De-centring the history of the internet in the Soviet Union: computers, networks and the infrastructural politics of digitality in Lithuania

ENThis article proposes de-centring the Russia-focused history of the Soviet computer networks by engaging with the developments in Soviet and post-Soviet Lithuania. Although in Lithuania the computer industry and digital connectivity developed as part of the Soviet big science and large systems, its politics took a different shape locally and regionally through incremental and situated practices. I argue that the national politics of digitality in the late Soviet modernity combined both autarchic and transnational orientations in effect creating lasting computer engineer communities. Drawing on a study of the archival and published materials and interviews with Lithuanian, Russian and international computer scientists and engineers, I show that, first, the scientific communities outside key Russian sites actively engaged in experimenting with remote digital communication since the 1960s and, second, that the legacy of these experiments was socially, materially and institutionally significant during the transformation into liberal democracy and market economy and connecting to the transnational networks and flows of technology in the 1990s. Keywords: entrepreneurship; the Cold War; Computers; Internet; Colonial modernisation; technonationalism; Lithuania; the Soviet Union.

• Constructing soviet cultural policy: cybernetics and governance in Lithuania after World War II. Linköping : Linköping University Electronic Press, 2008. 1 pdf (277 p.).
• Economic strategies and immigration in the Soviet Union's Western borderlands: Lithuania, Latvia and Belorussia in the 1950s and 1960s. Europe-Asia studies 2022, 74, 3, 481-498.
• Internal transfer of cybernetics and informality in the Soviet Union. Reassessing Cold War Europe. London: Routledge, 2013. P. 119-137.
• Inžinieriai pagal planą. Techninis mokymas ir specialistų rengimas Lietuvoje 1944-1990 metais. Vilnius : Lietuvos istorijos institutas, 2019. 279 p.
• Lietuviškoji nomenklatūra biurokratinėje sistemoje: tarp stagnacijos ir dinamikos (1968-1988 m.). Vilnius : Lietuvos istorijos instituto leidykla, 2011. 661 p.
• Situating the Internet as infrastructure: the case of post-socialist Lithuania. Internet histories 2021, December 13, 1 pdf.
• The Post-socialist internet: how labor, geopolitics and critique produce the internet in Lithuania.. Bielefeld : transcript Verlag, 2022. 252 p.