake — in the holding company that supplies the hardware used to restrict Russian internet traffic and surveil users.
The company is X Holding, whose subsidiaries manufacture equipment for Russia’s so-called TSPU systems, or “Technical Means of Countering Threats.” Under Russian law, these systems must be installed on the networks of every telecom operator in the country. They give Roskomnadzor, the country’s federal censorship agency, direct control over traffic flows; the telecom operators themselves have no access to the systems and no ability to influence what happens inside them. For the companies that host the hardware, it’s effectively a black box.
The TSPU systems combine software and hardware. The software comes from subsidiaries of state telecom giant Rostelecom, while the hardware is made by Yadro, part of X Holding.
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X Holding’s deputy director is Boris Korolev, 29, the son of Sergey Korolev — the FSB’s first deputy director. According to leaked databases reviewed by Zakharov, the younger Korolev joined the company’s leadership in September 2023, at age 27. At the time, the holding’s annual revenue exceeded 163 billion rubles ($2 billion); by 2024, it had surpassed 260 billion ($3.2 billion).
X Holding was founded by Anton Cherepennikov, a tech entrepreneur and, improbably, a professional esports player, who owned it for many years. Within the industry, though, Cherepennikov was widely regarded as a nominal owner — the real beneficiary, the prevailing view held, was billionaire Alisher Usmanov. Cherepennikov died in July 2023 at 40.
After his death, shares in the holding were redistributed among its subsidiaries. One recipient was a company called Garda, 20 percent of which was owned by Boris Korolev. Whether he still holds that stake is impossible to verify: X Holding does not publish financial reports, despite being one of Russia’s three largest IT companies. Zakharov attempted to reach Korolev by phone but received no response.
Zakharov argues that Korolev’s stake in X Holding is “ultimately also an asset of his father,” pointing to a pattern of valuable property registered in the son’s name. When Boris Korolev was 18, an apartment in central St. Petersburg was registered to him; a year later, a cottage outside Moscow followed. A 200-square-meter Moscow apartment is registered to Korolev’s 26-year-old niece. Journalists estimate the total value of these properties at around 300 million rubles ($3.7 million), with the family’s fleet of Porsche and Mercedes-Benz vehicles adding another 30 million ($370,000). At the time these assets were acquired, Zakharov notes, the family had no documented income that could account for them.
How much the Korolevs earn from Russia’s internet filtering infrastructure is hard to say, as the government keeps the relevant contracts secret. But based on publicly available data, at least 80 billion rubles ($980 million) have been allocated to deploy the TSPU systems nationwide.
On March 16, the Russian newspaper Kommersant reported that the Russian authorities appeared to have begun fully blocking Telegram, the country’s most popular messaging app.