How Telepathy Helped Build the Russian Internet

Path to Open Books on JSTOR

Hacking the Iron Curtain: A Media Archaeology of the Russian Internet is part of JSTOR’s Path to Open initiative, which helps nonprofit university presses meet the challenges of open access publishing. Books in the program become open access three years after publication. JSTOR Daily is making the first and second chapters available for free now to drive awareness of the program.

On September 5, 1982, a music festival in San Bernardino, California, organized by Apple’s Steve Wozniak, bore witness to the first-ever public television link between the United States and the Soviet Union. Two large screens on either side of the stage broadcast performances by singer-songwriter Alla Pugacheva and rock band Voskreseniye, while Soviet citizens gathered at a Moscow radio station rocked out to the American lineup—that is, until Grateful Dead promoter Bill Graham, “convinced the whole thing was a KGB trick,” as Jeffrey Kripal wrote in his 2007 book Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion, “literally pulled the plug halfway through the concert.”

This so-called US-Soviet Space Bridge (the first of several, including one co-hosted by television host Phil Donahue) often features in books about the cultural history of the Cold War. But what many of these books don’t tell you is that a large number of the people who organized these events also hoped to lift the Iron Curtain through another method: telepathy. In her new book Hacking the Iron Curtain: A Media Archaeology of the Russian Internet, journalist and “media archeologist” Natalia Konradova reveals how the story of the early Soviet internet—and the role it played during the collapse of the USSR in 1991—can be traced back to early- and mid-twentieth-century dreams of instantaneous and unmediated mass communication.

Telepathy was, for much of the twentieth century, considered a real possibility—one whose secrets modern science could and would eventually discover.

Though recognized today as a pseudoscientific fantasy, telepathy was, for much of the twentieth century, considered a real possibility—one whose secrets modern science could and would eventually discover. In the Soviet Union, scientific interest in telepathy stemmed not only from a sense of general techno-optimism shared by many countries both before and after the two world wars, but also from beliefs and aspirations particular to communist society. Like cosmism (a philosophical movement that aimed at nothing less than the colonization of space, the attainment of immortality, and the resurrection of every person who ever lived), research into “parapsychology” was expected to help usher in a utopian future.

Of course, what this future looked like depended on who you asked. Some scientists and science fiction authors envisioned a world in which doctors could diagnose patients remotely and one person could beam their skills and talents directly into the bodies of others. The CIA worried that Soviet officials would be able to steal sensitive government information and control “machines on the moon or in the ocean” with their thoughts, according to a 1973 report. Meanwhile, Iosif Goldin—a parapsychology enthusiast and principal organizer of the Soviet side of the first Space Bridge—imagined mass communication as a cure for geopolitical conflict. He once wrote that if “one realizes the observation of the sunrise simultaneously on all continents of the Earth and does it regularly, turning it into a form of bringing people together, there may be no nuclear catastrophe.”

Although the internet itself did not directly contribute to the USSR’s demise, it should come as no surprise that the appearance of one closely coincided with the disappearance of the other. Described by Konradova as a “perfected version of samizdat,” or self-published dissident literature, the rise of the internet and online communities made censorship and the suppression of information virtually impossible—at least for a time. Hacking the Iron Curtain concludes with a brief though warranted reflection on how, amid digital restrictions under Vladimir Putin, the Russian internet ecosystem—Runet—has become increasingly cut off from the rest of the World Wide Web, aiding the country’s return to autocracy.

How did you become interested in parapsychology?

I have worked on many different subjects as an anthropologist and media theorist. But I have always been particularly interested in phenomena or systems that are either created by users or shaped through their efforts and self-organization. It does not really matter whether I’m studying war memorials in small villages, which were one of the subjects I researched in the early 2000s, or internet literature—a phenomenon of the early Russian internet, when users had for the first time the opportunity to publish their literary works without them having to pass through any editorial process.

That was how my research into the Russian-speaking internet began. In the mid-2000s, colleagues in Germany invited me to join their project, where I studied internet forums. At that point, though, neither cybernetics nor parapsychology was anywhere on my research horizon. They emerged only during the research process.

