The 21st century electronic curtain between ‘Eastern and Western Internets’
For Russian philosopher Epstein, a new electronic and digital "Iron Curtain” is upon us. With the collapse of the Soviet totalitarian system, a new, immense and enveloping virtual system has emerged. Today's wall is not easily controlled by a centre of absolute power, but efforts are underway to plug the holes and sever connections. Putin's challenger is no longer Navalny, but Durov, founder of Telegram.
As Russian philosopher and writer Mikhail Epstein said on Radio Svoboda, at the turn of the millennium we moved from the CCCP[*] (or SSSR in Latin, i.e. USSR)[†] to the WWW, the acronym of the global Internet, which is being split into "Eastern and Western Internets”, divided by a new electronic and digital "Iron Curtain”.
Both acronyms indicate different kinds of unity of peoples and worldviews, the SSS of Soyuz, Sotsializm, Sovety indicating union, sharing, and other traits of common generalisation, typical of progressive ideologies.
When the SSS project collapsed, it was replaced by the WWW project, the World Wide Web, a universal web, Set na ves Sviet, “Network for the entire Earth”, as Epstein defines it, turning the socialist slogan of “Workers of the world, unite!” into "Consciences of all peoples and all times, unite!"
Thus, it is unsurprising that the history of the Internet's birth coincides with the disintegration of the Soviet empire, becoming in some ways its chronological continuation.
A totalitarian system ends, and in its place a virtual system is installed, equally immense and enveloping, one that does not require blood sacrifices or persecution in exchange for universal brotherhood, not of bodies, but of minds, not of life, but of thought.
Let us remember the dry lines from the Encyclopaedia Britannica: "The development of the WWW began in 1989 at the hands of Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues at CERN [. . .] The first text-based web browser was released in January 1992. The Mosaic web browser was released in September 1993; Netscape Navigator in December 1994.”
At that crucial moment in history, the last vestiges of totalitarianism intertwined with the first threads of the World Wide Web. Precisely in 1989, when the Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall came down, when Eastern Europe freed itself from Soviet dictatorship and the global socialist system collapsed, the network protocol, the command language used to send messages between computers, was created.
January 1992 marks not only the first month in the history of the "independent states" of the former Soviet Union, but also the beginning of the history of browsers, which made the Web accessible to personal computers. The universal Internet was born at the historical moment when Soviet-style totalitarianism was coming to an end.
The Commonwealth of Independent States (CSI), Soyuz Nezavisimykh Gosudarstv (SNG)[‡] in Russian, replaced the USSR, but “it immediately melted away," Epstein notes, a phoney institution that never led to any form of unity.
Subsequently, an attempt was made to create the Eurasian Union, started by Kazakhstan's "eternal" president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, who later found himself marginalised. The Eurasian Economic Union (EAES) was established, which today attempts to intervene in international markets. This led to the emergence of the Eurasian military alliance, the CSTO (Collective Security Treaty Organisation), which has been utterly incapable of addressing the military challenges of recent years and has remained powerless even in the face of local conflicts such as the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan, not to mention that between Russia and Ukraine.
The USSR ended in December 1991, and the WWW was born in January 1992. "Like a velvet butterfly, the Internet emerged from the SSSR, from its multiple and cumbersome structures, like a steel caterpillar," Epstein states.
In September and October 1993, when Russia’s presidential army besieged the country’s parliament and a bloody civil war tore through the heart of Moscow, Mosaic, the first American mass-market networking platform, made its appearance on the global stage.
Finally, in December 1994, when Russia's internal political landscape became visibly fragmented and the war in Chechnya began, the global electronic communications network was further consolidated. A new and improved programme, Netscape, was released, after which the Internet began to develop at an unprecedented pace.
Thus, the failed global republic of labour was replaced by a global republic of intellects, who no longer need hands and weapons to realise their ideas, but manage instead their own machines and cultivate their own fields in a purely virtual space.
Unlike the struggle for material property, the “expropriation of the expropriators”, the Internet does not require violence or sacrifices.
Epstein quotes some remarks from a conversation he reported in 1999 on Radio Svoboda with the poet Alexei Tsvetkov, which reflects the enthusiasm of that period:
“What do Russians lack in the post-Soviet years?
“It seems there is more of everything than before, and if there wasn't, there will be more: books, television programmes, wines, sausages, parties, politicians... but the Enormous is missing. Which was there in Soviet life, despite or precisely because of its harsh and cold everyday life.
“There was an Idea that moved and inspired this world, killing it even, inspired by pain and faith, despair and damnation. Worldly Holiness was missing, and even the Inspiration for the soul's self-destruction, a sort of final correlation of every little thing in existence with the History of the World and its Main Meaning.
“Traditional religions have disappeared behind the threshold of newly rebuilt temples, and in secular life, only the secular remains, only for the benefit of the present and the fulfilment of its small goal. The Enormous has abandoned life: only the ‘old songs’ dedicated to it remain, in which it rejoices and weeps for the entire universe it has abandoned.”
Now this Enormousness is back to envelop the Russian world, the WWW is locked down, and the new electronic curtain is rising to protect the "digital concentration camp”, with new war letters such as Z (Zapad, West), S for Sever, North, and V for Vostok, East, according to the divisions of the armies that must conquer the entire world. Above all, the Z of the great Western enemy, which coincides with Zapret, "Prohibition," and Zanaves, "Curtain," and also with the Zone, which indicates the world of concentration camps, once again populated by sacrificial victims of the new empire.
It's no longer an "iron curtain" easily controlled by a centre of absolute power, where all it takes is a simple pull of the plug, while today every ban and every wall is circumvented in a thousand ways. This is why there are constant attempts to plug holes, cut connections, block windows that open unexpectedly, due to the currents and flows of the digital network.
There is no clash of ideologies nor specific forces, whether from the heights of the Kremlin or from the cracks of the Internet; we wander in the void of "totality without utopia”, as Epstein calls it.
The electronic curtain separates Russia not only from the outside world, but also from itself and its future, in a senseless struggle between WWW and ZZZ.
The political confrontation in Russia today is no longer between Vladimir Putin and the hero of dissent Alexei Navalny, who sunk into the "Zone”, and certainly not against smaller parties like the Communists, liberal nationalists, and other regime supporters who are trying to exploit discontent over Internet shutdowns ahead of September's parliamentary elections.
The people facing off today are Vladimir Putin and Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram messenger, whose shutdown symbolises the end of the WWW and the definitive transition to ZZZ.
Durov recently accused the European Commission of planning to introduce an application to verify the age of Internet users, viewing it as a tool for spying on European citizens, extending the electronic curtain into the virtual world, where borders and latitudes exist.
The founder of Telegram was arrested in August 2024 at the Paris airport, on his way from Azerbaijan, where he reportedly met with Putin, through the mediation of Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev. In reality, there was no meeting. The Kremlin tsar even boasts of "not using the Internet”, letting his subordinates hack it, placing himself above all the curtains.
Durov has been accused of refusing to cooperate with state institutions in both the East and the West, allowing all kinds of illegal transactions on his messenger's channels, which Russia is now trying to shut down forever, despite the founder's instructions on possible bypass routes, again using the magical acronym VPN, the escape route from the digital curtain, not knowing where we will end up.
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[*] Союз Советских Социалистических Республик.
[†] Union of Socialist Soviet Republics.
[‡] Содружество Независимых Государств,
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