January 9, 2001   

This Date's Issues:   5014 • 5015

Johnson's Russia List
#5014
9 January 2001
davidjohnson@erols.com

[Note from David Johnson:
1. Kennan Institute meeting report: Joseph Dresen, Looking Back at the Origins of Soviet Studies.
2. Kenneth Baillie: JRL #5011, #8 Cohen/Salvation Army: A Followup.
3. Christian Science Monitor: Fred Weir, Russia to revise crime, penalty. Parliament is expected to approve a prison overhaul this month that could free thousands of prisoners.
4. Reuters: Turner funds effort against mass destruction arms.
5. Reuters: Swedish PM eyes closer EU-Russia ties.
6. eurasianet.org: Andrew Apostolou, Changing US Administration Provides Opportunity For Review Of Caspian Policy.
7. Current History: Rafal Rohozinski, How the Internet Did Not Transform Russia.]

******

#1
Kennan Institute meeting report
Looking Back at the Origins of Soviet Studies
By Joseph Dresen

"Early Soviet Studies in Light of Newly Available Materials" (October 19,
2000) Lecture at the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International
Center for Scholars, Washington, D.C.

"If you had surveyed the scope of American scholarly research on foreign
countries in 1939, declared Joseph Berliner, Professor Emeritus, Department
of Economics, Brandeis University during a 19 October 2000 lecture at the
Kennan Institute, you would have concluded that the USSR was a very minor
player on the world scene, with very little impact on the lives of Americans.
By the 1950s, according to Robert Tucker, Professor Emeritus, Department of
Politics, Princeton University, there was an intense, well-informed debate
about the nature of the Soviet political order. Both speakers and the
lecture's discussant, Abbott Gleason, Professor, Department of History, Brown
University, and former Director, Kennan Institute, stressed the importance of
newly accessible Soviet archives in evaluating the predictions of the early
Soviet studies specialists.

To address the lack of expertise on their new wartime ally, the U.S.
government established an intelligence gathering unit in the newly created
Office for Strategic Services (OSS) in 1941. After the war, veterans from
this unit went on to work in U.S. universities, educating the first post-war
generation of scholars who took up a specialization on the Soviet Union
within their disciplines. The rapid expansion of Soviet studies, a product of
the cold war rather than an expression of purely scholarly interest in Soviet
society, was funded by government and foundation grants, and took the form of
research centers, graduate programs, research grants, and journals. By 1950,
the first wave of new scholars were completing their doctorates and launching
their careers, and by 1960 the field of scholarship (soon dubbed by the
then-disparaging term sovietology) was in full swing.

Because of the secretive nature of the Soviet order, this new field of study
did not lend itself to direct examination. Instead, scholars were forced to
find alternate methods of interpreting this system. Tucker noted that a
particularly formative experience for him, while serving in the U.S. embassy
in Moscow in the 1940s, was going to the Lenin Library to research changes in
Russian policy toward Poland after the victory over Napoleon in the war of
1812. He learned that the Soviet Union had to be interpreted in the context
of Russian history. It was this experience, and such writings as George
Kennan's comparing Stalin's rule to the evolution of the tsarist autocracy,
that led Tucker to conclude, "the one-party system had given way to a
one-person system; the ruling party to a ruling personage."

During the 1940s and 1950s, theories on the nature of totalitarianism were
developed and debated. Tucker stated that according to the writings of Hannah
Arendt and Zbigniew Brzezinski, the Soviet Union, as a totalitarian power,
was driven by ideology rather than Stalin as an individual. This model did
not fit well with what we now know actually happened in the Soviet Union,
Tucker declared.

In early 1953, for example, Soviet Russia was paralyzed with fear over
official pronouncements signaling the start of a new round of purges.
Stalin's death in March 1953 not only forestalled this new round of purges,
but led to a subsiding of internal terror. On the day after Stalin's funeral,
Georgi Malenkov, then the head of the Soviet government, stated in a meeting
of party leaders that "much happened in connection with [Stalin's]
personality cult we consider it obligatory to bring to an end the policies of
the personality cult." This statement was first published in 1991, Tucker
noted.

In the social sciences demanding concrete data, such as economics, the lack
of access to data presented obvious challenges to early Soviet specialists.
Other obstacles were less obvious but equally challenging, stated Berliner.
One example is that political constraints on Soviet economists curtailed any
kind of balance in Soviet writings on their own economy. Berliner recounted
meeting as a young scholar with a senior economist at the Institute of
Economics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and how he brashly lectured on
price theory and the importance of using interest rates to properly measure
the cost of capital. "You know," replied the Soviet economist, "I wrote a
number of articles on that subject before I was arrested."

The offset to this lack of openness, according to Berliner, was the Soviet
practice of "self-criticism." Intended to shield society from corruption, the
accounts in the Soviet press never implicated top officials. These stories
did describe all sorts of schemes at the enterprise level and became an
invaluable source of information on how the Soviet economy actually worked.

Perhaps the biggest criticism against Soviet specialists, noted Berliner, is
their failure to predict the collapse of the USSR. But, Berliner pointed out,
they had correctly identified the sources of inefficiency and retardation. If
Soviet specialists were geologists instead of social scientists, they could
be said to have correctly identified the fault lines where the earthquake
might occur, but lacked the means to forecast when and how it would occur.

Commenting on the presentations, Gleason added that new information from the
opened archives has provided valuable insights, especially on the conduct of
Soviet foreign policy. He emphasized, however, the early critical work of the
two speakers in shaping our understanding the Soviet Union with only the
scarcest of data available to rely upon.

