My organization supplied the models to the Usenet in Moscon from 1989 to 1995...
What sort of models do you refer to?
We were on the ground at a conference in Prague when that coup attempt occurred.
By coincidence, I had just the week before helped organize and participated in a conference on HCI. The Relcom folks were not at that conference, but I was able to take time to meet them, see the office and go to a very nice party with them :-). When the coup attempt occurred the next week, I was back in the US, but in a perfect position to relay traffic from the US to them and from them to the US. The most "famous" thing that came out was Yeltsin's speech while standing on a tank in front of the White House.
We were in constant contact with our folks in Moscow who was busy organizing the events without interference.
Do you have any of that traffic stored away? If so, could we get it for the archive at SUNY?
The new media is always under the radar of the old regime.
It sure was in that case. Within a few hours, they were operating on laptops out of their homes, so it would have been hard to stop even if they had been visible. They were using dial-ip links in those days.
Our new media have given us the illusion of freedom and openness while actually giving the dictators a free hand to track and identify the opposition leadership and all their friends.
It is surely a two-edged sword. I just wrote a report on the Internet in Cuba, and devoted a section to pointing out that the Internet not only poses a "dictator's dilemma," but can be a valuable tool for a dictator (or terrorist). Larry