Eagle, I don't want to form an alliance anymore.

An application was quickly sent from the Academy of Sciences to the Soviet Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology: to introduce World Wide Web technology and build a nationwide information network.

When the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology received this application, it was busy discussing cooperation with the University of Helsinki in Finland.

1990年和1991年正是计算机技术快速发展的年代。在1991年8月25日，芬兰赫尔辛基大学的一个二十一岁的学生在论坛Minix新闻组上发了一条帖子，帖子的大意是:

"I'm making an operating system, it's just a hobby, it won't be as big or as professional as GNU."

The student's name is Linus Torvalds, and the "hobby" project he wrote about is called Linux.

Before him, there were many operating systems in the world. Because the World Wide Web had not yet been invented and the Internet only circulated within academic circles, each research institution would develop its own system. For example, in the 80s, each ministry in the Soviet Union had its own operating system. However, after Slava came to power and began to vigorously promote informatization, a unified operating system was established across the entire Union—DEMOS.

DEMOS is the Russian abbreviation for "Dialogue Unified Mobile Operating System." It was a Unix-like operating system developed in the Soviet Union and the technological foundation behind the Relcom network (an early Soviet computer network connecting research institutions and universities). The DEMOS team primarily consisted of personnel from the Kurchatov Institute in Moscow and the Computing Center of the Academy of Sciences, who had accumulated extensive technical expertise in Unix-like systems over the years.

If the Linux kernel were combined with the upper-level applications of DEMOS and the Soviet Union's local software ecosystem, and the Linux kernel were used to replace the outdated parts of DEMOS that couldn't keep up with hardware development, while retaining DEMOS's accumulated experience in areas specific to the Soviet Union, such as Cyrillic alphabet support, OGAS interface, and security authentication system, then the Soviet Union could have created an operating system that was both modern and localized!

Moreover, Torvalds is Finnish. The relationship between the Soviet Union and Finland was very good in recent years—for decades during the Cold War, Finland served as a buffer zone and technological conduit between the Soviet Union and the West, and academic exchanges and technological cooperation between the Soviet Union and Finland were completely unimpeded.

Therefore, after combining various suggestions from technician forums during the past process of popularizing information technology, the Kurchatov Institute team decided to introduce the open-source collaboration model of Linux into the Soviet software ecosystem and use it to improve DEMOS.

In November, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology delivered a report on the introduction and improvement of the new operating system for the World Wide Web to Slava's desk.

Slava was overjoyed after reading the report and ordered: "Do it! Do it with all your might! It would be best to bring all these geniuses to the Soviet Union to serve the cause of communism!"

On November 18, the Soviet Union sent a special envoy to CERN to formally contact Berners-Lee.

The Soviet representative found him and identified himself and explained his purpose:

"The Soviet government hopes to invite Mr. Berners-Lee to work in the Soviet Union to help build a World Wide Web system among Soviet universities. The Soviet Union is willing to spend one million rubles to purchase the technology patents of the World Wide Web and hire you for a fee of 1500 rubles per month."

This is no small amount. After the bursting of Japan's economic bubble, the only two currencies that remained the strongest in the world were the US dollar and the ruble. In many European countries, the ruble's share of foreign exchange reserves has surpassed that of the US dollar. 1500 rubles is enough for a middle-class European family to live comfortably for three months.

For a technician at CERN earning a basic researcher's salary, this is a very sincere offer.

After listening to the Soviet representative's words, Berners-Lee remained silent for a moment, then said:

“I developed the World Wide Web with the intention of making it public and accessible to everyone. You don’t need to buy patents because I don’t intend to apply for patents for it.”

The Soviet representative was taken aback.

"It's not just about the protocols and standards I've developed; I hope that everything new things everyone develops from now on will be open and free. If a single company or government monopolizes these things, the World Wide Web will become a closed system—and then it will lose all its meaning!"

What is this? This is the spirit of internet communism!

The Soviet representative's gaze towards him instantly transformed into that of someone looking at a proletarian comrade.

"The Soviet people thank you for your dedication, Comrade Bernard Lee."

“Hey, wait a minute—if you’re really willing to pay me to hire you, can I bring my family with me to the Soviet Union? Your green cards are honestly really hard to get.”

Berners-Lee smiled shyly.

"Of course! But we need about a week for background checks."

Please understand that this is the Cold War era, and any entry application from a NATO citizen requires careful screening, let alone obtaining a Union green card.” The Soviet representative smiled and shook hands with Berners-Lee.

