by Holt Ruffin

[This article appeared in the Fall-Winter 1999-2000 issue of ISAR's Give & Take: A Journal on Civil Society in Eurasia.]

In Dismantling Utopia: How Information Ended the Soviet Union, author Scott Shane compared the failed coup attempt of 1991 with the Bolshevik seizure of power decades earlier. Just as in 1917 Lenin made St. Petersburg’s Central Telegraph Office and the Russian Telegraph Agency priority targets, so in 1991 KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov and his "State Committee on the State of Emergency" (GKChP) sent tanks and soldiers to surround the main Moscow telephone exchange and seize control of the broadcast facilities of Ostankino TV. Kryuchkov also had a long list of newspapers which were to cease publication immediately, and a similar list of some 70 editors and journalists who were to be arrested.

But the accumulated power of five years of glasnost—an ever more independent press, and rising levels of international travel, including the participation by thousands of Soviet citizens in overseas exchanges—had unleashed democratic currents in Russian civic life far deeper than Kryuchkov et al. had appreciated. This, plus the also-unappreciated complexity of controlling information in a city of rapidly multiplying faksi, kseroksi, and computers, doomed the August 19 coup attempt almost from the start. As Shane aptly put it, "The information blockade imposed by the GKChP turned out to be more like a tennis net than an iron curtain."

What reduced the iron curtain to a tennis net? Or as Kryuchkov himself, if he had a sense of humor, might have asked: How did we make such a mesh of things? One answer is surely the internationally networked PC and, as we end a decade identified with the Internet, it’s a good time to assess, if briefly, its role in strengthening the democratic movement and civil society in Russia during a very turbulent decade.

For some perspective: At the end of 1981 Poland was under martial law, Leonid Brezhnev celebrated his 75^th birthday, and there were scarcely more than 200 host computers on the entire Internet. Business cards in the USSR carried telex numbers. Ten years later, the Soviet Union had dissolved, the Internet had nearly one million host computers, and e-mail was overtaking telephone, fax and telex as the instrument of choice for international communication. In Russia, which entered the nineties with about as many international telephone lines as a mid-size office building in Manhattan, the role of e-mail in builidng links to the international community was especially important.

E-mail service began in Russia in 1990 with Sovam and Relcom/Demos. GlasNet followed shortly after. Never a large player in the ISP (Internet service provider) field, it was nonetheless the most truly nongovernmental and independent one and it marketed itself to the NGO community. Sovam and Relcom/Demos easily outstripped GlasNet in accounts and geographical reach, but they had the benefit of state support and facilities. (Relcom/Demos arose out of the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy in Moscow, a development paralleling in some ways the Defense Department’s incubation of the Internet in the U.S.)

By 1994, after splitting off from Demos, Relcom would have 30,000 active accounts throughout Russia and the FSU, the great majority of them with business firms.

By comparison, Glasnet was able to support 4,000 user accounts (the actual number of subscribers was lower), of which 24 could be online simultaneously. Thanks to a satellite channel donated by George Soros’s International Science Foundation, Glasnet was also able to link its server in Moscow to the by-then two million host computers on the rapidly expanding Internet, giving subscribers real-time access to the online world. Glasnet was mainly a Moscow and St. Petersburg-based service, but it offered local dial-up service in 30 cities around Russia and also had a host computer in Kyiv since December 1992. While these numbers today seem small, it is hard to overstate the importance of e-mail communications—its reliability, low-cost, and 24-hour availability—for the success of hundreds and thousands of partnerships between NGOs in the U.S. and their counterparts in Russia and the rest of the FSU.

With e-mail came other important developments. News groups and so-called "conferences"—electronic forums where subscribers with similar interests could "meet" and exchange e-mail—became a very popular aspect of the Internet. IGC and Glasnet hosted hundreds of conferences on their networks, including one called isar.journal.

Similar in function to news groups and conferences was the so-called "listserv," software which provided a system for simultaneous distribution of e-mail messages to hundreds or thousands of recipients. Listservs also automated the process of joining or leaving the list, making the administration of large e-mail networks a simple matter. In January 1995 Center for Civil Society International (CCSI) began its own listserv, CivilSoc, using the Friends and Partners (F&P) platform that Greg Cole in Knoxville, TN, and Natasha Bulashova, in Pushchino, Russia, had established. It quickly became a popular service and today CivilSoc reaches more than 1,500 subscribers around the world, offering regular information about conferences, exchange opportunities, grant programs, and new organizations or projects—all related to civic engagement and the growth of civil society in the FSU.

The CCSI Web site was also built on the Friends and Partners platform and, when last measured, was experiencing 88,000 page views per month. Requests for pages profiling specific NGOs in Eurasia, a major feature of the site, were running at 26,000 per month. Thanks to F&P, numerous other organizations like CCSI have had free Web sites and listservs with which to reach worldwide aucidences over the past five years—at no cost, and with excellent technical support.

The late eighties also saw the beginnings of a very important program in the FSU, supported by the U.S. government: the development of public Internet access sites. With support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York and working with IREX, an independent Russian organization named Vega Laboratory began developing open e-mail facilities for scholars in Russia. The State Historical Public Library in Moscow, for example, received its first e-mail account thanks to Vega. The program soon went beyond Moscow to other cities, and other nations of the FSU, and to civic organizations as well as academic ones. It also combined Internet training with providing access.

