Internet Resources for Eurasia, 2001 Edition

About this Guide  

he Internet has become vast and even the best search engines often return too many answers to a query, or fail to find sites they should have found. Thus, saving search time on the Internet is one reason you will find this 2001 directory of Internet Resources for Eurasia a useful tool to have at your side whenever you go online. To save you, the user of this guide, even more scarce time, please keep in mind the following things:

Countries are the primary category. Many of the resources in the pages that follow could be categorized in more than one way, e.g., Ukraine and environment, or Belarus and human rights. However, rather than duplicate an entry in two categories, or make extensive use of cross-referencing, we categorized a resource by country or region whenever that seemed to be at least one of the identifications. Thus, if you are interested in Russian websites that deal with women’s issues, look in Russia first, not Women.

Some resources could be listed either in E-mail Lists or Websites.  RFE/RL, for example, runs a number of e-mail lists but also has a very extensive and up-to-date website. Was that resource primarily a listserv or website? In some cases, the assignment to one or the other category was necessarily arbitrary. Therefore, be sure to check both the E-mail Lists and the Websites section if a particular resource could conceivably be categorized either way. Also, don’t neglect to …

Use the index. We have indexed every resource mentioned in the guide. So if the Table of Contents doesn’t help you find what you want, consult the Index. 

Periods don’t count. Sometimes an e-mail address or a URL (website address) will come at the end of a sentence, so that it looks like the period might be part of the address.  It is not. That “dot” at the end of any sentence containing Internet addresses is always a period. We have never encountered a URL or e-mail address that ended in a dot or period.

Upper and lower case do count, for website addresses at least.  Whenever you transcribe a Web address, be sure not to change the case of the characters. If you change one capital letter in a URL to its lower case form, that website will not be found. E-mail is generally not sensitive to changes in case.

So much by way of tips for using Internet Resources for Eurasia.  What can we say about the criteria by which we selected the resources included here?

Virtually all the resources in this guide are free—for now. We may look back in five years to this period as the halcyon days of the Internet, when so much on it was widely accessible at no cost to the user. By then many of the resources described in this guide may have become “monetized” and accessible only for a fee. But the fact is that now a great number of excellent resources are available for free. That is a huge value and it was a major criterion in deciding what to include in this guide.

The resources selected correspond to the development challenges facing the former Soviet republics of Eurasia. The issues in the table of contents—economic enterprise, civil society, environment, health, law and human rights, etc.—are the axes along which the new/old nations of the region we call Eurasia will either develop toward democracy and prosperity—or not. What is remarkable is how many resources now exist on the Internet that positively address these issues in useful, specific ways.  Spend an hour or two browsing some of the sites in the pages that follow to see for yourself.

Internet Resources for Eurasia is for citizens of the region, as well as for non-citizens who work there or have a professional interest in it. Staff of foundations, multilateral organizations, and humanitarian or other NGOs working in the region; students preparing to work or travel in the region; journalists and writers; members of government agencies; businesspeople; educators and researchers—such people, spanning a wide range of interests and occupations, will find this guide helpful.

So will citizens of the region, especially in those countries where Internet access is relatively unrestricted and growing rapidly. A guide like Internet Resources for Eurasia, that gets people to where they want to go on the Web quickly, has value for anybody. But it is especially useful if time spent on the Internet is relatively expensive—as it is in most of the NIS—and you have only an hour or two a week, perhaps, during which you can get online.

Many resources in Internet Resources for Eurasia will be new to users. This directory not only will save you hours of time. It will also make you aware of  hundreds of online resources related to Eurasia that you did not know existed and might never have thought to look for. This includes many of the e-mail lists related to the region, which are often harder to find than websites, yet are just as useful in their own ways.

This edition is stronger than previous ones in three major ways. We have added at least fifty percent more websites, bolstering especially the section on Business and Economics. The guide has become more bilingual, providing more resources in Russian than previous editions, as more and more users from the West are becoming bilingual in English and Russian. (More and more citizens of the NIS are also becoming bilingual in their native language and English.) If a resource is in a language other than English, we indicate this with a letter: R for Russian, Uk for Ukrainian, Es for Estonian, etc.

Finally, we have added a section called Internet Toolbox, where you will find a number of “tools” to make a website more interactive and bring more visitors to it: online English-Russian translators; chat rooms and forums; surveys and polls; peer-to-peer collaborations, etc.

 M. Holt Ruffin
Director
Civil Society International
Seattle, WA
USA
May 2001

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