Weekly Newsletter

"*" indicates required fields

What did you feel was missing from existing treatments of this subject (like Alaina Lemon’s book) that you wanted to explore with Hacking the Iron Curtain?

Because my research is interdisciplinary, I read literature from a wide range of research fields: the history of the internet and digital culture, Cold War studies, studies of utopias and technological imaginaries, “parascience,” and so on. These fields have been studied for a long time, and each has produced fascinating work. What I felt was missing was precisely the connection between them.

Alaina Lemon’s book was an important discovery for me, not only because it was the only work I encountered that placed Soviet parapsychology within the context of the Cold War, but also because she shows just how powerful the mutual desire for communication was among people in both the USSR and the US. That said, Lemon’s approach was grounded more in theatrical practices, and she was not interested in the history of technology. When Soviet parapsychology is discussed elsewhere, it is typically situated within the history of supernatural beliefs and esoteric practices, as in The New Age of Russia: Occult and Esoteric Dimensions, a substantial volume edited by Birgit Menzel.

What interested me was a phenomenon identified in the 1960s by Lynn Schroeder and Sheila Ostrander, authors of the classic Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain: for a considerable period in the USSR, parapsychology was treated as a science. Researchers used scientific methods in their experiments and attempted to identify patterns in telepathy, telekinesis, and other phenomena. Yes, this no longer fits within our contemporary scientific understanding of the world, but I am talking about events that took place sixty years ago, when faith in the power of science was virtually limitless. As far as I know, before my work, no one had considered research into telepathy as one scientific field among others—regarded today as a dead end, but one that at the time could be seen as almost equivalent in status to computer science.

At what stage in your research did it become clear to you that there was a connection between parapsychology—telepathy in particular—and the early Russian internet?

I originally set out to study the history of the Russian internet. I interviewed figures from the Runet of the 1990s and worked with online archives. In those archives, I discovered that one of Russia’s first internet providers had actually been founded in the 1980s. This simply did not fit with my understanding that the internet could only have appeared after the collapse of the USSR in 1991.

Once I delved into the history of the first network connections from Soviet territory, I found myself dealing with an entirely new set of questions and, for me, an entirely new research field. Media archaeology is exactly the kind of (proto) discipline that is interested in dead ends, unrealized projects, and strange coincidences. It is still not particularly well known in the US, but I live in Germany, the birthplace of media archaeology.

To what extent was parapsychology research responsible for the rise of the Russian internet?

I distinguish between several levels of this connection. One is relatively simple and straightforward. The first contact between American and Soviet users on Usenet became possible thanks to American entrepreneur Joel Schatz, who came to the USSR in the mid-1980s. He did so because of his connections to the Esalen Institute in California, a well-known center of “alternative research,” now better known as a popular retreat destination for California tech people.

Esalen, in turn, had those connections because people associated with the institute had begun traveling to the USSR in the early 1970s hoping to establish contacts with Soviet parapsychologists (and they did). Later, they established a Soviet-American exchange program and joined the citizen-diplomacy movement, but initially it was the parapsychologists—with their desire for grassroots communication and their refusal to accept conventional boundaries of what was possible—who proved capable of connecting people from two countries on opposing sides of the Cold War.

More to Explore

How Hacking Got Hacked

Livia Gershon November 23, 2018 How the archetype of the quirky, brilliant tech entrepreneur whose ideas could change the world migrated from high-tech hacker culture to Wall Street.

While studying this phenomenon, I also arrived at another, conceptual level of connection. In a sense, the internet is telepathy, except that a digital signal plays the role of the brain waves that science has never succeeded in discovering. In the 1960s, an era of techno-optimism and great hopes that human reason would triumph over war, disease, and death, computer science and the development of computer networks advanced alongside research into other possible forms of communication—forms that do not exist in nature but that, theoretically, could exist.

You mention on multiple occasions that telepathy was researched more extensively in the USSR than elsewhere. Why was this?

