Some days on the Russian information highway, it can seem that Nikolai Gogol was right when he wrote that "Russia is a land of hopeless roads and idiots." Crackling phone lines, clogged intercity and international channels, punitive monopoly pricing, and incomprehensible government decrees sometimes make it seem that the Russian Internet is doomed to remain a peripheral curiosity reserved for foreigners, physicists, hackers, and wealthy hobbyists rather than the mass medium it has become elsewhere in the world.

In historical perspective, however, the rate of growth and steady improvement in Russian network services has been astounding. Who would have guessed five years ago that a university student in the closed city of Kazan could have, at almost no cost and without special permission, a live video-phone chat over the Internet with a friend in Michigan? Russia is at once a very poor country and an exceptionally rich and developed one. Though much of the economy lies in ruins, computers are pervasive in higher education, business, and government, and while access may be relatively limited, much of the equipment and software in use is cutting-edge. Despite myriad problems and challenges, the Internet is readily accessible throughout Russia at relatively moderate cost in world terms, and promises immeasurable impact on the social and economic life of the country in the years ahead.

To sketch a panorama of new connections and connectivity in Russia today is to try to grasp and hold a moving cloud with bare hands. Like Russia itself, the Russian Internet is not a monolith but a rapidly growing crazy quilt of both complementary and clashing colors. An examination of individual "patches" in the quilt, with all of their contradictions, offers some insight into the nature of the Russian Internet and its potential role in Russia’s future.

But the overall rosy trend should not obscure the real conditions and varied problems of access. Many cities in Russia are effectively "on-ramps to nowhere." Access to full Internet services may exist, and local interconnections between networks may be well-developed, but overloaded, low-speed intercity and international channels often render use of on-line media such as the Web all but impossible.

In the United States, an individual can order a very high-capacity "T-1" dedicated connection to move data between his or her home or office and the Internet at a rate of 1.5 megabits per second (mbps). In Russia, the country’s largest networks, Relcom and Demos, only recently managed to establish connections to the Internet at 2 mbps, and the combined capacity of Russian providers’ international channels probably remains under 10 mbps.

Bottlenecks inside Russia are even more severe. For example, the capacity of the connection between Moscow and Cheliabinsk, a major industrial center in the Urals with relatively large public and university networks and excellent technical talent, are overloaded well past the breaking point. "Pinging"(hailing) a typical site in Cheliabinsk, such as www.chel.su, shows response times greater than 4 seconds. Combined with the congestion of connections between Moscow and the rest of the World, that translates to a wait of more than 20 minutes to receive a singe home page while browsing the Web from a terminal in Cheliabinsk. The chief cause of such bottlenecks is the lack of high-speed digital data transmission channels between Russian cities.

In many places, the only type of intercity connections available are antiquated copper telephone lines, which cannot offer data speeds off more than 28.8 kilobits per second (kbps) over long distances. (Connectivity between cities in the West is typically measured in megabits per second.) 28.8 kbps is usually acceptable for a single home-computer user’s connection to an Internet provider, but when an entire city depends on two or three such lines, the potential for traffic jams is obvious. Russia’s transcontinental fiber-optic and microwave data transmission system is constantly being expanded, but that is a slow process. The system is also expensive; in many cases the charges for using the system are more than fledgling service providers, or their customers, can afford.

Other cities suffer from what can be called "isolated islands of connectivity," where an Internet provider with good external links faces extraordinary difficulty connecting users inside the city. Rostov State University (on the Web: http://www.rnd.runnet.ru), for example, has a good connection to the Internet via satellite link to St. Petersburg. However, the university building where the satellite dish is mounted lies on the outskirts of town, far away from the city center and many potential users. While individual users from anywhere in the city can log in to the university’s network by telephone, connecting entire organizations’ networks at reasonable speeds is impossible because the only lines available are old copper telephone wires.

Despite these problems, acceptable connectivity is available and improvements are just a matter of time and investment. In some cities, the infrastructure is already ahead of demand. Redcom (http://www.redcom.ru), an Internet service provider in the far-eastern city of Khabarovsk, built an extensive municipal data network that supports high-speed dedicated connections through local telephone stations and connects to the Internet via satellite link to Moscow. But traffic on the system remains very low. The only clients with leased Internet connections are other providers reselling Redcom’s service, and just a few hundred customers use Redcom’s dial-up service. For Redcom, the Internet is not a core business but a hobby. It survives by selling point-to-point data links within the city to banks.

