How Not to Network a Nation. The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet

(Ben Green) #1

work by Orlando Figes, Revolutionary Russia, 1891–1991: A History (New York: Metro-
politan Books, 2014). Other classics outside the Soviet period or space include Eric
Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991 (New York: Pan-
theon Books, 1994); Orlando Figes, Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia
(New York: Picador, 2003); and James H. Billington, The Icon and the Axe: An Interpre-
tive History of Russian Culture (New York: Vintage, 1966). For more on the intellectual
context, see the politically opposing pair, Isaiah Berlin, Russian Thinkers (New York:
Penguin Group, 1978), and Richard Pipes, Russian Conservatism and Its Critics: A
Study in Political Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005).



  1. Robert E. Kohler and Kathryn M. Olesko, “Introduction: Clio Meets Science: The
    Challenges of History,” Osiris 27 (1) (2012): 4–6.

  2. The literature on the history of computing in the United States context is also
    significant. For a basic introduction, see Paul E. Ceruzzi, Computing: A Concise History
    (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012); Paul E. Ceruzzi, A History of Modern Computing (Cam-
    bridge: MIT Press, 1998); Martin Campbell-Kelly and William Aspray, Computer: A
    History of the Information Machine (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2004); and William
    Aspray and Paul E. Ceruzzi, The Internet and American Business (Cambridge: MIT
    Press, 2008). The growing literature on the U.S. history of the Internet includes
    works such as Janet Abbate, Inventing the Internet (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999); Paul
    N. Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War
    America (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996); Finn Burton, Spam: A Shadow History of the
    Internet (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013); and Thomas Streeter, The Net Effect: Romanti-
    cism, Capitalism, and the Internet (New York: New York University Press, 2011). See
    also Jonathan Zittrain, The Future of the Internet, and How to Stop It (New Haven: Yale
    University Press, 2008), and Tim Wu, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Informa-
    tion Empires (New York: Atlantic Books, 2010).

  3. Scholarship has not yet advanced a deep understanding of the relationship
    between social justice and computing, although initial inroads are being made in
    the critical study of gender and computing. A few works of note include Donna
    Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Rout-
    ledge, 1991); Jennifer S. Light, “When Computers Were Women,” Technology and
    Culture 40 (3) (1999): 455–483; Nathan Ensmenger, The Computer Boys Take Over:
    Computers, Programmers, and the Politics of Technical Expertise (Cambridge: MIT Press,
    2010); and Mette Bryld and Nina Lykke, Cosmodolphins: Feminist Cultural Studies of
    Technology, Animals and the Sacred (New York: Zed Books, 2000).

  4. David E. Hoffmann, The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race
    and Its Dangerous Legacy (New York: Random House, 2009), 150–154, 364–369, 422–
    423, 477.

  5. Ibid., 153–154.


222 Notes to Introduction

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