Joseph Dresen is program associate at the Kennan Institute.

*******

#2
Date: Mon, 08 Jan 2001
From: Kenneth_Baillie@rus.salvationarmy.org (Kenneth Baillie)
Subject: JRL #5011, #8 Cohen/Salvation Army: A Followup

Kudos to Ariel Cohen for his article on our Salvation Army problems in
Moscow.  Dozens of articles in print and programs on the airwaves have, at
last count, run in 24 countries but Cohen's summary is among the best
researched and written of them all.  The few minor errors of fact are not
worth quibbling about.

Many of the media stories, including Cohen's, have concentrated on the
failings of government bureaucrats.  I would like to comment on another
aspect of the story which has not received much attention: the Moscow
courts.

We filed our application with the city in February 1999, and received the
denial six months later.  Then we began our lawsuit in September 1999.  The
lower court claimed it didn't have jurisdiction, sending us to another
lower court. The second court also claimed a lack of jurisdiction.  A
higher court finally sent the case back to the original court. It seemed
the courts were not keen to dispense justice but only to avoid the religion
hot potato issue.  A year was wasted, not to mention the legal fees.

At last a hearing was set.  The city called for more time (a year isn't
enough?).  Another hearing was set.  Our lawyers showed up for argument and
filed a written brief but the city didn't send their attorney. Under the
legal rules a defendant's failure to defend should have brought a summary
judgment for the plaintiff.  But unbeknownst to us, and in violation of
legal procedures, the city filed their brief privately with the court.  We
were not even aware of its existence until the court handed down its
decision later. We were astonished to find exactly one sentence about our
arguments, which merely noted that we argued.  Then the city's previously
undisclosed brief was copied page after page as the court's judgment.

There is more.  The city had orginally denied our registration for four
simple reasons, contained in a mere two short paragraphs.  Now the city
introduced a long list of new reasons why we should not be registered.
This was another violation of legal procedure: the appeal should have dealt
only with the earlier four 'reasons', and could not introduce anything new.
Yet the court allowed it.

The city/court arguments were legal nonsense: misreadings and
misapplications of the 1997 law, and unsubstantiated charges against the
Salvation Army.  Much has been written in the media about the word 'army'
in our name being taken to mean we must be a para-military, subversive
group. Over and over I have been asked by reporters if what I said about
this is for real. Yes.  I quoted directly from the court document. The
city/court cited passages from various Russian laws against formation of
insurrectionist military groups.  Well, sure, every country outlaws
insurrection.  But the head-snapper is to quote the various laws, then say
we might be such a group so therefore we should not be granted
registration.  Not so much as a single instance of illegal activity was
alleged in support of the charge.  We have been working in Moscow since
1992 and have been fully and properly registered all that time.  You would
think that by now, if we were a dangerous group, someone would be able to

present some proof to that effect.  It is a sad commentary on the court
that it would allow ugly smear tactics to be dignified as a supposedly
legal judgment.

We went to the appeals court level.  Our lawyers listed all the violations
of procedure in the lower court's actions, which surely showed blatant
prejudice against us, yet the appeals court upheld everything done
previously.

Some city officials have been a problem for us with their injustice,
irrationality and prejudice. But I submit that the city courts have also
been a problem.  The President has said the country is in need of a
'dictatorship of law'.  I'll leave off commenting about the dictatorship
part but I can vouche for the law part: we surely need some.

Ken Baillie, Colonel
The Salvation Army, Moscow

******

#3
Christian Science Monitor
January 9, 2001
Russia to revise crime, penalty
Parliament is expected to approve a prison overhaul this month that could
free thousands of prisoners.
By Fred Weir
Special to The Christian Science Monitor

Russia, home to the world's largest prison population, is planning imminent
changes to a penal code that many regard as unwieldy, often arbitrary and
unfair.

But in the drive to improve justice, while saving money for the
cash-strapped government, there are concerns that the overhaul could simply
deposit hundreds of thousands of prisoners on the streets with no
provisions for adjustment back into society.

Even critics concede the new law, which parliament is expected to pass this
month, might signal the first-ever sweeping cleanup of Russia's overcrowded
and brutality-plagued prisons. The law's proposed limits on pretrial
detention, reduced sentences for petty crimes, and expansion of the
probation system could lead to the release of as many as 350,000 prisoners
within months.

"It is only half a step forward, but it will partially relieve some of the
ugliest problems," says Maj. Gen. Sergei Vitsin, one of Russia's leading
criminologists and an adviser to both the Kremlin and the Helsinki Group, a
Russian human rights movement based in Moscow. "Our state is being pushed
into this reform for urgent financial reasons, but the logic leads in a
progressive direction."

More than 20 million Russians have passed through the prison system, one of
the world's harshest, in the past three decades. One out of 4 Russian
adults either has been in jail personally or had a family member
incarcerated.

Despite hopes for improvement in the decade since the Soviet Union
collapsed, human rights experts say conditions in the far-flung network of
jails, prison camps, and detention centers, which house more than 1 million
inmates, remain squalid and desperate.

"Nothing has changed," says Larissa Bogoraz, a former Soviet dissident who
spent years in the gulag prison-camp system and now works as a human rights
consultant. "Anyone who enters our prisons can expect to have no rights, no
hope, not a shred of mercy."

It is hoped that the new law, which has already passed two parliamentary
readings, will dramatically reduce overcrowding and in the short run, at
least theoretically, enable the state to improve nutrition and living
conditions for the remaining prisoners.