"Actually, the main reason I was willing to work in the Soviet Union was not because of the money, but because you had OGAS."

“OGAS?”

“Yes, OGAS,” Berners-Lee said. “My Soviet colleagues at CERN told us about this automated system you’re using to manage the country. You’re building a nationwide, real-time information network for economic coordination—there’s no other like it in the world!”

You may not know how many people in NATO universities are studying your system. Since the economic crisis in the United States four years ago and in Japan a few months ago, many scholars have believed that we should learn from the Soviet experience.

Of course, we all know this is impossible. The wealthy and corrupt politicians will not allow citizens the freedom to access information and monitor the government at any time. The British government is doing everything it can to increase mass surveillance and control over its citizens…

Seeing that the Englishman was about to start criticizing the government, the Soviet representative quickly stopped him and told him not to say such things in public.

"In short, if we could achieve a system where information could flow both horizontally and vertically across the entire country: factories could see their warehouse inventory, farmers could check the demand in nearby cities, and students could read papers in libraries across the country... that would be—"

He paused, as if searching his mind for a sufficiently grand word.

"—This will be the golden age of mankind."

Sigrún has taught at the Iceland University of the Arts as a part-time lecturer since and was Dean of the Department of Fine Art from -. In – she held a research position at Reykjavík Art Museum focusing on the role of women in Icelandic art. She studied fine art at the Icelandic College of Arts and Crafts and at Pratt Institute, New York, and holds BA and MA degrees in art history and philosophy from the University of Iceland. Sigrún lives and works in Iceland.

CERN, December 3, 1991

Berners-Lee didn't want money, but CERN, which possessed the technology, demanded money from the Soviet Union, saying that terminating Berners-Lee's contract and relinquishing the intellectual property rights would cost money. The Soviet Union readily transferred one million rubles to CERN's account through the Foreign Economic Bank, and CERN subsequently signed a document.

"CERN relinquishes all intellectual property rights to the World Wide Web code—whether in source code or binary form—which anyone may use, copy, modify, and redistribute."

And so, from that day on, the three components of the World Wide Web became the common property of all mankind.

In the Soviet Union, a country with a long tradition of "property-based communism," all technologies acquired from abroad could be used by research institutions, citizens, and businesses. Soviet electronics factories began producing the first batch of computer hard drives equipped with the new operating system.

On the 28th, the new DEMOS operating system was flashed onto these hard drives as a pre-installed system. The hard drives were then installed into newly manufactured personal computers and computer workstations and shipped to universities and information centers throughout the Soviet Union.

In theory, a graduate student at Moscow State University who has just received a computer can connect to the World Wide Web after turning it on—if his machine is connected to the campus network.

Of course, there was almost nothing on the World Wide Web in December 1991; there were probably fewer than 20 web pages in the entire world combined. But this student had a tool to create web pages. He could turn his paper into a webpage, and he could put a link in the webpage pointing to another paper he cited—perhaps that paper was on a server in Leningrad.

On January 10, 1992, the Soviet government decided to begin popularizing the Internet within the country.

The first to join were academic networks among higher education institutions—Moscow State University, Leningrad State University, Novosibirsk Science City, Kyiv University... These institutions, which already had a large number of terminals and deployed information centers, have now added access to the World Wide Web.

Then came an even bolder decision: the Soviet government decided to try to establish a government website to implement Soviet democracy.

The website's function is simple: it allows citizens to access publicly available government documents such as laws and regulations, departmental notices, statistical data, and newspaper articles.

The website also provides links to other government agencies or university websites through these documents.

Another month later, after all the constituent republics and local governments of the Soviet Union had their own websites, Slava decided to apply the service system to the government website, allowing citizens to handle some business online through their personal terminals—of course, due to the immaturity of the technology, in most cases citizens still had to make an in-person trip.

Later, the Soviet government established a dedicated whistleblowing website, allowing citizens to submit whistleblowing materials directly online, and many citizens experienced the benefits of the anonymity of the Internet.

As public satisfaction with the Soviet government continued to rise, Slava eventually issued a direct order that all publicly available information, including daily government operations, policies, and finances, should be made available online to allow Soviet citizens to further monitor the government and comprehensively deepen Soviet democracy.

In 1992, there were no videos or animations, and even pictures were rare. The internet speed and computing power in 1992 could not support overly complex pages; they were just simple text links and some simple tables.

But its significance is immense. This is the first time in human history that a government has chosen to proactively disclose government information to all citizens and allow them to inquire, report, and handle business at any time!

