
The Soviet web: the tale of how the USSR almost invented the internet (2017) - tosh
https://www.calvertjournal.com/articles/show/7605/soviet-internet-cybernetics-viktor-glushkov
======
truantbuick
Isn't this article missing the point of the internet?

It talks about an ambitious (but ultimately aborted) top-down project to build
thousands of interlinking mainframes.

But building large networks wasn't particularly novel. It was the idea that
you could build a logical layer that potentially linked _any_ network.

The key to the early internet was you didn't necessarily need to build
anything physical. You could link up several existing networks in any which
way you want, despite involving disparate organizations, systems, and
infrastructure.

~~~
emiliobumachar
Could you please elaborate?

How would one link up two existing networks with different systems and
infrastructure?

What I can think of is either installing a couple translating routers, which
do speak TCP/IP as well as their network's internal protocol, or making them,
by repurposing existing machines with software-only modifications. Is that
what you had in mind as not really counting as installing something physical,
or did I miss something?

~~~
Eyas
Right. The key innovation of the internet was the invention of TCP/IP for the
purpose of inter-network communication. See
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_protocol_suite#Early_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_protocol_suite#Early_research)

~~~
ethbro
I'd say the kernel of that was the idea of encapsulation and separating
functions by layer (really the same idea, from packet and flow perspectives,
respectively).

~~~
LoSboccacc
I'd say the core is that anyone could link up and start talking with other
parts of the network; the arp/ip technology was the stepping stone of course,
but a key differentiator from previous machine networks[1] is that you can
just hook up to the internet, it was truly decentralized from its ideation.

[1] ie. stock tickers, terminals of time share mainframes, or see plan 55-A
for a wider interconnected switched network this russian idea

------
ZinniaZirconium
It would have been so cool if the USSR had its own internet and shared it with
China and China were still running it now because wouldn't it be great to stop
hearing about how people think firewalling the entire Chinese IP space will
keep hackers out. Also a parallel internet built on something other than
TCP/IP would promote competition to see which internet design is technically
superior. But realistically nobody wants two internets that are incompatible.
We already have IPv6 which is incompatible with the rest of the internet and
that's enough trouble as it is.

~~~
nradov
We had other protocols. TCP/IP won exactly because it was technically
superior.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_Wars](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_Wars)

~~~
Spooky23
Somewhat related, Netheads vs. Bellheads
[https://www.wired.com/1996/10/atm-3/](https://www.wired.com/1996/10/atm-3/)

I briefly worked at a place fully dominated by Bellheads early in my career.
They were bemoaning IP and holding on to ATM stuff as late as 2001. I'm told
that the last of their tribe (after I left) fought off VoIP as a passing fad
well into the 2000s.

~~~
mherdeg
Hard to believe this was nearly a quarter century ago. T he references are
getting dated:

> "How do you scare a Bellhead?" he begins. "First, show them something like
> RealAudio or IPhone. Then tell them that right now performance is bandwidth-
> limited, but that additional infrastructure is being deployed." > … > One
> result is undergrads who, for $29.95 a month, clog up the Internet with CU-
> SeeMe sessions.

~~~
rhn_mk1
The article is dated 1996. How does it have an IPhone reference?

~~~
nwallin
Wrong iPhone.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linksys_iPhone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linksys_iPhone)

~~~
rhn_mk1
Thanks. That's closer, but the time to release is still 2 years. Is the
article referencing pre-release rumors? Or was it amended later?

~~~
thodin
Probably it was about this product: [https://www.zdnet.com/article/hey-look-
heres-an-iphone-ad-fr...](https://www.zdnet.com/article/hey-look-heres-an-
iphone-ad-from-uh-1996/)

------
jandrese
IMHO the project was doomed from the start. Top down design on a scale that
massive and distributed is nightmarishly complex, and when the designer is
well ahead of the state of the art like this it doesn’t stand a chance.

ARPANET by contrast started from the bottom and worked up. This is crucial
because it makes it easy to iterate on the design until you get it right. With
a top down design mistakes get baked in and become nearly impossible to
correct.

~~~
zackmorris
It's interesting to hear you say that. When I was growing up in the 1980s,
everything was top-down (NASA, IBM, even pop culture). '95-99 was when the
internet popularized the idea of barely controlled anarchy leading to success
that we take for granted today.