But an amnesty of 120,000 convicts last year proved insufficient and
unsatisfactory. "An amnesty is a one-time measure that lets off steam, but
does not address the underlying problems of our system," says Oleg
Filimonov, deputy chief of Russia's department of corrections and the main
author of the new law. "We need sustained reforms that will make our
prisons more humane and fair, as well as more efficient."

Russia's pretrial detention centers currently house more than 300,000
suspects, who are often held for five years or even longer while police
investigate their offenses. These jails - known as SIZO - have a reputation
for brutality and neglect. "Police continued to torture detainees in order
to secure confessions, using methods like beatings, asphyxiation, [and]
electric shock ... as well as psychological intimidation," notes New
York-based Human Rights Watch in its year 2000 report on Russia. Experts
say SIZO inmates are often packed into cells with sitting-room only, forced
to sleep in shifts, and given inadequate food, clothing, and medical care.
AIDS, tuberculosis, and other diseases are a major problem.

Mr. Filimonov says the main impact of the new law will be to slash
permitted pretrial detention to a maximum of one year, and to implement a
bail system for those charged with minor crimes. "Many of these prisoners
are not people who need to be kept isolated from society," he says. "Our
system is traditionally based on tough measures and no consideration for
the accused. The definitions need to be changed."

The law also includes measures to make probation more accessible and rapid,
to create a network of minimum-security prisons for minor offenders, and to
reduce restrictions on family visits and other forms of outside aid for
prisoners. Filimonov says the new rules will not apply to those convicted
of serious crimes, which he says include murder, treason, and terrorism.

Critics worry that the proposals do not go far enough. "There needs to be a
radical decriminalization of whole swaths of our criminal code," says Major
General Vitsin. Many things that would be handled under civil law in the
West - such as failure to shovel a snowy walkway that a pedestrian slips on
- are treated as criminal matters in Russia. "Huge numbers of citizens go
to jail where they should simply pay fines or do community service," the
general says. Offenses that would be considered misdemeanors in the US,
such as shoplifting, often draw sentences of years at hard labor.

"Our system of justice is excessively punitive," says Vitsin. "Taking a
harsh and uncompromising stance against crime clearly has not worked. Look
around you, our society is more criminalized than ever."

The new law makes no provision for reeducating police, judges, and prison
guards. The financially strapped Russian government has no money for such
frills, says Filimonov: "We are doing what we can and must do right now."

Experts say the imminent mass release of prisoners is not as controversial
as a similar event might be in the US. "Too many Russians have been exposed
to the prison system," says Leonid Sedov, a sociologist with the
independent Institute of Public Opinion Research in Moscow. "Peoples'
sympathies tend to be with the prisoners, not with the state - at least
when it comes to minor criminals."

Largely absent from the discussion is any consideration of what happens to
former inmates once they hit the streets. "This is typical of our country.
We take sweeping measures without thinking through the consequences," says
Col. Lyudmila Tropina, deputy head of the Moscow police force's department
of juvenile affairs. "We are not asking if these people have homes to
return to, or any means of making an honest living. We will simply turn
them loose and congratulate ourselves for enacting reforms and saving the
state's resources.

"But if there is no sustained effort to follow released prisoners into the
community and help them to adjust, it is guaranteed that most of them will
fall into the orbit of criminal gangs. Soon they will be back in prison,
and what will we have solved?"

*******

#4
Turner funds effort against mass destruction arms
By Tabassum Zakaria
 
WASHINGTON, Jan 8 (Reuters) - Media mogul Ted Turner said on Monday he
would fund a new group of high profile politicians and other figures
dedicated to eliminating nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.

"We should not miss this opportunity to make the world a safer place for
all of us," Turner said at a media conference to announce his Nuclear
Threat Initiative.

Turner, who founded CNN and is now vice chairman of Time Warner Inc.
<TWX.N>, pledged $250 million over five years for the effort.

The group includes Swedish diplomat Rolf Ekeus, who headed the U.N. Special
Commission on Iraq from 1991 to 1997, former U.S. Defense Secretary William
Perry, and Republican senators Pete Domenici of New Mexico and Richard
Lugar of Indiana. Also on the board is Andrei Kokoshin, a member of the
Russian parliament and former first deputy defense minister in Russia.

The co-chairman of the initiative will be former senator Sam Nunn, once
rumored to be a candidate for defense secretary in President-elect Bush's
Cabinet until the Georgia Democrat said he was not interested in returning
to government service.

Nunn said the nuclear initiative was a factor behind that consideration.

The organization, which held its first board meeting on Monday, aims to
fill niches and stimulate private sector funding for various efforts to
curb weapons of mass destruction.

While the group intends to focus on the nuclear threat, it also planned to
address biological and chemical weapons "which are in fact more likely to
be used," Nunn said.

An example of a possible project would be to provide venture capital for
private firms willing to hire Russian biological scientists for commercial
endeavors.

The United States has been concerned that experts in nuclear, biological
and chemical weapons from Russia and the former Soviet Union find peaceful
venues to utilize their knowledge and skills.

Another potential project would be to fund the development of an early
warning system for threats from biological agents due to "terrorism" or
other reasons, Nunn said.

The Wold Health Organization, Centers for Disease Control, and other groups
are working on this, he said. "They have a long way to go, we're going to
take a keen interest, that will be one of the projects we look at right up
front," Nunn said.

He said the aim of his new group was to stimulate progress through other
organizations. "We're not going to run programs as such, we're going to
basically try to contribute to and get other people to run them," Nunn said.

The group, which will have a staff of 20 to 30, was not expected to engage
in significant lobbying, but may fund  non-governmental organizations,
pilot programs and education efforts, Nunn said.