I think the USSR, as a project intended to realize a socialist utopia—and I am not discussing here how successful that project ultimately proved to be—had much stronger investments in radical scientific discoveries expected to fundamentally transform human life. Some of these ambitions were realized, such as spaceflight. Scientists today are still working on others, such as immortality. Others, such as telepathy, have disappeared from the scientific agenda.

One could probably add that the USSR had an obvious overproduction of specialists in the natural sciences, which was connected to the military-industrial complex. At some point, the Soviet Ministry of Defense also began investing in this new field because it seemed potentially useful for defense purposes. As a result, Soviet laboratories could often find room for experiments involving new and uncertain phenomena.

Still, I think all of this was more a consequence of the first factor: an exceptionally strong belief in scientific progress. Both American and Soviet societies were modern societies, if by modernity we mean above all a reliance on rational knowledge and technology. But in the USSR, this modernity was particularly radical and allowed virtually no alternative: it lay at the very foundation of the state as the only possible form of its existence.

You mention that Soviet scientists like Vladimir Bekhterev continued to research telepathy even after failing to find proof of its existence. Why did this interest persist, including among the CIA and US politicians?

In general, I have the impression that, from the 1920s through the end of the 1980s, scientists around the world were reluctant to abandon the subject completely. I do not know enough about Bekhterev’s activities to speculate confidently about his motives, but I do know that he was aware of the research his former student Vasiliev was conducting at his institute. I interpret this as an attempt not to burn any bridges—simply to keep the possibility open, “just in case.” What if the experiments ultimately did produce results, and you found yourself among those accused of suppressing something new and progressive? But of course, that is only my theory.

As for the CIA and politicians, that belongs to a different period. Judging from documents in the declassified CIA archives, they were deeply impressed by reports of Soviet achievements in this field and wrote alarmed assessments suggesting that the USSR might soon learn to guide missiles with the power of thought, kill people with a glance, and so on. Their primary objective, therefore, was to ensure the United States did not fall behind in this area.

Beyond parapsychology, to what extent did the Soviet internet become possible thanks to perestroika, and to what extent did perestroika become possible thanks to the Soviet internet?

I do not think I would subscribe to either proposition, because for me the causal relationship lies outside both perestroika and the Soviet internet. Rather, a second modernity—or postmodernity—arrived: a period in which users gained real possibilities to influence events. In the USSR, perestroika began, and contacts with the US intensified. In the United States, the internet became available to a critical mass of users. The mythology of the Cold War was ceasing to work on both sides: people understood that official authorities were lying and wanted to escape their control. All of this was happening simultaneously.

Of course, before perestroika, it would have been impossible for an American to walk into a closed Soviet scientific institute and ask to be connected to a classified network—which is exactly what happened when the internet provider SovAm Teleport was founded in the mid-1980s. But perestroika itself would not have happened if a significant portion of Soviet society had not already been ready for it.

You note that, at various points in twentieth-century Soviet history, techno-utopian dreams often gave way to practical and commercial applications. Between the two, which ultimately plays a larger role in this story?

Once connecting to the internet from the USSR became technically possible, there was much less room for fantasy. Why take risks and invest in uncertainty—which any grand vision requires—when a concrete technical solution already exists, and all you need is the money to implement it? More broadly, the USSR was shifting from overregulated socialism to unregulated capitalism, which would reveal itself in full force in the 1990s.

Nevertheless, pragmatism and commerce alone did not define the character of the early Russian internet. Because early users saw the network primarily as a hobby, they enthusiastically invested their time and energy in games, poetry, and all kinds of impractical inventions. Until the end of the 1990s, when the first major commercial projects emerged, the network was primarily a space for entertainment and free communication.

Can you talk about the role Russian Usenet played during and after the unsuccessful 1991 coup attempt to prevent the USSR from collapsing? Could events have played out differently if Russians had not had this window to the outside world?

This was an important moment. Information about the Moscow coup of 1991 reached American media and politicians largely through Usenet users at the Kurchatov Institute, in Moscow. They, in turn, collected information through their internal network, translated it into English, and posted it to newsgroups.