Today Project Harmony of Vermont runs Internet access and training programs (IATP) in 32 centers in 20 cities throughout Russia, while IREX runs a roughly equal number in Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakstan, Kyrgyzstan,and Uzbekistan. Funding for this program has come primarily from the U.S. government, but the Soros foundations, as well as Carnegie, have also supported it. Soros’s major commitment in this area, of course, has been its $100-million project to help 30 universities and technical schools across Russia connect with the Internet.

1994 was a hinge point as the Internet moved from a text-only technology (exemplified by Gopher, the basis of IREX’s first Web site) to a text-and-graphics technology. Friends and Partners, formed in January 1994, was very quick to take advantage of the new graphics capabilities. Also in 1994, by the way, the "First International Conference on the World-Wide Web" was held at the CERN labs in Geneva, where Tim Berners-Lee, the "father of hypertext," worked as a scientist.

Both the uncertainty and excitement about where things were heading at this time is captured in a passage from Ian Kallen’s Post-Soviet Study Resources on the Internet, perhaps the best compendium of online resources on the FSU at the time. Writing in early 1994, Kallen had this to say:

The World Wide Web is a searching system that works with hypertext links; operative words in a sentence contained in a file link to other files in a webbed chain of topics and definitions. Every file becomes, in effect, a menu… My experience has revealed a good number of bugs: links that are not open, dead ends and otherwise thwarted searches. However, this system does hold a great deal of promise, so don’t despair.

No need to worry about despair, as it happened. The speed at which the Web’s promise would be realized took everybody by surprise. In June 1994 the first of four annual New Media for a New World conferences were held in Russia. Organized by Seattleites Alan Boyle and David Endicott together with the Center for War, Peace and the News Media in New York; and RAPIC (now the National Press Institute) in Moscow, and with primary funding from USAID, the first conference was held at Ostankino TV headquarters, inside walls still pocked by a gunbattle of the October 1993 putsch attempt.

Conference participants from abroad were impressed by the technical virtuosity of the Russians—Andrei Kolesnikov and Igor Semenyuk of Sovam, Sasha Fillipov and Tatyana Savenkova of Relcom, and Anatoly Voronov of Glasnet. Within hours of the opening session, participants were able to see photos of that session online. They were also able to pull down text, graphics, video and music from the Web, thanks to the 64kbs connection that Relcom and Sovam had installed at Ostankino. And in a powerful demonstration of the Internet’s implications for the media, Semenyuk took journalists at the conference on a "virtual" tour of documents from the Soviet archives that had just become available on the Web.

The last New Media for a New World conference was held at Urals State University (UGU) in Ekaterinburg in October 1997. It was a great success, with some of the more than 100 journalists who attended coming from as far away as Kyiv. The conference revealed how far Russia had come in four short years. Hundreds of Russian newspapers now had online editions, and some of their authors were at the conference. Sophisticated searchable online databases were demonstrated, both general ones like Rambler (http://www.rambler.ru) and specific ones developed for the media. CCSI’s Deirdre Shelley made a presentation on the NGO resources now available on the Internet.

The excitement and sense of comraderie among the adepts in this technology were palpable.We discovered that an Internet café existed in Ekaterinburg, unbeknownst to the conference organizers, and we visited a start-up TV station, on the twelth story of an office building, where an enthusiastic and young group of were bring very fresh approaches to an "old" medium.

But we also saw some of the startling contrasts that beset post-Soviet Russia. George Soros visited the university during our conference. He spoke to a crowded assembly, then walked through freshly painted halls, past a string quartet, to the gleaming facility of chrome, glass and new linoleum which his foundation had created, containing rows of late-model IBM PCs, all networked to each other and to the Internet. But in the short time he was there, he probably did not have occasion to use the men’s room…and it was just as well. For several days the university had had no running water—for failure to pay its utility bill!

The fiscal crisis in which Russia has seemed endlessly mired means that public investment has not been an engine of Internet growth for the country. In spite of this, it is now estimated that more than one million citizens are regular Internet users and Russia has 225,000 host computers. In a nation which values science and technical training so highly, there is a large cadre of technical talent with which to "build out" the Internet. The scarce factor is fiscal and political stability.

Can the Internet also help here? Can it help to "build out" those public institutions and behaviors of civil society whose absence has plagued political and economic development in Russia throughout the nineties? A recent inititiative of Friends and Partners says "yes" to this question—at least at a local level. Its Russian Civic Networking Program (RCNP), supported first by the Eurasia Foundation and now by Ford, is a "cooperative Russia-U.S. project to promote development and wide-spread availability of advanced telecommunications technologies and civic networking to enhance the delivery of social services and generally serve public interests; to promote access to government information and increase civic participation; and to support the advancement of a nationwide civic networking infrastructure in Russia."

The first year of the RCNP was conducted in three cities—Chelyabinsk, Samara, and Sergiev Posad—and efforts seem to have concentrated on establishing the Internet connection, developing public access points, and training citizens in how to use networked computers. In the current phase, with Ford’s support, the project is being expanded to three more cities in Russia—names to be announced at the end of 1999. The next two years will therefore see RCNP activities going forward in six Russian cities.

There is much to be said for the primary goal of RCNP—expanding citizens’ access to information through computer technologies—even if it remains somewhat unclear how Internet-based "civic networks" in fact will lead to more citizen empowerment in Russia, and to changes in institutions such as local government, law enforcement, education, and health care. It seems an experiment very much worth trying, however, in a country where the suppression of information for so many decades was the central objective of public policy. Against the famous dictum of Karl Marx—"The point is not to understand the world, it is to change it!"—the RCNP is based on a quiet confidence that scientia potestas est, or, knowledge is power.