Turner once offered to donate $1 billion to erase the U.S. debt to the
United Nations but was not allowed to do that, so instead he made a gift in
that amount to special U.N. humanitarian projects.

Last month he donated $34 million to help close a deal that cut U.S.
payments to the United Nations.

*******

#5
Swedish PM eyes closer EU-Russia ties
By Gareth Jones
 
STOCKHOLM, Jan 8 (Reuters) - Swedish Prime Minister Goran Persson said on
Monday he wanted to build up relations between Russia and the European
Union during his country's six-month EU presidency which began last week.

Speaking after a brief trip to Germany for talks with Chancellor Gerhard
Schroeder which were dominated by Russia, Persson sounded an optimistic
note about Moscow's prospects.

"We have good Russian economic development, a Russian president with good
popular support, a Russian administration gaining more and more in
legitimacy," Persson said.

"We must use this period of Russian recovery to build a much closer
relationship with the European Union," he told a group of visiting
Brussels-based journalists after his return to Stockholm.

Schroeder had been briefing EU president Persson on a private trip the
German leader made to Russia over the weekend -- when Russians marked the
Orthodox Christmas -- at the invitation of President Vladimir Putin.

"What Chancellor Schroeder said about Russia confirmed my opinion that we
have a very promising situation in Russia now," Persson said.

He alluded to some of the grim problems still facing Russia, including
disposal of nuclear waste and other environmental issues, but added: "I am
hopeful about Russia, and have good reason to be so."

EU CREEPING CLOSER TO RUSSIA

Neutral Sweden has made EU enlargement a priority of its presidency and is
particularly keen to admit Moscow's former Baltic satellites of Estonia,
Latvia and Lithuania.

It also wants to channel EU help to Russia's Baltic enclave of Kaliningrad,
which will become boxed in by EU territory once Poland and Lithuania join
the Union. Kaliningrad has grave environmental and public health problems.

Earlier, Swedish Foreign Minister Anna Lindh told reporters the EU under
Stockholm's chairmanship would not shy away from confronting Russia on
issues where they differed.

"We want a frank, open dialogue which includes criticism of issues like
Chechnya and media freedom," she said.

While Putin's pledges to cement market reforms have won wide backing in the
West, his conduct of the war against rebel fighters in Chechnya and his
action against Russia's only independent media empire, Media-Most, have
raised doubts about his commitment to a fully open, pluralist democracy.

Russia is enjoying good economic growth after a decade of contraction,
though economists say it is largely due to higher oil prices and the
continued effects of the rouble devaluation which followed its 1998
financial crash.

EU officials have been trying to convince Russia that EU enlargement
represents a golden opportunity, not a threat, to Moscow's own economic
prospects.

ENLARGEMENT A TOUGH SLOG

In his remarks to reporters on Monday, Persson made clear that Swedish
commitment to enlargement did not mean any softening of the tough criteria
which the 12 candidate countries, mostly from the old Soviet bloc, must meet.

"Sweden has perhaps been among the strongest advocates of eastern
enlargement, but now we have the responsibilities of the presidency," he
said.

"We must keep up the pressure on the applicant countries... There are no
free lunches. It is extremely difficult to adjust your regulations, laws,
democratic processes to what is needed inside the EU," he said.

The EU, which now has 15 members, says it will be ready to admit the first
candidates by the start of 2003, though they are not expected to formally
join before 2004 at the earliest.

*******

#6
eurasianet.org 
January 8, 2001 
Changing US Administration Provides Opportunity For Review Of Caspian Policy
By Andrew Apostolou
Editor's Note: Andrew Apostolou is a historian at St. Antony's College,
Oxford.

The change of administration in the US provides an opportunity for Washington
to review a confused Caspian Sea policy. US Caspian Sea policy has strayed
from the original parameters set by President Clinton in May 1998. The result
has been the invention of pipeline proposals that are based more on politics
than economics, and act as a source of tension among governments and western
oil companies.

President Clinton said in May 1998 that pipelines should be financed by the
private sector, and be commercially viable. Since then, however, the US State
Department has altered policy into one of promoting any oil or gas export
pipeline that will avoid crossing Russia or Iran. This policy, which is a
different from President Clinton's initial vision, is mostly political,
designed to further isolate Iran while pushing Russian influence out of the
Caspian Sea.

There is a degree of economic logic to this State Department approach. Both
Russia and Iran are competitors in the oil and gas markets of Caspian Sea
exporters -- Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan. Russia and Iran would
probably not hesitate to restrict Azerbaijani, Kazakh or Turkmen oil and gas
exports, if they felt that these upcoming rivals from the Caspian Sea were
eating into their markets.

The main pipeline proposal being pushed by the State Department has been the
Baku-Ceyhan oil export pipeline, to run from Azerbaijan to Georgia and then
finally to the Turkish Mediterranean oil terminal at Ceyhan. On paper the
proposal looks good: it avoids Russia and Iran, and ends in Turkey, a western
ally and energy importer with no reason to restrict Caspian Sea energy
exports.

The problem has long been that few in the oil and gas industry believe that
Baku-Ceyhan is commercially viable. Most firms in the Azerbaijan
International Operating Company (AIOC), the main foreign oil consortium in
Azerbaijan, have yet to commit oil to Baku-Ceyhan. Baku-Ceyhan is to have
capacity of 1 million barrels per day (b/d), yet AIOC will only produce
800,000 b/d at its peak. Three AIOC firms, Exxon Mobil (USA), LUKoil (Russia)
and Pennzoil (USA), seem set to shun the pipeline altogether, reducing total
potential AIOC throughput to 616,000 b/d.