On a tangent, I personally feel that bottom-up design has been an almost
complete failure. The US has lost its ability to articulate what it needs to
do, and then execute that plan. So for example, nearly all federal services
that we used to depend on are failing. The Post Office is being crippled
because it's seen as a price ceiling against UPS and FedEx, not to mention
that elections can't be rigged when votes are centrally counted. The IRS has
been defunded by the far right and liberals who have sold out to Wall Street,
because they don't want rich people or corporations to be audited, because
that might reveal widespread fraud. NASA hasn't been properly funded since
Challenger, and technically lost its funding when the public lost interest in
moon missions. We can argue various fake news interpretations of these trends,
but the truth of them is self-evident from an academic standpoint.

What's my point? That maybe we could use a little more top-down planning. I'd
rather see the spirit of socialism succeed (the elimination of wealth
inequality), rather than what we have now, which is survival of the fittest on
steroids. A top-down internet might have had some basic security measures in
place, such as HTTPS everywhere. Also some bells and whistles like the free
hosting that university students enjoy.

This may all seem quaint, but the loss of confidence in central government
planning in the US is another way of saying that our republic is in decline.
It's the central conflict in the Republican Party, half of whose members are
old enough to remember when American ingenuity was once second to none. Now we
can't even temporarily nationalize, say, N95 mask manufacturing. Sad.

~~~
winstonewert
> not to mention that elections can't be rigged when votes are centrally
> counted

What?

~~~
zackmorris
I should have said "as easily"

~~~
winstonewert
I'm not sure how it is easier either. I would expect it to be easier to
corrupt one single centralized count then many decentralized counts.

In fact, the votes that I've seen brought under suspicion are precisely those
were ballots were collected in a central location before being counted.

------
thodin
USSR invented "internet" in terms of internal military network, but it had
nothing in common with public packet-switching networks like in the West. Such
networks were build in USSR only in late 80s - early 90s, some of them by
western companies.

Even PSTN was unreliable, mostly analogue, SS7 was never implemented on 99% of
intercity links.

Glushkov never produced any working model of his "network", they had no
protocols, no software, no hardware.

~~~
wwarner
I think this is interesting. The value of tcp/ip was the ability to form
logical networks over and across existing physical/electronic networks. That
only makes sense if you have an abundance of physical networks to start with.

~~~
thodin
Glushkov was never about packet switching, he had an idea to build new
dedicated physical network for this project, he estimated that this project
will need more resources than nuclear and space program combined (!). It was
actually a waste of materials, resources and completely incompetent. And
access to that network was planned as very secure, even the project itself was
partly top secret.

In real world, we in USSR had very basic X.25 network (built by VNIIPAS -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VNIIPAS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VNIIPAS))
in late 80s, with 2 links to Europe (via Finland and Austria) and X.25 network
for universities (Akademset). They were many years behind even European
networks and were built on very unreliable hardware. TCP/IP came to Russia
only after 1991, no one actually used it before even for LANs (although it was
available in stolen source code from BSD Unix).

~~~
thrwway34
Actually it appeared a little before 1991, in 1989. There was first Internet
connection to Finland in Demos institute (their demos.su domain is still
operational) and I can remember reading their Usenet posting about communist
coup d'etat in 1991.

~~~
thodin
Demos got their international UUCP connection only in 1990. In 1989 they were
playing with Moscow-only UUCP network. Everything was dialup based.

In 1991 they played with local TCP/IP in Moscow, in 1992 started to make
dialup calls to Finland with SLIP instead of pure UUCP. Only in 1993 several
permanent TCP/IP links from Russia (Demos, SOVAM Teleport, etc) to the West
were finally established.

~~~
thrwway34
According to their 'memoirs' they made a dialup connection to Finland in 1989:
second link from 'History'
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEMOS_(ISP)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEMOS_\(ISP\))

~~~
thodin
In 1990, according to comment from Antonov.

Please also check detailed history:
[http://ru.arf.ru/Hrono/index.html](http://ru.arf.ru/Hrono/index.html)

12-19 August 1990.

------
wwwwewwww
"Red Plenty" is a "historical fiction" novel that is an easy read and deals
with this subject. Glushkov is the main character.

~~~
cambalache
It's extremely anti-soviet, almost propagandistically so. It wouldnt be out of
place as a work made at the request of Voice of America, although the author
is an Englishman.

~~~
WC3w6pXxgGd
Should the novel be pro-soviet?

~~~
cambalache
So are those the only 2 options? Why the fondness for a dichotomy? Sign of the
times I guess.

