Torrents.ru

» see torrents.ru as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

By 2004 I was at university and still doing most of my downloading out of an internet cafe, since broadband did not reach my own room until around 2006. The largest tracker in Europe was open that entire time and I never opened a page of it. Torrents.ru was Cyrillic from the header down and its library was Russian releases for Russian speakers. Standing in exactly the right category and the wrong alphabet is its own kind of distance.

It went up on 18 September 2004 and became the default address for the Russian-language internet. Four million registered accounts, somewhere near a million torrents. It ran as a forum rather than a search box, with moderated release groups and a culture that treated a badly encoded file as a personal insult.

That mattered more than the raw size did. Most trackers of the period were indexes with a comment field bolted on. This one was a community with editorial standards attached, which is the reason its userbase was later able to move as a single block.

~ the chronicle ~

~ fifty dollars ~

On 18 February 2010, RU-Center, the largest domain registrar in Russia, suspended torrents.ru with immediate effect. The order came from the investigative division of the district prosecutor's office in Chertanovo, a residential part of southern Moscow, attached to a criminal case under Article 146 of the Russian criminal code, which covers copyright infringement committed on a large scale.

The predicate was this. On 26 January 2010 a Moscow resident sold a copy of Autodesk software to somebody for about fifty dollars. That is the entire underlying offense. Autodesk and 1C, whose products were named in the complaint, both denied afterward that they had initiated anything. A site with four million users went dark over a single transaction that neither rights holder would claim to have reported.

~ what a registrar can do ~

The mechanism is the part worth keeping, because it is the cleanest illustration I know of a lesson the rest of the web learned much more slowly. Nothing was proven and nothing was heard. An investigator sent a request to a registrar, the registrar complied, and a domain four million people had bookmarked stopped resolving that afternoon.

No servers were seized and no operator was arrested. The database and the users were exactly where they had been the day before. The only thing anybody took was the name, and taking the name turned out to be enough to remove a site from the internet for as long as it took someone to type a different one.

~ the move ~

Within hours the forum was answering at rutracker.org, registered through the Bahamas specifically so that no Russian authority could pull the same lever twice. Almost the entire userbase came along, which is the rarest outcome in this category. Sites that lose a domain usually lose the people with it.

The aftermath was louder than the death. A petition addressed to Medvedev and Putin gathered more than fifteen thousand signatures asking whether the prosecutors had exceeded their authority. The Russian Pirate Party reported denial-of-service attacks against 1C and against an online cinema in the days that followed. None of it changed anything, and the.ru zone had made its point.

RuTracker is still running in 2026 with over sixteen million accounts. Moscow City Court ordered it permanently blocked in November 2015 and Russian providers implemented that in January 2016, and it kept growing regardless. Torrents.ru is the name that died. The thing itself just changed address.

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