Claims that Kazakh oil will make up the gap are premature. An accurate
estimate of reserves in Kazakhstan's claimed offshore sector will not be
available until the end of 2002. Even then, an additional pipeline would have
to be built from the Kazakh-claimed oilfields in the northeastern Caspian Sea
to Baku, costing yet more money on top of the $2.4 billion to $3.7 billion
estimated for Baku-Ceyhan.

Oil industry sources have repeatedly pointed out that if Baku-Ceyhan were
commercially viable, then it would already have been built. Amoco (USA),
before its merger with BP (UK), claimed that Baku-Ceyhan would need $200
million per year in subsidies from the US government to be viable. Rather
than engage with the oil companies and take account of the independent
studies which have criticised Baku-Ceyhan, the State Department has instead
tried to pressure them into paying for a pipeline they do not want. There is
an irony here. On the one hand, the US government preaches the virtues of the
free market and privatisation to former Communist countries, yet the same US
government is trying to force privately-owned western oil companies to build
a pipeline that suits its political convenience more than the best interests
of these companies' shareholders.

By repeatedly stressing that Baku-Ceyhan is commercially viable, the State
Department has undermined relations among, on the one hand, the governments
of Azerbaijan and Turkey and, on the other, western oil companies such as BP
Amoco and Exxon-Mobil. The State Department has encouraged officials in
Azerbaijan and Turkey to believe that BP Amoco and Exxon-Mobil's skepticism
about Baku-Ceyhan is not well founded.

The problem is that what the US government says tends to be taken much more
seriously outside the US than within. Many oil industry analysts tend to
react with skepticism to claims made by US officials concerning the Caspian
Sea, including an assertion that there are 200 billion barrels of oil
reserves in the Caspian Sea. Unfortunately, officials in the region take such
claims at face value, concluding that the US government knows something that
they do not. Similarly, when the State Department tells them that Baku-Ceyhan
is commercially viable, the governments conclude, wrongly, that the State
Department knows more about oil export pipelines than BP Amoco or
Exxon-Mobil.

Most of the oil companies in AIOC have now formed a "sponsor group" that will
undertake a series of studies on the pipeline's viability. These will
conveniently postpone any final decision for another eighteen months, by
which time everybody will have forgotten the already missed March 1998
deadline for a decision on whether to build Baku-Ceyhan, and the primacy of
commercial over political considerations will perhaps have won out.

*******

#7
Current History
October 2000
How the Internet Did Not Transform Russia
Rafal Rohozinski, University of Cambridge. (rar20@cus.cam.ac.uk)
About the Author.
Rafal Rohozinski is a doctoral candidate in the Faculty of Social and
Political Sciences at the University of Cambridge, Trinity College,
and has served with the United Nations as an adviser on "digital
divide" issues in the former Soviet Union, the Middle East, Africa,
and Asia. This article draws on the author's  report, "Mapping
Russian Cyberspace: A Perspective on Democracv and the Net" (Geneva:
UNRISD, 1999). It is available on the Internet at
http://www.unrisd.org/infotech/conferen/russian/toc.htm

"In Russia, "the 'new dog' of the Internet was adapted and used to
perform the 'old tricks' inherent to the Soviet system. Nine years
after the Soviet system's demise, the legacy of that system and its
attendant social order continues to influence and help shape  the
size, character and, social texture of the Russian Net."
                                                                  * * *
0n August 21, 1991, a group of senior Soviet officials conspiring to
oust President Mikhail Gorbachev declared a state of emergency
Although they immediately attempted to muzzle the central press and
television stations, their information-control tactics were not
foolproof: a group of computer programmers began cybercasting
information across a heretofore unheard-of computer network
Relcom/Demos-with nodes across the Soviet Union. Within hours, a
temporary node was established in the Russian parliament, allowing
Russian Federation President Boris Yeltsin's rejection of the coup to
be e-mailed to Russia's regions and abroad. Local journalists began
to circulate news reports through the network, many of which were
reproduced in local media uncensored by the central authorities. By
the evening of the coup attempt, the Relcom/Demos network had become
an active channel of communication between Moscow and the regions,
linking a multitude of major and minor actors opposed to the old
guard's attempt to overthrow the government.

Relcom's role in "defeating" the attempted coup was heralded in the
West as a concrete example of a popular paradigm: freedom of
information and the means to communication were keys to dismantling
the "evil empire." Accounts of Relcom's role during the coup soon
grew totally out of proportion to its real significance, and many
commentators feeding on the general euphoria surrounding the Soviet
collapse-freely espoused what they saw as the "organic" connection
among information technologies, social change, and democracy

This heady interpretation of 1991 fit within a wider utopic framework
that saw information technologies as socially "transformative":
information technologies empower individuals in their relationship to
institutions, ergo, information technologies promote democracy and
freedom. Surely the ideas proposed by writers such as Frances
Caincross, Nicholas Negroponte, and Francis Fukuyama point to a
readily observable phenomenon-namely, that advances in cheap and
accessible telecommunications have changed power relations between
individuals and institutions. However, the leap to declaring that
these technologies also have the ability to reinforce, or even
create, democracies is a long one indeed. And yet throughout the
early 1990s, the argument that the "Internet = democracy" coagulated
into an informal ideology, as academic cited journalist cited
academic until the stories they told took on the credibility and
respectability of established facts. Although more recent studies
have increasingly problematized the relationships between the
Internet and democracy, the lingering influence of 1990s rhetoric is
still evident.