To expand my comment, the problem is not that it criticizes the soviet regime,
that is OK and even needed.The big problem is the total lack of nuance which
robs the work of any artistic value. When you read non-fiction and fiction
soviet authors (Chekhov, Dostoevski, Grossmann, Zhukov, Bulgakov) there is
always criticism of the government in general and the individual in
particular, to different degrees, but there is also a human side present, this
human warmness. Yes, the bureaucrats suck and the party establishment are
bastards, but summer in the dacha is fantastic, getting drunk with friends is
a brotherly experience and there is Masha waiting for me hopefully to form a
nice family. All of this is mostly absent or totally disfigured in western
authors treating soviet themes, this work one of the worst exponents. The
soviet union portrayed in Rocky IV and Ivan Drago are more credible and three-
dimensional than any character in this work. The people are only corrupt,
incompetent and bad to the core (meany meany commies) or helpless victims of
the system with 0 agency whatsoever. It's painfully obvious the author has not
clue about the actual psyche of a soviet citizen or functionary.

~~~
tropdrop
It sounds like Spufford fails to see the Soviet citizens as real humans.

For an example how to _not_ do that, all one must do is read any of the
authors you mention (or Tolstoy, Chukovskaya, Gogol...) Tolstoy in particular
has a knack for painting the interior psychological worlds of his characters
fluidly and from a place of deep empathy.

------
xorcist
They almost invented a network, not the internetwork.

Important difference.

------
gumby
A similar system was planned for Chile until the CIA overthrew their
government in 1973. Allende was really far sighted and imaginative.

~~~
Niccizero
It wasn't our goverment. Allende won by parlamentary tricks (not by popular
vote) and had very poor support during the entirety of his govement.

~~~
ggm
Oh come on. It was a three way vote tie and there was a constitutional
process. He was displaced by a junta, and they slaughtered innocents, and you
want to complain about Allende's election?

------
kome
Unrelated, but fun: the .su (soviet union) domain is still active and running.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.su](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.su)
[http://www.fid.su/](http://www.fid.su/)

~~~
082349872349872
I'm fond of the site hosting [http://diafilmy.su/7209-sojuz-
appolon.html](http://diafilmy.su/7209-sojuz-appolon.html) among others (use
arrow keys to advance the filmstrip).

~~~
Baeocystin
As a space fan, what a great filmstrip! Thanks for posting it for us to see.

------
tvalentyn
There is a good book covering the development of computing in Kyiv written by
a contemporary of Glushkov: intro:
[http://www.icfcst.kiev.ua/MUSEUM/DIFFERENT/StoreEternally.ht...](http://www.icfcst.kiev.ua/MUSEUM/DIFFERENT/StoreEternally.html)
pdf:
[http://www.icfcst.kiev.ua/MUSEUM/TXT/MalinovskiyBN_StoreEter...](http://www.icfcst.kiev.ua/MUSEUM/TXT/MalinovskiyBN_StoreEternally_rus.pdf)

See also: [http://www.icfcst.kiev.ua/MUSEUM/museum-
map.html](http://www.icfcst.kiev.ua/MUSEUM/museum-map.html)

------
gumby
Props to the author for using the definite article with the ARPANET. I usually
see it strangely written as “Arpanet” as if it were a thing that had a name.
It was just the net, just as the local big town is referred to as “the city”
wherever you happen to live.

------
decebalus1
Fascinating stuff. If you're interested in this, you'll love 'How Not to
Network a Nation' by Benjamin Peters [0].

[0] [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27310479-how-not-to-
netw...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27310479-how-not-to-network-a-
nation)

~~~
anarbadalov
Agreed! (full disclosure: i work for MIT Press). Here's a 3,000-word version
of the book that readers of this piece will also appreciate:
[https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-soviets-invented-the-
internet...](https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-soviets-invented-the-internet-and-
why-it-didnt-work)

------
phenkdo
A comparable precursor to the internet was MINITEL in France.

~~~
macintux
The Internet predates MINITEL, at least if you consider ARPANET its birth.

~~~
jonmartinwest
Two pre-ARPANET prototypes were "oN-Line System" and Memex.

Douglas Engelbart's "Mother of all Demos" still blows my mind every time I
watch it. Douglas Engelbart was inspired by Vannevar Bush "Memex.

------
082349872349872
Several years ago a colleague sent me a 60's or 70's soviet film exploring the
idea of the Turing Test. Does that ring a bell with anyone here?

~~~
omazurov
Most likely "Who's behind the wall?" [0]

[0] "Кто за стеной?" (1977)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECvsD4b0JlU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECvsD4b0JlU)

~~~
082349872349872
That's it! спасибо...