On February 14, 1992, the Soviet Union's first government website went online at www.sssr.su

The Latin transliteration of CCCP is SSSR, and the domain suffix is ​​.su—this is the country code top-level domain registered by the Soviet Union in 1990.

The page is very basic. Besides a bunch of content listing various business websites, speeches by the General Secretary, new national and local policies, and TASS news, the top only shows the outline of the Soviet coat of arms—a hammer and sickle with a globe—made up of simple HTML tags, and below that are a few lines of text:

"Government Information Portal of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics"

Then there are a few links:

-Inquiry into the laws and regulations of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR

- Policy briefing of the Council of Ministers of the USSR

- Economic data from the National Statistical Commission

-Pravda News Today

-Government websites of the constituent republics

-Government Services Processing

Each link leads to another page, from which you can navigate to other pages. From the central government to local governments, from government agencies to universities, links unfold like a network.

On the day it went live, traffic was low—because very few people could access it. Only organizations with computers, internet access, and the latest version of the DEMOS system could see the website. In February 1992, there were probably only a few hundred such organizations throughout the entire Soviet Union.

Soviet citizens were very receptive to this novelty. After all, with the informatization reforms of the past few years, most collective farms across the Soviet Union had been incorporated into agricultural production and research associations. Each association's schools had deployed information or computing centers, and large and medium-sized cities had computing and information centers. The widespread use of information terminals within enterprises made this technology completely familiar to workers, and informatization reforms within the government improved the efficiency of citizens' work.

For citizens, it's simply a matter of going from reporting information vertically to terminals to now being able to send messages to each other through information nodes in each city, as long as they have a terminal that can access the network!

How fast! How convenient!

Various private forums were subsequently established, and websites sprang up like mushrooms in 1992. Soon people discovered that this pure New Eden lacked regulation, and harmful content such as crime and extremist ideologies began to appear on the World Wide Web.

Later, some tech enthusiasts and geeks, after entering the world of the World Wide Web, hoped to explore its boundaries, and in the absence of laws and regulations, they quickly made a mess of things.

In June 1992, the first major information leak caused by a hacker attack occurred.

Chapter 130: You, Brother Xiong, can't out-argue you online, but what about offline?

Moscow Kremlin, July 20, 1992

It's 6:20 PM. Slava finished processing the last document. In the past two days, the Soviet foreign trade department had been negotiating with Japanese car companies, hoping to take advantage of the bursting of the Japanese bubble economy to buy up Japanese automotive technology at rock-bottom prices. After reviewing it and giving his approval, Slava tossed it into the "read" document basket.

He stretched and his neck cracked.

"Ding!" He pressed the bell in the secretariat, and the secretary responsible for organizing and sending official documents to the relevant departments pushed open the door and entered, saluting the General Secretary.

"Comrade General Secretary, you've worked hard!" "It's no trouble at all. Go home early after get off work. I'm waiting for Comrade Ivanova."

Slava casually slipped a small bag of glutinous rice strips to his secretary and then said goodbye.

Every time he finished get off work, he would wait for Director Nian to come to him from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. If neither of them was working overtime, the two of them would go home together. Director Nian had called him half an hour earlier, saying that she had to keep an eye on the foreign trade department and it would probably take more than an hour. She told Slava to have dinner in the office first, and if it got too late, Slava could go home first.

So Slava dialed the internal phone and asked his secretary in charge of duties to send him the menu for dinner at the Kremlin that night from the terminal so he could order.

After hanging up the phone, Slava turned to face the terminal on his desk.

This terminal is a standard configuration for an information system—a 15-inch cathode ray tube monitor, a Soviet-made keyboard, and a host computer running the latest version of the DEMOS system.

Since the World Wide Web became widespread in the Soviet Union, this terminal in the General Secretary's office has not only been able to view national economic data, but also access the Internet to browse web pages, send and receive emails, and—

Boasting online.

Slava first opened his email and selected a few dishes with a sweet flavor—in recent years, influenced by his mentor, he had also developed a fondness for sweets. He then sent the email to his secretary and cleaned up his personal email inbox.

Unlike his regular work email for issuing orders to various ministries, this was Slava's private email. Only a few members of the Politburo and the Central Committee who were on good terms with him had his private email, as well as friends he met on online forums.

He first deleted Ligachev's daily greetings without fail, then politely declined several emails inviting him to offline gatherings or fishing trips. Finally, after confirming that there was nothing important, he skillfully opened his browser and entered a URL in the address bar.

veche.su

Vicher is currently the most popular online forum in the Soviet Union.