Relcom's appearance in 1991 also served to reinforce an already
established tendency to see the Soviet transition as a linear
progression from a planned economy and oppressive past to a
market-oriented, democratic future. Within this paradigm, the Soviet
Union's demise represented the victory of Western values. And, in a
sense, the people's protest against the 1991 coup (which threatened a
return to pre-glasnost days) was thought to exemplify this underlying
linear social evolution. The Internet's role in enabling this popular
protest served to reinforce the idea that Russia was moving toward
greater openness and freedom, and that the Internet was the
handmaiden to this linear transformation.

Yet, nine years after Relcom's public debut, it is not clear that the
Internet has significantly transformed Russia. Nor has the
"transition" brought Russia into the fold of Western liberal
democracies. Russia has defined its own unique bit of cyberspace that
at present is home to around 1.2 million of its 150 million citizens.
However, the Russian Net's variegated terrain and social functions
are more reflections of the Internet's adaptation to Russia, rather
than its transformation of Russia.

To understand the present and potential future of the Russian Net, we
must look beyond the technology of computer networks to the premises,
practices, and practicalities of life in the Soviet past.
Specifically, the failure of the Soviet state sector to develop an
open, Internet-type computer network must be contrasted against the
successful emergence of such a network within the "informal" sphere,
meaning outside formal state control. Making sense of this paradox
illuminates core features of the Soviet and post-Soviet context: the
tension between public values and private norms and the subversion of
public resources for private gain, both of which continue to
influence the growth and development of the Russian Net.

PUBLIC VALUES, PRIVATE NORMS

During the Soviet era, formal power was vested in the hands of the
Communist Party. Politically, economically and socially, the official
system espoused values that left little need for autonomous
individual action and limited scope for activities that were not
subsumed to the dominance of Soviet institutions.

In reality, life in the Soviet Union did not conform to the Soviet
ideological blueprint. The rhetoric of efficiency and equality that
dominated the official system stood in sharp contrast to the stark
realities of everyday life, which were characterized by resource
shortages, breadlines, bureaucratic red tape, and party privilege.
For individuals to live (or pursue private advantage), they had to
devise strategies to thwart authority, circumvent bureaucracy, and
subvert the pervasive control of institutions. This disjuncture
between official ideals and everyday realities caused Soviet citizens
to develop a culture of existing in two spheres of life: the public
or official sphere, where they upheld (at least rhetorically) the
values of the institutional order; and the private or unofficial
sphere, where they acted in accordance to a different set of norms
that were linked to personal and private interests. Generally,
private-sphere strategies involved individuals leveraging their
positions within public institutions for personal gain. This was
often done by building up informal personal social networks--blat in
Russian-through which individuals could trade information and access
to goods and services. On a systemic level, blat acted as an "old
boys network" that facilitated the workings of the otherwise
stultifying Soviet bureaucracy. (Soviet industry was also full of
tolkachi or pushers, whose job was to ensure that supplies for
critical inputs were met, and excess demand successfully and shrewdly
disposed of.) Thus, blat was the essential grease that made the
Soviet system work on both the individual and institutional levels.

The divide between public values and private norms is important for
understanding the history of official and unofficial networking
efforts in the Soviet Union, as well as the contours of the current
Russian networking scene.

Historically, Soviet officials had an ambiguous relationship with the
idea of two-way communications, reflecting the contradictory needs of
officially maintaining central control while seeking private means to
personally subvert this same control. Stalin is said to have replied
to a call for the creation of a modem state telephone system with the
remark, " I can imagine no greater instrument of counter-revolution
in our time." At the same time, "telephone rule "-instructions given
by telephone from the center-was one of the hallmarks of the
Stalinist era.

The Soviet government's contradictory relationship with the
communication and control aspects of telecommunications has left its
mark on the telecommunications infrastructure. Soviet telephony
evolved as an accretion of private telephone networks-each
representing a different layer and level in the various state and
party bureaucracies' telephone systems, rather than a unified whole.
For example, 1991 figures indicate that only 55 percent of the total
telephone stock was connected to a public telephone network; the
remaining 45 percent was dispersed among a vast array of private or
"branch systems" belonging to state ministries, military and security
organizations, the party, and large industrial conglomerates. This
communication/control pathology that drove the Soviet pattern of
telecommunications development also worked to stymie official efforts
to develop and implement computer networks in the Soviet Union, while
encouraging the growth of "unofficial" networks, meaning networks
that were formed outside the official sphere.

ROUTING AROUND "BIG BROTHER"

During the early 1960s, the Soviet leadership became interested in
the potential that computers and computer networks held to resolve a
myriad of logistical and managerial challenges inherent in an
increasingly complex central planning system and economy. Several
leading academicians impressed the Soviet leadership with the
technical possibility of building a state data-transmission network
that would support central economic management.

As the technical plans threatened to turn into actual projects, few
within the beneficiary institutions welcomed the development of the
proposed computer networks. At issue was the question of control and
what that meant in the context of Soviet public/private relations.

 From an institutional perspective, the institution that controlled
the planned network would have access to a valuable resource, which
could be traded for other lucrative favors. From an individual
perspective, however (that is, from the perspective of managers who
worked within these same institutions), the networks were seen as a
potential threat to their personal field of action; managers feared
that the transparency and surveillance potential of the networks
could be used by their superiors to limit their "private use" of the
public resources they controlled. Thus from the outset, plans for the
state network were held back by inter-institutional rivalry for
control and intra-institutional resistance by line managers tasked
with the network's creation. By 1989, only segments of the network
were operational. 1

While state-directed initiatives to build computer networks withered,
privately run networks emerged and flourished, often with the tacit
agreement of the same line managers and directors who resisted
official networking efforts. By 1991, it was these hidden networks
that formed the largest and fastest-growing segment of Russia's
emerging Net.

