On September 5, 1982, a music festival in San Bernardino, California, organized by Apple’s Steve Wozniak, bore witness to the first-ever public television link between the United States and the Soviet Union. Two large screens on either side of the stage broadcast performances by singer-songwriter Alla Pugacheva and rock band Voskreseniye, while Soviet citizens gathered at a Moscow radio station rocked out to the American lineup—that is, until Grateful Dead promoter Bill Graham, “convinced the whole thing was a KGB trick,” as Jeffrey Kripal wrote in his 2007 book Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion, “literally pulled the plug halfway through the concert.” This so-called US-Soviet Space Bridge (the first of several, including one co-hosted by television host Phil Donahue) often features in books about the cultural history of the Cold War. But what many of these books don’t tell you is that a large number of the people who organized these events also hoped to lift the Iron Curtain through another method: telepathy.
In her new book Hacking the Iron Curtain: A Media Archaeology of the Russian Internet, journalist and “media archeologist” Natalia Konradova reveals how the story of the early Soviet internet—and the role it played during the collapse of the USSR in 1991—can be traced back to early- and mid-twentieth-century dreams of instantaneous and unmediated mass communication. Though recognized today as a pseudoscientific fantasy, telepathy was, for much of the twentieth century, considered a real possibility—one whose secrets modern science could and would eventually discover. In the Soviet Union, scientific interest in telepathy stemmed not only from a sense of general techno-optimism shared by many countries both before and after the two world wars, but also from beliefs and aspirations particular to communist society.
Like cosmism (a philosophical movement that aimed at nothing less than the colonization of space, the attainment of immortality, and the resurrection of every person who ever lived), research into “parapsychology” was expected to help usher in a utopian future. Of course, what this future looked like depended on who you asked. Some scientists and science fiction authors envisioned a world in which doctors could diagnose patients remotely and one person could beam their skills and talents directly into the bodies of others.
The CIA worried that Soviet officials would be able to steal sensitive government information and control “machines on the moon or in the ocean” with their thoughts, according to a 1973 report. Meanwhile, Iosif Goldin—a parapsychology enthusiast and principal organizer of the Soviet side of the first Space Bridge—imagined mass communication as a cure for geopolitical conflict. He once wrote that if “one realizes the observation of the sunrise simultaneously on all continents of the Earth and does it regularly, turning it into a form of bringing people together, there may be no nuclear catastrophe.” Although the internet itself did not directly contribute to the USSR’s demise, it should come as no surprise that the appearance of one closely coincided with the disappearance of the other.
Described by Konradova as a “perfected version of samizdat,” or self-published dissident literature, the rise of the internet and online communities made censorship and the suppression of information virtually impossible—at least for a time. Hacking the Iron Curtain concludes with a brief though warranted reflection on how, amid digital restrictions under Vladimir Putin, the Russian internet ecosystem—Runet—has become increasingly cut off from the rest of the World Wide Web, aiding the country’s return to autocracy. How did you become interested in parapsychology?
I have worked on many different subjects as an anthropologist and media theorist. But I have always been particularly interested in phenomena or systems that are either created by users or shaped through their efforts and self-organization. It does not really matter whether I’m studying war memorials in small villages, which were one of the subjects I researched in the early 2000s, or internet literature—a phenomenon of the early Russian internet, when users had for the first time the opportunity to publish their literary works without them having to pass through any editorial process.
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