------
trabant00
You can't come up with plan like this and not come up with 'what's in it for
them' in Russia or Eastern Europe. Not even now.

~~~
bluetomcat
Case in point - Bulgaria. Overstaffed state administration consisting of more
than 400 thousand people spread throughout the whole country, for a population
of 6.5m. All that staff are regular hard voters for the currently ruling
party, in exchange for promises for pay increases and bonuses. There is also
strong resistance to introducing any effective electronic governance because
it might render these people unemployed, and that would also compromise the
whole power structure.

~~~
trabant00
We're neighbours and I understand. One thing to be mindful of though: we have
to phase out state jobs slowly. Mostly waiting for the aging buraocrats to
die. Doing it too fast means you have to support a lot of unemployment which
strains the already weak economy.

------
nahuel0x
Related, this is an interesting relatively modern (1993) book about socialist
planning + computers + networking:

"Towards a New Socialism" / Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell

[http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/socialism_book/](http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/socialism_book/)

~~~
rileyphone
Cockshott has some lectures on youtube as well. He's a pretty interesting guy
with a background in CS, mostly compilers other than the cybernetics.

------
myth_drannon
So a bit like a capitalist entrepreneur who needs to have a brilliant idea and
be a great salesman, the scientists in USSR had to have a cunning social
skills to push their ideas through layers of un-interested bureaucracy. A
Sisyphian task that would just cause them to become disengaged. That's how
that society got its alcoholics, poetry evenings and other sublimation
hobbies.

~~~
vidarh
One of my pet theories is that economic growth is surprisingly poorly
correlated to economic or social systems except for one thing: Stability.

Bring stability, and people learn the mechanisms that works for their society,
and overcome surprisingly large differences in type of obstacles. Be it
dealing with the vagaries of the free market, or how to maneuver a Soviet-
style bureaucracy.

It's in fact almost depressing how little effect even quiet massive political
changes appears to have on growth on "just" national level relative to the
effects of larger global trends; but an alternative view is that it shows
humans abilities to work around messed up political limitations.

~~~
keiferski
“In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder
and bloodshed but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the
Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love; they had five hundred
years of democracy and peace and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

\- Orson Welles, The Third Man, 1949

Ancient Greece was also exceptionally politically unstable and yet produced
the foundations of Western civilization.

~~~
SamReidHughes
Meanwhile, Switzerland got a three-peat of Nobel Prizes in Medicine in 1948,
1949, and 1950.

It makes sense that a guy like Welles would value art and throw scorn on
technology. Stability is necessary for investment and the build-up of capital;
it isn't necessary to make a painting.

~~~
keiferski
Renaissance Italy was also a hotspot for the development of technology, far
more than Switzerland at the time. A lot of this development was driven by
warfare and enabled by achievements in the arts: perspective, for example,
enabled far more detailed schematic drawings. Or, the numerous architectural
innovations which enabled buildings like the Duomo to be constructed. Most of
the best-known Italian renaissance artists were also engineers.

 _There’s something missing in our appreciation of the Renaissance, says Paolo
Galluzzi, professor of the history of science at the University of Florence-
something very important. While we rightly glorify this period as an
extraordinary flowering of humanism and the arts, most of us have overlooked
the engineering accomplishments that were just as much a part of the
Renaissance as the “Mona Lisa.”_

[https://www.technologyreview.com/1998/01/01/237121/the-
art-o...](https://www.technologyreview.com/1998/01/01/237121/the-art-of-
renaissance-engineering/)

~~~
toyg
Renaissance Italy also invented double-entry accounting, effectively creating
a new discipline. And then, of course, gave us Galileo Galilei.

------
Bloggerzune
Good I think this is one of those cases where the most correct answer is
simply "yes". Realistically, the guards were put there to halt the transfer of
people, goods, and currency: to be the physical manifestation of a hard
border. Although, the motivation for this border (who it benefits, is it to
keep "others" out vs "us" in) was a dynamic concept that evolved over time.

However, if you integrate the motivation function over the entire time of
separation, which is one way of reducing the complexity, the primary result is
to keep easterners from escaping. In the early days of widening division,
there was a mass migration of people fleeing "The East"; each person carried a
multitude of reasons for their flight. One effect of the border was to halt
this flow. [https://www.bloggerzune.com/2020/06/whatsapp-web-
scan.html?m...](https://www.bloggerzune.com/2020/06/whatsapp-web-
scan.html?m=1)

------
leptoniscool
It really doesn't matter which group of people or what state "invented" the
internet. Humanity is better off now with it. It's also incorrect to assign
all credits to the origin, since it involves all the people who have worked to
improve it incrementally.

~~~
macintux
Except that its origins in the U.S. have had fairly significant knock-on
effects like the dominance of English online. The perceived censorship-free
nature, receding as it may be, perhaps can be attributed to its origins in a
country with a constitutional prohibition thereof.

Unfortunately it’s not so clear humanity is unambiguously better off with it.
Social media is certainly stress-testing society.

------
nahuel0x
Soviet bureaucracy wanted to transform itself into capitalist oligarchs by
seizing and privatizing the state enterprises instead of creating an open,
democratic and scientific economic planning system. Trotsky was right.