It is the name of the people's assembly of the ancient Rus' city-states, a democratic tradition of the Novgorod Republic. In the Soviet context, it carries a subtle meaning—"viche" is "democracy" in the feudal era, and the founder probably thought he was being humorous by using it to name an internet forum in a socialist society.

Vicher had over 200,000 daily active users. Considering that in 1992 the total number of people in the Soviet Union with internet access was only a few million, this number meant that almost every Soviet citizen with internet access was spending time here.

The forum's structure mimicked the early BBS's partitioning model, but it made an innovation—allowing users to create their own "Baidu Tieba," similar to a topic partition, where anyone can create and post.

This led to an explosive growth in the number of online forums on Vicher—from "Moscow Food Forum" to "Amur Oblast Fishing Forum" to "Su-27 Family Forum" to "Kazakhstan Joke Forum"—there's everything.

Slava entered her username and password.

Username: AAA Arrest Warrant Wholesale Bear Brother

Password: 1145141919810

login successful.

Sigrún has taught at the Iceland University of the Arts as a part-time lecturer since and was Dean of the Department of Fine Art from -. In – she held a research position at Reykjavík Art Museum focusing on the role of women in Icelandic art. She studied fine art at the Icelandic College of Arts and Crafts and at Pratt Institute, New York, and holds BA and MA degrees in art history and philosophy from the University of Iceland. Sigrún lives and works in Iceland.

The account “AAA Arrest Warrant Wholesaler Bear” has been on the Vicher Forum for three months.

Slava enjoys logging into a few online forums during lunch breaks or near the end of the workday to chat with netizens. Sometimes they have serious discussions—like talking to programmers about system bugs in the "OGAS Technology Forum"—and sometimes they just chat casually, like discussing which bakery makes the best rye bread in the Moscow Life Forum.

He would occasionally run into Nian Dao's alternate account on the forum.

The username of the guide is "AAA Five-Year Plan Writing Sister Long".

Both people's names have the prefix "AAA," which is a popular practice on the Wiche forum. Adding "AAA" to a name is to make it appear at the top of the user's friend list.

"Brother Bear" and "Sister Dragon" occasionally appear in the same thread. They often tag each other in certain topics to invite each other to answer, leading many netizens to believe that the two are either very good friends or a couple in real life.

After all, the two accounts often went online at the same time, and their views on certain topics were surprisingly consistent—for example, both of them particularly liked to criticize those who spread doomsday prophecies on forums such as "the Soviet economy is about to collapse," "NATO is about to invade and liberate the suffering Russian people," and "the Romanov dynasty will return like lightning to settle accounts with the Communist Party."

No one knows who "Brother Xiong" is. There have been speculations on the forum: some people say that he is probably a mid-level cadre in the State Planning Commission because he is too familiar with economic data.

Some people say he works in the military industry because he always knows what research and development is about to begin and what test flights are about to start before the country issues an announcement.

Some people say he's just a retired old man who spends his days spouting off about the unofficial histories and secrets of high-ranking officials to grab attention.

After logging in, Slava went directly to the "Soviet Population Forum".

This forum was originally a place for netizens to exchange information about the culture, customs, travel guides, and food recommendations of the various republics of the Soviet Union. But at some point, its topics gradually shifted—from "Which Georgian wine is the best?" to "How brain-dead are the leaders there?"

The reason is simple: before the World Wide Web, people across the Soviet Union were geographically separated, lacking a platform for free communication. The bureaucracy you encountered in Uzbekistan was suffocating; who could you talk to?

They talk to their neighbors, they talk to their coworkers—everyone knows, but it's just venting. You don't know if people in Moscow are experiencing the same thing, you don't know if people in the Far East are also cursing the same leaders.

Now we have it!

On the Viche forum, an Uzbek farmer (maybe a farmer, maybe not—who knows who's who on the internet?) posted about how the chairman of their village's collective farm bribed the data entry clerk to change the data on the OGAS terminal, falsely reporting production to cheat the government out of subsidies.

A worker from Moscow commented below: "Our factory has the same problem. The factory manager asked the accountant to lower the scrap rate. The system shows that our factory's pass rate is 98%, but in reality, even 85% is hard to come by!"

Then a teacher from Minsk commented: Our school principal used the government-allocated maintenance funds to renovate his own villa. The system shows that "the school maintenance project has been completed," but the classroom windows are still drafty.