This book offers a comparative perspective on the technological, economic, and political aspects of Internet development in the post-Soviet countries. In doing so, international experts analyze similarities and differences in various countries throughout the chapters. The volume consists of two parts. The chapters of the first part examine the post-Soviet area as a whole. The second part includes specific case studies on the development of the Internet, either in individual countries or in groups of countries. Countries analyzed are Estonia, Ukraine, Russia as well as three Central Asian countries: Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. Topics covered in the volume include, but are not limited to measurement, dynamics, and structure of each national Internet audience; the history of the Internet in the post-Soviet countries; development of infrastructure; Internet regulation and institutional aspects; online markets such as telecommunications, online advertising, e-commerce, and digital content; social and cultural aspects; as well as the transformation of the national media systems. This book is a must-read for students, researchers, and scholars of political science and economics, as well as policymakers and practitioners interested in a better understanding of Internet development in the post-Soviet area.

This study of the Russian internet explores how, when, and why the internet challenges leaders in non-free states. Using an analysis of content, community, catalysts, control, and co-optation, Revolution Stalled moves beyond 'virtual' politics to show how the internet can threaten and defy information hegemony and re-shape societies.

This book presents an interdisciplinary analysis of the Internet in Russia and its impact on various aspects of social life. The contributions discuss topics such as the features of the Russian media system and digitization processes, the history of the Runet, national Internet markets and the Internet economy, as well as legal aspects. By presenting the results of relevant case studies, it illustrates the process of integrating the Russian segment of the Internet into the international system, offering insights into various country-specific features of the Runet’s functioning and development. The first part of the book focuses on the Internet in the context of development of the Russian media system with respect to historical features and digital inequalities. The second part then discusses economic and legal aspects of the Runet, while the third and the fourth parts offer an analysis of digital culture, including the role of journalism and regional diversities as well as online representations and discussions. The chapter "Runet in Crisis Situations" is available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com.

A Library Journal Best Book of 2015 A NPR Great Read of 2015 The Internet in Russia is either the most efficient totalitarian tool or the device by which totalitarianism will be overthrown. Perhaps both. On the eighth floor of an ordinary-looking building in an otherwise residential district of southwest Moscow, in a room occupied by the Federal Security Service (FSB), is a box the size of a VHS player marked SORM. The Russian government's front line in the battle for the future of the Internet, SORM is the world's most intrusive listening device, monitoring e-mails, Internet usage, Skype, and all social networks. But for every hacker subcontracted by the FSB to interfere with Russia's antagonists abroad -- such as those who, in a massive denial-of-service attack, overwhelmed the entire Internet in neighboring Estonia -- there is a radical or an opportunist who is using the web to chip away at the power of the state at home. Drawing from scores of interviews personally conducted with numerous prominent officials in the Ministry of Communications and web-savvy activists challenging the state, Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan peel back the history of advanced surveillance systems in Russia. From research laboratories in Soviet-era labor camps, to the legalization of government monitoring of all telephone and Internet communications in the 1990s, to the present day, their incisive and alarming investigation into the Kremlin's massive online-surveillance state exposes just how easily a free global exchange can be coerced into becoming a tool of repression and geopolitical warfare. Dissidents, oligarchs, and some of the world's most dangerous hackers collide in the uniquely Russian virtual world of The Red Web.

Post-Soviet Handbook: A Guide to Grassroots Organizations and Internet Resources

How, despite thirty years of effort, Soviet attempts to build a national computer network were undone by socialists who seemed to behave like capitalists. Between 1959 and 1989, Soviet scientists and officials made numerous attempts to network their nation—to construct a nationwide computer network. None of these attempts succeeded, and the enterprise had been abandoned by the time the Soviet Union fell apart. Meanwhile, ARPANET, the American precursor to the Internet, went online in 1969. Why did the Soviet network, with top-level scientists and patriotic incentives, fail while the American network succeeded? In How Not to Network a Nation, Benjamin Peters reverses the usual cold war dualities and argues that the American ARPANET took shape thanks to well-managed state subsidies and collaborative research environments and the Soviet network projects stumbled because of unregulated competition among self-interested institutions, bureaucrats, and others. The capitalists behaved like socialists while the socialists behaved like capitalists. After examining the midcentury rise of cybernetics, the science of self-governing systems, and the emergence in the Soviet Union of economic cybernetics, Peters complicates this uneasy role reversal while chronicling the various Soviet attempts to build a “unified information network.” Drawing on previously unknown archival and historical materials, he focuses on the final, and most ambitious of these projects, the All-State Automated System of Management (OGAS), and its principal promoter, Viktor M. Glushkov. Peters describes the rise and fall of OGAS—its theoretical and practical reach, its vision of a national economy managed by network, the bureaucratic obstacles it encountered, and the institutional stalemate that killed it. Finally, he considers the implications of the Soviet experience for today's networked world.

Emergence of digital technologies has caused debates among scholars about what role and impacts the Internet will have in our society. The diversity of positions regards the Internet ranges from the hypothesis that the new medium is just another reinforcement of previous media to a belief that it is a new powerful tool for mass manipulation. This book is an attempt to explore some features of the Internet as a postmodernist phenomenon. Using Russian media as a case study, this work seeks to explore the correlations between electronic media and the post-Soviet society. The relevant mass media theories and critical works are reviewed and taken as a the foundation of this research. An examination of Russian media is performed on the examples of two periodicals: Trud and Komsomolskaya Pravda. Essential criteria of the analysis are functions of the periodicals, their content and methods of representation during the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. The study argues that the Post-Soviet press and particularly Internet newspapers have become a product of Russian postmodernism, which is a combination of Socialist Realism traces and innovative avant-garde trends.