Based on surveys of Internet service providers and participants in large seminars it has held, ROCIT estimates that there are presently 500,000 individual users of electronic mail in Russia, of which 25,000-50,000 have access to a full range of on-line Internet services including the Web. Some 85 percent of the latter group hail from the largest cities, including Moscow, St. Petersburg, Novosibirsk, Nizhnii Novgorod, and Yekaterinburg. Growth of the former group is estimated at 200 percent per year, while the latter is growing at 400 percent, which suggests that relatively soon a majority of network users in Russia will have access to the full menu of Internet capabilities, not just electronic mail.

Solid sociological data about Russian Internet users simply do not exist. But based on observation and anecdotal evidence, two or three years ago the commodities traders, computer programmers, physicists, mathematicians, and chemists—by whom and for whom networks in Russia were originally created – clearly represented the dominant user categories. Today, those groups still represent a plurality, if not a majority of users, and the educational sector is dominated by users from the hard sciences rather than the humanities. But across the board, the Internet user base in Russia is gradually becoming more diverse.

The type of content one can find on Russian World Wide Web sites mirrors trends in the user base. Two years ago when only a handful of Russian Web site existed, the vast majority represented technical institutes and computer companies. Now, with the number of Web servers in Russia approaching 1,000, computer-technology sites still dominate but one can find a little bit of everything.

Some U.S.-based Web search engines such as Alta vista will accept Cyrillic characters and can be used to search Russian-language Web sites. However, those American sites cannot "intelligently" resolve Russian key words because they do not recognize declensions inherent to Russian grammar. "Krasnyi", "krasnaya", and "krasnogo" are all declensions of the same word for "red", but search engines written for English will not recognize them as such. Several Russian programmers are working on new search engines that will search intelligently in Russian, including the "New Russian Search" created by programmer David Tolpyn and available at the State Historical Public Library’s "OpenWeb Workshop" site in Moscow (http://www.openweb.ru).

By any standard, content and the user base are diversifying rapidly. The process would, however, occur faster were it not for a kind of inherent brake: new types of content are slow to develop because there is minimal user demand for them, but until more varied content exists there is little to draw masses of new users from new walks of life.

As in the West, traditional media in Russia have taken notice of the Internet and started to report on it, even if they do not yet entirely understand what it is. A sprinkling of articles has appeared over the last year in many mainstream print publications, including the newspapers Segodnya, Kommersant-Daily, and Izvestia, and magazines such as Ogonek. The late-night television news magazine and call-in show "Vremechko"offers an e-mail address for viewer news and commentary (artem@wremechko.msk.su) and a Moscow radio station has its own World Wide Web site and a weekly broadcast about the Internet (http://www.openradio.ru). The Russian computer press has also started to treat the Internet with increasing seriousness and plans are afoot to launch at least two Russian-language, Internet-specific journals this fall: Planeta Internet and Internet World Russia.

A growing number of Russian publications are available on-line, including Nezavisimaya gazeta, Finanosovye Izvestiya, and niche publications such as the human-rights newspaper Ekspress-Khronika. Russia On-Line (http://www.online.ru) provides an excellent set of links to various Internet versions of newspapers. One of the most impressive Web media resources is the National News Service home page (http://www.nns.ru), which contains a database of complete articles from various Russian periodicals, similar to the Nexis database of English-language publications. During both rounds of the recent presidential election, the National News Service mounted a colorful, continuously updated set of return charts and an electoral map. Judging by the Web site’s sluggishness on election nights, it proved quite popular.

Russian print media offer a bullish assessment of the Internet’s market potential in Russia, and even the American Chamber of Commerce in Russia devoted the entire July-August 1996 issue of its magazine to the global "network of networks" and its importance to business.

Indeed, unlike in the United States where the National Science Foundation and Defense Department created the Internet chiefly to support research, the growth of Russia’s Internet has, from the very beginning, been driven primarily by commercial applications. It was the commodities traders, bankers, and businessmen who, at the beginning of the decade, were the customers who helped Russia’s largest network, Relcom, spread its array of simple e-mail routers throughout the country.

The market is already extensive, but in the near term the largest-scale commercial opportunities will likely center around organization applications of Internet technology in proprietary corporate networks – rather than on individual or mass-market applications. When only 50,000 people out of a population of more than 150million have access to on-line capabilities such as the Web, the potential use of the Internet as a broad marketing tool is obviously very limited.