The first unofficial computer network-Relcom/Demos-came into being as
a by-product of an unofficial effort by a group of widely dispersed
computer programmers. Their goal was to create a version of the Unix
operating system (os) that would function on Soviet computer
hardware. Throughout the 1980s, Soviet computer programmers had
become convinced of the merits of Unix over existing Soviet
counterparts. However, Unix was not accepted as an official os in the
Soviet Union, and therefore the source code was nearly impossible to
find -- officially. In reality, bits of the os code had made their
way to the Soviet Union through a variety of sources. By the
mid-1980s an elaborate system of semi-legal informal exchanges which
at times involved highly risky "deals" between programmers at secret
military industrial institutions and civilian institutions-coalesced
into a loose and completely unofficial network of computer
programmers spanning the Soviet Union, devoted to the problems and
challenges of Unix.

At the end of the decade, the informal effort around Unix had borne
fruit: some Moscow-based programmers had developed Demos-a Unix-like
operating system that could run on Soviet-made computer hardware.
Shortly thereafter, an unofficial computer network-Relcom/Demos-that
used Demos and the built-in networking protocols of Unix, began to
take shape. However, the success of the Demos os was short-lived; by
1989, personal computers (Pcs) had become more available and with
them new versions of the Unix os. Perversely, this made Unix even
more attractive since it could now be supported by relatively
inexpensive (and reliable) Pcs rather than Soviet mainframes. As a
consequence, Relcom added increasingly more nodes to its network,
encompassing an ever expanding range of institutions linked by
personal or professional circles of interest. By 1990, the social
aspects of Relcom overtook its purely technical discussions, and
e-mail and access to newsgroups became its most salient and
compelling features, especially after Relcom/Demos managed to
establish "unofficial" international connectivity to the Internet
through Finland in September 1990. 2

By 1991, Relcom/Demos nodes spanned more than 120 towns and cities
encompassing 20,000 users in more than 1,000 organizations across the
Soviet Union. The nodes were located in public institutions (usually
former computing centers), financed from official funds, used public
infrastructure, and supported by the same institute directors and
senior managers who viewed government-sanctioned networks with
suspicion. Yet the network itself remained unofficial and hidden from
the public sphere, in the same manner as the personal exchange
networks that had become so essential to the functioning of the
Soviet system.

By the beginning of 1991, Relcom's unofficial status had became
increasingly superfluous, as Soviet institutions slid toward terminal
decline. But the salience of its "unofficial" status remained
important to users of the network. Arguably, this was because the
informal and unofficial relationships that were established and
maintained on the Net closely resembled the everyday relationships of
exchange in the private sphere of existence-providing a means to
leverage informational capital safe from the public-sphere order.
Programmers and scientists soon recognized that the "unofficial" net
allowed them to bypass the formal bureaucratic hierarchy to access
colleagues, funding, and the means to organize travel and publication
that had been hitherto unthinkable. Similarly, enterprise directors
and entrepreneurs recognized the value of knowing the local prices of
goods and leveraging local shortages to realize huge profits. In
short, the unofficial Net was an important facilitator in the
exchange of informational currency among colleagues and friends.

By 1992-1993, the Soviet order had melted away. The old constraints
that had once defined the public sphere disappeared, replaced by
faith in the "transition" toward a democratic, market-oriented
post-Soviet future. In the resulting economic "shock" programs, state
funding for public institutions dried up. As such, sustaining Relcom.
nodes on the fringes of the state budget was no longer possible for
most institutions. Relcom rapidly commercialized and became, in
effect, a pay-as-you-go franchise network open to anyone with the
means to pay.

Commercialization opened Relcom to a new generation of Net users ---
entrepreneurs who recognized  its power to fill the vacuum left by
the collapse of Soviet-era centralized economic planning and
distribution mechanisms. In the absence of a functioning market,
these virtual tolkachi pushed Relcom into hosting a bewildering array
of newsgroups dedicated to the sale and trade of commodities and
goods - especially between 1992 and 1994, when they acted as a
virtual "electronic commodities exchange" facilitating the sale and
purchase of everything from sugar to surplus military equipment.

COLONIZING THE INTERNET

The uniqueness of the Russian Net and its unofficial beginnings
resides in the way that Soviet social practices-the bifurcation
between public and private-sphere norms and behaviors embraced and
adapted cyberspace to technologically enhance existing patterns of
social relations. Thus, what is most interesting about the Internet's
emergence in Russia is not the way in which technology transformed
society, but rather the way in which society colonized the
technology. The "new dog" of the Internet was adapted and used to
perform the "old tricks" inherent to the Soviet system. Nine years
after the Soviet system's demise, the legacy of that system and its
attendant social order continues to influence and help shape the
size, character, and social texture of Russian Net.

At a technical level, the inherited Soviet telecommunications
infrastructure has greatly influenced the size and structure of
Russia's networks. For example, poor penetration of basic telephony
services by 1996 only 49 percent of urban families and 20 percent of
rural families had access to a private telephones-limits the maximum
number of potential users. Where no telephones exist, neither can the
Net. Second, unlike in the West, where the Net is largely defined by
its rich array of on-line services, in Russia the lack of local
telephone lines precludes reliable high-speed on-line connections.
Consequently, few local Internet service providers (ISP's) offer
on-line accounts. Access to the world wide web is generally
restricted to major cities; most users in the regions experience the
Internet through e-mail and newsgroups alone.