~~~
Koshkin
> _Soviet bureaucracy wanted to transform_

Quite the opposite: soviet bureaucracy didn't want to transform anything, they
were more concerned with maintaining the status quo for as long as they could.
This is why the system turned out to be too rigid to withstand the pressures
of the modern world.

On the other hand, think about how much the planned economy would benefit from
the wide-spread automation and access to modern computing and communications.

~~~
mantas
What would planned economy do with hands not needed anymore? :) Even with
totally unproductive economy, USSR had lots and lots of bullshit jobs just to
keep people employed. What would USSR do with tons of unemployed people?
Create fake jobs? Or what... let people find out what they'd like to do and
let them start private initiatives?!?

~~~
Koshkin
No problem there: an efficient planned economy would have no trouble
whatsoever also planning for bullshit jobs, efficiently.

Incidentally, does not look like bullshit jobs were specific to the USSR, they
are indeed _everywhere_.

~~~
ulzeraj
I fail to see how magic advanced computer power would solve the problem of
economic calculation in the socialist commonwealth. Without prices there is no
efficient distribution of resources.

~~~
thrownagain
The same way they do so within a single sufficiently large corporation, and
the same way the market utterly fails in such a situation. See
[https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4385-failing-to-plan-how-
ay...](https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4385-failing-to-plan-how-ayn-rand-
destroyed-sears)

~~~
thodin
Private companies are interested in getting real statistics, it was not like
that in USSR. Even on largest auto-factory (AvtoVAZ) programmers were creating
software with intentional bugs, so they can fix it later, during pre-
programmed outages and get some bonuses. No one was interested in sending real
statistics to Moscow, from head of local shop to head of large factory.

~~~
Jtsummers
To be fair to those programmers, I've seen the same thing (or similar) in the
US. It wasn't intentional bugs, but intentional delays in addressing them.
That is, they sandbagged. They knew the fixes but didn't apply them so that
they could hit monthly/quarterly/whatever targets. Or they knew they could
knock out 100 features in a week, but that one feature would take 3 months.
They'd mete out those 100 easy features over the three months so that they
didn't appear stalled (they weren't, but management couldn't tell the
difference between a stall and a hard problem).

~~~
thodin
Ok, another example: out famous "Cotton Scandal":
[http://shorturl.at/fzLPU](http://shorturl.at/fzLPU)

For more than 10 years thousands of party members from soviet republic of
Uzbekistan were sending fake data to Moscow (this included corruption on many
levels across the country) about production of cotton. Everyone was involved,
from top to bottom, I don't see how creation of any network would help with
that. In fact programmers across USSR were putting tools into the software for
state companies to produce "fixed" results for central planning committee. And
in central planning committee they were also corrupt :) (my relative worked
there in 80s and I know how it was organized on basic level).

------
UweSchmidt
Culturally, the internet is very much an American thing though. Any computer
network controlled by almost any other culture would probably be extremely
boring.

The idea of registering a domain and "owning" it at the exclusion of everyone
else is still wild to me and clearly a parallel to staking claims of land by
American settlers. The boldness of collecting and presenting information in an
unique way on a website, communities and forums emerging organically, are also
processes that draw inspiration from a real or idealized past of starting from
scratch with no authority around. The tolerance of occasional security
breaches and (initially) rejection of centralization and censorship have been
labeled the "Wild West" before.

A German internet surely would have come with red tape and a mere playground
area for private citizens, and credentialed entities taking over content
creation. Communist ideology would have made the thing centrally controlled,
and judging how tightly controlled copying machines and telephones were in
Eastern Germany as a means of communication nothing of cultural value would
have come out of a communist internet in my opinion.

~~~
talideon
You don't "own" a domain: you have a recurring lease on it.

~~~
macspoofing
A domain is a type of intellectual property. For all intents and purposes you
own it.

~~~
talideon
It's not, unless you have a trademark, and even then only within narrow
domains in which you've registered the trademark.

You don't own domains any more than anything else you lease.

In fact, if you read your registration agreement, you'll find out just how
_little_ you own it.

