Link Turn – The alternative of a public communist inspired commons is infeasible – it leads to a surveillance state that halts true internet access

Computing devices had been used in communications applications in USSR since the 1950s, with missile defence systems (M-40) communicating to remote terminals sending radar data over hundreds of kilometres away, and later the launch in 1972 of a data telecommunication network to serve the needs of the Russian Railways. By the early 1980s, the USSR began to use computer networks to connect with the world outside, testing connections with Australia and the United States. Further commercial networks appeared through the early 1990s. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation and other states inherited a vast network of telephone and data connections. Albeit not state of the art in a global sense, this network served as an initial backbone for the development of the Internet in post-Soviet countries, playing a major role in future network development in former Soviet countries and Eastern Europe.

The Soviet attitude towards communication technologies was described to be driven by telephony policy that was targeted along with other media policies, at the surveillance and maintenance of control through keeping the sector underdeveloped. The resulting concentration of access to media among the ruling elite, the nomenklatura (Vartanova, ), necessarily created an informational divide between the ruling caste and other castes. Still, digitisation and technological development was seen as scientific development rather than as a threat to the political status quo; although it allowed some development in the sector, it still limited connectivity with other countries.