These two technical failings have conspired to limit the potential
growth of Russia as an Internet power: 1998 figures indicate that
Russia had roughly one Internet-connected computer for every 2,189
people, a rate far below most developed countries. In absolute terms,
studies suggest between 600,000 and 2.6 million Russians have access
to the Net, although several leading Setoviki (Russian network
luminaries) place the real figure at around 1.5 million users of
networks services of all kinds. And, while the Russian Net continued
to grow at impressive levels throughout 1998 and 1999 increasing by
30.1 percent, not far behind the United States rate of 32.4
percent-without significant and sustained investment, the limits of
Soviet-era infrastructure and penetration will invariably slow these
rates to much lower levels over the next few years. The cost of
Internet access also impacts significantly on the growth and
penetration of the Russian Net. As recently as 1995, Relcom charged
users for each byte of information sent and received. At present,
most ISP's still offer this option, since the cost of unlimited
Internet access varies between $30 and $70 per month (the average
monthly wage in Moscow, one of the country's wealthiest areas, is
only $100 to $300). In the regions, where wages are significantly
lower, the high cost of access represents a major barrier to growth.
Figures for 1997 indicate that Muscovites may account for up to 50
percent of all Russian Internet users.

The Soviet telecommunications inheritance, however, has had the
positive consequence of preventing the monopolization of network
services. As state enterprises dissolved and former government and
party offices were sold or rented to generate revenue for their new
owners, their independent Soviet-era telephone networks became
available as alternative sources of connectivity for ISPs that wanted
to distance themselves from the existing local, regional, and
national telephone operators. By 1998, Russia had more than 200 ISPs,
many of whom acted as "upstream" providers to a multitude of smaller
local outfits (Relcom had only 10 percent of the total market). And
while this changed somewhat in the wake of the collapse of the
Russian economy in 1998-which forced consolidation in the commercial
ISP industry and subsequently attracted greater interest from large
institutional players-by global standards the Russian ISP market
remains remarkably fragmented, and much more tolerant of cottage ISPs
than is the case elsewhere.

THE TECHNOLOGICAL ILLUSION

Since the mid-1990s the state sector has made a surprising, if not
unexpected, return to the networking sphere by seeking to assert a
measure of control over Russia's Net. In 1995, a presidential decree
banned the use of encryption algorithms or devices unless they were
certified by the Federal Agency for Government Communications and
Information, Russia's version of the United States National Security
Agency By early 2000, the Federal Security Service (FSB, the
successor to the KGB's domestic service) secured presidential assent
for a law requiring all ISPs to connect FSB offices, provide the
technical means to monitor network traffic, and offer assistance in
tracking and monitoring specific Internet addressees. Although this
proposed system, called the System for Operational-Investigative
Activities (SORM-2), has been criticized in the West as restricting
the Internet, many members of the Russian network community see
SORM-2 as largely unenforceable and impractical. It is viewed as an
attempt by individuals within the FSB to use regulation as a method
to extract lucrative payments from ISPs in return for certifying
their activities as "SORM-2 compliant."

The personal motives thought to underlie SORM-2 are just one small
example of how the legacy of Soviet-era institutional practices
continue, despite the imposition of economic shock therapy and the
illusions of democratic transformations. Personal networks remain
vital avenues for obtaining goods and services, as does the use and
abuse of power within institutions and government.

Despite its limited penetration of Russian society, the Russian Net
provides a technological lever for individuals to "route around" the
old and new obstacles of Russia's geographic enormity, its relative
underdevelopment, and its post-Soviet economic and political
disparities. True, the Net's growth cannot be divorced from the
global importance of information and communications technologies.
However, the continued relevance of unofficial networks in Russia
(especially Russia's Fidonet, which represents the single largest
segment of the Fidonet anywhere in the world) suggests they remain an
important cultural back channel for all important personal
networking.3

Russia's Internet development vividly demonstrates a wider point
concerning the error of assuming that information technologies are
the handmaidens of democratic development. As the Russian case shows,
the impact of information technologies is critically shaped by the
social context in which they are deployed. In this respect, Russia
cautions against our expectations regarding the transformative
character of these technologies-and perhaps more important, our
belief that through them Russia, or any other society, will
"transition" to a "democratic" future.

Endnotes.

1 A similar pattern of tension led to the relative failure of two
high-profile attempts aimed at creating Soviet scientific and
research networks similar in intent to ARAPNET-the Internets
forerunner-in the United States.

2 1n August 1990 a computer engineer, Leo Tomberg, visited some
colleagues at Demos in Moscow who had just purchased a new modem and
were in the midst of testing it. They decided to try to connect to a
server in Finland because a colleague of Tomberg's had recently been
there as visiting academic and still had his password and account on
the university Internet server. Within a few hours, the assembled
team had poked around the Finnish server enough to arouse the
attention of its administrator. A rapport was struck, culminating, on
September 13, 1990, with the Demos registration of the domain su
(Soviet Union) as the "official" address of the (then) Soviet segment
of the Internet. All this, of course, occurred without the knowledge
or agreement of anyone outside the Demos team.

3 Fidonet is the Internet's "shadow brother." it was developed in the
early 1980s by an American programmer to exchange information (mail,
news) between computer bulletin board systems. By 1990, Fidonet had
grown into a global network. In recent years the popularity of
Fidonet has declined everywhere but in Russia, where it has partially
taken over Relcom's old function as an informal network. Unlike
Relcom, Fidonet is cost-free, and "membership" is based on personal
contact with existing Fido users.

*****

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