The Internet cannot become a truly mass medium in Russia until costs fall relative to average income. In Moscow, which enjoys the most competition and cheapest connectivity in Russia, dial-up on-line time begins at about $3 per hour, while dedicated connections for corporate networks begin at $600 plus 20 percent value-added tax per month for 64 kbps leased line. Given an average personal income of $150 per month across Russia, the obstacle is obvious.

On the other hand, the near-term on-line user base of 50,000-200,000 people generally represents the new wealthy and middle classes, which is a very attractive segment of the market for advertisers to reach. Newspapers with smaller circulations have successfully sold advertising for years.

At the elementary and secondary-school level, a handful of tiny pilot projects have brought the Internet into the classroom—although most often only its electronic mail component. But the general poverty of primary and secondary education in Russia has prevented such projects from becoming widespread. A group of schools in the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk have designed numerous interactive activities using e-mail, but only with each other within the city, because Russian-language schools are so rare on the net.

At the university level and in research institutions, however, Internet access is very prevalent. Concentration of computers in technical and scientific departments combined with economic constraints and administrators unaccustomed to free, unmediated communication tends to compartmentalize and limit access, but as technical connectivity improves and institutions gradually have more funds to invest in terminals, student exposure to the Net increases steadily.

A number of foreign foundations and non-profit organizations with both private and U.S. government funding such as the Soros Foundations, the International Research and Exchanges Board, the Eurasia Foundation, and NATO’s Office of Science and Technology have invested in projects and grants to support both network infrastructure and user training at educational institutions across the former Soviet Union. The benefits of those programs have been significant, but despite hype in the press, most of the resources to support educational and research networking in Russia have come from the Russian government and the universities and institutes themselves. The Russian Institute for Public Networks (http://www.ripn.net) and its educational subsidiary RELARN have led the way in providing public and private sector support to educational institutions and to the development of the Russian Internet in general.

Although Central and East European governments have so far supported the Internet’s development, or at least shown benign indifference, suspicions remain that the region’s more authoritarian governments will try to rein in the inherently open, decentralized communications medium. Several months ago, a note circulated around Internet news and discussion groups related to the former Soviet Union, containing what purported to be a translation of a blurb in PC World Belarus detailing draconian restrictions on Internet use in the country. According to the note, each Internet user in Belarus would be required to register at his or her local police station and apply for special permission from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which would be marked in the applicant’s passport. Violators—unregistered Internet users—would be punished severely. The message was exposed as a hoax, but not before it created an international stir. The fact that huge numbers of informed people took such an item seriously suggests that Internet users in the region remain in an insecure position vis-a-vis central authorities. (There are continued reports from Belarus—although the government denies them—that officials there are attempting to keep track of who is using the Internet).

While Russia has not seen the extent of old-guard backlash that Belarus has, its security services clearly treat the Internet with skeptical caution. The 10 January 1995 issue of Nezavisimaya gazeta contained alleged excerpts from a Federal Counterintelligence Service document that contended in the strongest terms that foreign technical assistance and education programs are cover for espionage, and that international computer networks are obvious espionage tools and contribute to a brain drain of the country’s best technical personnel. Publicly, government officials declined to address the authenticity of the document. While it most certainly does not reflect official policy, it clearly suggests that powerful elements are deeply ambivalent about the "opening" of Russia in general, and new communications media in particular.

Government desire to regulate the use of data encryption technology is not unique to Russia, as the American "Clipper Chip"controversy showed. (A U.S. government official suggested that anyone using encryption be required to use a "Clipper Chip", which the FBI would be able to decode.) But the potential reach of an April 1995 decree by President Boris Yeltsin on data encryption is widely seen as cause of alarm. A cloud of uncertainty surrounds the decree, which appears on its face to prohibit even the most elementary forms of encoding—including user-password encryption and everyday data-compression utilities such as "pkzip"—without special licensing. It also empowers a subagency of the Federal Security Service to regulate encryption issues. To this day the meaning and application of the decree remain murky.

Despite all the spooks, idiots, and hopeless roads, the Internet in Russia is a chaotic, dynamic, and growing phenomenon, as it is elsewhere in the world. While it clearly has not yet achieved the social, economic, and political influence of television and other traditional media, the Internet promises to be a vital bridge between Russia and the rest of the world, and a catalyst of Russia’s’ great latent intellectual potential to leverage influence on the economy and society.