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The Rise of Runet and the Main Stages of Its History

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Internet in Russia

Part of the book series: Societies and Political Orders in Transition ((SOCPOT))

Abstract

The history of the Russian Internet begins in the late 1980s, when the Soviet users contacted the American ones for the first time. This chapter examines the literary, social, and political development of the Russian Internet through the 1990s and the 2000s, from the first literary experiments and the first experience in political technologies to the new form of social and political activism performed within social networks in the early 2010s. Being the first case of citizen journalism during the August Putsch in 1991, the Russian Internet rapidly switched to becoming an “apolitical” activity and, consequently, became a tool of political technologies. Several generations of the runet, from the first computer scientists to the Russian-speaking emigrants to the mass users, have changed each other along with their values and claim to the Internet. While the users in the 1990s developed the concept of Russkii Mir (Russian world) and inspired authorities to control the public sphere, users of the 2010s are rather searching for a technology sufficient to resist official policy.

This chapter was written as a part of the project “Andersdenken digital. Das russische Internet als individueller Freiraum und/oder öffentlicher Gegenraum”, which is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft DFG (SCHM 2378/5-1).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The USENET accounts usually contained two parts: the name of an institution (university, company) and a type of computer. In the case of the kremvax hoax, a letter was sent from a fake account “kremvax”. The name combined “vax”, a computer model popular among the Internet users, and “krem”, which alluded to the Kremlin.

  2. 2.

    The word “hacker”, in the 1970s and 1980s, signified a person who was interested in technologies, engineering, and computers. John Draper called himself a “hacker” in this old sense of the word, though he was a victim of the changing concept of hacking. Draper was arrested on suspicion of espionage and imprisoned for hacking the telephone system of AT&T company (Lapsley, 2013).

  3. 3.

    Operating systems and computer networks had being developed in the USSR, but they did not become universal as Unix or the Internet did (Peters, 2016).

  4. 4.

    A cooperative was a form of private business in the socialist system, an offspring of the ambiguity of late socialism. According to Marxist ideology, cooperation was excusable because owners and employees of such enterprises were one and the same and, therefore, there would be no “exploitation of man by man”. At the same time, some cooperators suddenly became very rich, something that was a new reality for the USSR. A notorious case is that of the first legal Soviet millionaire Artem Tarasov who founded the cooperative “Tekhnika” in 1989 and earned 3,000,000 roubles. His deputy with the same income paid 90,000 roubles towards Communist Party dues (Dodolev, 2011).

  5. 5.

    By this time, the Kurchatov Institute and Demos cooperative had built, using the foundation of Unix/Demos operating system, a computer network of research institutions over the whole country. Therefore, in entering the Internet and USENET, they not only appeared online themselves but also made a connection between “the world” and the participants of their network in Novosibirsk, Irkutsk, and other Soviet cities.

  6. 6.

    “News” means here user posts in USENET newsgroups.

  7. 7.

    Telenet, later SprintNet, is an American commercial network elaborated in 1974 by the software developers who earlier had participated in work on ARPANET. Ironically, one of the first messages of the agency about the coup was forwarded to USENET by Piet Beertema, the author of the kremvax hoax.

  8. 8.

    The word sovok derives from “Soviet” and is homonymic to the word “dust tray”. Both the word and the discussions about Soviet ethos are still present in Russian-speaking Internet discourse, including among a new wave of Russian emigrants.

  9. 9.

    Application forms for student and work positions were typical in the USSR. In the fifth paragraph, an applicant had to indicate his or her ethnicity. The phrase “the fifth paragraph” became an idiom for “Jew”.

  10. 10.

    There are several witnesses and references attesting to the fact that the software did, indeed, exist. The most detailed of such accounts was published by Evgenii Berkovich, the author of a website dedicated to Jewish history. In an interview, Berkovich explained that he knew who the software developers were but could not name them as they were still employed at the MSU (Berkovich, Jevgenij. 2017. Facebook message to author, September 2017).

  11. 11.

    The word troll arose in USENET in the early 1990s and referred to users who manipulated others into emotional reaction through online interactions (Donath, 1999). Russian-speaking users preferred to use the word flamer.

  12. 12.

    Runet is a portmanteau of ru and net/network. The term was coined by blogger Raffi Aslanbekov in 1997 in his column Great Uncle’s Thoughts and became very popular among early Russian users, as it described not only language but also the special atmosphere of Russian Internet (Aslanbekov, 1997; Likhachev, 2015).

  13. 13.