I would say the absence of the internet probably would not have changed the fundamental course of events, because the victory of the democratic forces during the coup depended much more on resistance on the ground than on support from other countries. The absence of access to Usenet might, however, have affected more specific aspects of what happened: how quickly information circulated, how much pressure came from outside the Soviet Union, and so on.

Some people think that if the Soviet internet had developed sooner, it could have ensured the survival of the USSR. Do you share this belief?

The idea that the development of the internet might have saved the USSR comes from the author of an alternate-history novel in which technologies are transported into the Soviet Union from the future. I don’t believe in this idea, because creating the internet required not only high-quality materials, which were in short supply, but also international cooperation, from which the USSR was cut off after World War II. It also required the internet itself—if, by the internet, we mean a system of communication and community formation.

I think this last factor matters most. Soviet society, and even more so the Soviet leadership, had absolutely no need for people to communicate freely with one another beyond institutional control. At the same time, Soviet engineers were already connecting computers into networks before work on ARPANET had even begun. In other words, the technical possibility existed, but neither the social demand nor the political will did. Even telephone services remained unavailable in many Soviet cities until the 1990s. To stay in touch, people exchanged letters, postcards, and telegrams.

More to Explore

The Chilean Wide Web?

Matthew Wills July 23, 2022 Salvador Allende’s attempt to network the national economy mirrored his government’s struggle to balance centralization and decentralization.

Cybernetics, however, did produce a powerful vision that extended far beyond computers and even beyond communication itself. But because cybernetics was a product of Soviet culture as a whole, that vision faded when Soviet culture entered into crisis. The desire to imagine radically different futures was replaced by a desire to “live like people in the West,” particularly in terms of everyday life and living standards.

In the conclusion, you draw parallels between the futurism of Silicon Valley (specifically the quest for immortality) and the techno-utopianism of Soviet cyberneticians. Could you also speak to any meaningful differences between these visions?

To be honest, there are surprisingly few substantial differences, and that amazes me. Eternal life is hardly a new idea, of course, but one might still expect to see signs that these people lived in different periods and in very different cultures.

One possible distinction is that the American version of this techno-utopia is somewhat less closely tied to the public good and more oriented toward individual benefit, whereas Soviet cyberneticians had in mind, first and foremost, a new society, and only then a new human being as a member of that society. But we also have to remember that Soviet cyberneticians wrote articles and gave interviews under conditions of censorship. With that in mind, this difference may be less substantial than it initially appears.

In your conclusion, you write that the “historical connection between the attempts to rebuild the power lost during the collapse of the USSR and the current reality cannot be ignored.” To what extent did the Russian internet contribute to Russian world ideology and its consequences, including the war in Ukraine?

The figures of the early Russian internet did not make the decision to launch a military attack on Ukraine, and they should not be held responsible for it. The concept of the “Russian World” emerged from the political technologies of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Although political technologists participated in the development of the Russian internet, they were not the ones who made the decision to launch Russia’s most recent military aggression.

Nevertheless, I do see—and describe in the book—a conceptual connection between the expansive space of Russian-language verbal culture, which became the first meaningful content of the Russian-speaking internet, and the “Russian World.” The fact that this connection is conceptual is important.

Until very recently, the expression “Russian internet” was something of an oxymoron, because the internet is, by definition, a global network. Yes, you can write in any language you like, but technically you are still writing on a common, international internet that does not recognize state borders. This is no longer entirely the case. In Russia, a “sovereign Runet” whose borders increasingly coincide with the state’s borders has, by now, almost become a reality.

In other words, Russians first entered the American internet; then they developed the concept of the “Runet,” which technically remained part of the global network but was culturally understood as a unique and independent phenomenon; and decades later, they physically carved out a segment of the global network in which international conventions no longer operate in the same way and where an antiwar post can result in a prison sentence. I am not sure I would call this a “Sonderweg,” but it is a remarkable development. One can only hope that the rest of the world will not follow the same path, although there are reasons for concern.

The post appeared first on JSTOR Daily.