    The content preferences of the first Russian Internet users were directly related to Soviet cultural policy. Since the 1930s, the Soviet government had supported amateur literature and founded creative writing courses, coteries, and contests at almost every factory or institute across the USSR. On the other hand, the Soviet official system fostered cultural hierarchies that resulted in a high status being awarded to authors who published their works and extremely low status to those who were not allowed to be published. Thus, publishing houses functioned as repressive institutions and limited access to the public for both low-level writers and political undesirables.

  14. 14.

    The word seteratura was made up in the mid-1990s and derives from Russian set for “network” and literatura for “literature”.

  15. 15.

    All of these projects were launched on American university websites because its authors studied or worked and later transferred over to independent platforms.

  16. 16.

    The term sock puppet in the early online slang referred to the false identity assumed by a user who spoke to himself or herself while pretending to be another person (Word Spy, 2017).

  17. 17.

    Female virtual personalities created by male users were very popular in the early Russian Internet. There were almost no real female users and, according to Sergej Kuznetsov’s character, “there is a hard and fast rule on the Net: the sexier a girl is, the higher the chances are that she is a male” (Kuznetsov, 2004).

  18. 18.

    The word polittekhnologii emerged in 1996 and became a very important concept for both Russian political practice and the Russian Internet. Formally, political technologists were political consultants who borrowed their methods—such as manipulation of politicians’ public image, research of voters’ expectations, etc.—from American practice. However, the Russian political scene was different, so political consulting took on new significance and became a synonym of manipulation and double dealing (Wilson, 2005).

  19. 19.

    Sometimes the online community reacted to the appearance of a new member. Thus, in the late 1990s, the arrival on the scene of Sergey Datsyuk, a Kiev-based philosopher related to Moscow polittekhnologs and an active user, did not go unnoticed. Unlike other participants, Datsyuk not only published his articles online in order to manipulate public opinion, but he was also interested in researching the Internet as a new medium and digital environment. As Datsyuk created a great deal of texts written in very sophisticated and near-esoteric language, other users created his double and launched a project called Robot Sergey Datsyuk. The website generated automated texts based on Datsyuk’s original work and ultimately forced him to leave the Internet (Robot Sergey Datsyuk, 2002).

  20. 20.

    Kuznetsov, Sergej. 2016. Skype communication with author, 26.01.2016.

  21. 21.

    One can observe a similar trend in Russian cinema directed at answering the question: who are the Russians? (see Brat-2, Osobennosti Natsionalnoj Okhoty, Sibirskij Tsyrjulnik, and other popular movies of the 1990s–early 2000s).

  22. 22.

    On the early global Internet, which was primary American, the same role was played by multi-user games, or MUGs (Gorchev, 2000; Gorny, 2009).

  23. 23.

    Between 2000 and 2010, the Russian Internet audience increased by 1826% (Razvitije internet, 2010).

  24. 24.

    Moshkov, Maksim. 2016. Personal communication with author. Moscow, 25.03.2016.

  25. 25.

    Novosibirsk users were very active from the early 1990s onwards because they had access to the Internet before other Russian cities excluding Moscow. The distribution of Internet access was related to Soviet science politics and planning, which resulted in the organising of scientific centres such as Akademgorodok near Novosibirsk or Puschino near Moscow. These scientific centres had well-developed communication channels with Moscow, human resources, and therefore access to the Internet.

  26. 26.

    2channel was a Japanese textboard launched in 2007. Many imageboards, regardless of their language, were named after this globally popular platform.

  27. 27.

    Marat Guelman was a polittekhnolog and co-founder of FEP. In 1999, he launched the website Gif.ru, which later was transformed into Kultura Information Agency. In 1999, the slogan of Gif.ru was “World without politics”.

  28. 28.

    Eurasianism was developed by Alexander Dugin and was widespread among Internet users who wanted to be anti-establishmentarian (Verbitskii, Mikhail. 2016. Personal communication with author, Moscow, 23.03.2016). In the 2000s and 2010s, it very nearly turned out to be official Russian policy.

  29. 29.

    In August 2014, SORM was extended to monitoring of social networks, chats, and forums.

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  1. Berlin, Germany

    Natalia Konradova

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  1. Natalia Konradova
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  1. Higher School of Economics, National Research University, Moscow, Russia

    Sergey Davydov

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Konradova, N. (2020). The Rise of Runet and the Main Stages of Its History. In: Davydov, S. (eds) Internet in Russia. Societies and Political Orders in Transition. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33016-3_3

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