Unglued Empire: The Soviet Experience with Communications Technologies by Gladys D. Ganley
Robert Randolph · Technology and Culture · 1997
1006 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE claim with which the authors begin and end their book. Edelcrantz’s treatise offers, they promise (p. x), “a glimpse of the world of a serious eighteenth century scholar attacking a twentieth century problem.” They conclude (p. 218) by remarking that Chappe and Edelcrantz solved the problem of signaling codes “in a way that makes it look easy” and that they did so “almost two centuries before we understood the problem well enough to recognize it as hard.” The fact that Chappe and Edelcrantz attacked the problem of signal ing codes makes it ipso facto an 18th-century problem, and one would like to know more about the contemporary resources in codes and cryptography on which they could draw in defining and resolv ing the problem. Only from that perspective can onejudge how hard it was. Michael S. Mahoney Dr. Mahoney teaches in the Program in History ofScience at Princeton University. Unglued Empire: The SovietExperience with Communications Technologies. By Gladys D. Ganley, with a foreword by Marshall I. Goldman. Norwood, N.J.: Ablex, 1996. Pp. xvii+234; notes, bibliography, in dex. $54.95 (cloth); $24.95 (paper). That information technologies, policies, and media played an im portant role in the decline and ultimate demise of the USSR is well known from the works of Scott Shane, David Benn, and others. In Unglued Empire, however, Gladys Ganley recounts the saga in a dra matic and accessible fashion on the basis ofwide-ranging and metic ulous documentation. By assessing it against the backdrop of similar occurrences in other countries, she derives insights into the new challenges that modern communication technologies pose for any government that would wish to control its people by controlling in formation. Unglued Empire opens with a concise survey of the stagnant econ omy and moribund polity that Mikhail Gorbachev inherited in 1985 when he came to power in the USSR. Ganley spotlights the role that communication technologies had already begun to play in the strug gle between dissidents and the Communist regime. She then devotes four chapters to the effects that Gorbachev’s policies of openness (glasnost) and restructuring (perestroika) had on communications in the USSR during the next five years, focusing in turn on specific sets of media: telephone and facsimile, computers and computer networks, print media, and radio and television. A chapter on the watershed Press Law of 1990, which at least in theory replaced Com munist Party control of the mass media with legal regulation, sets TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 1007 the stage for a chapter on Russian Federation president Boris Yelt sin’s use of media and information resources in his power struggle against Gorbachev, and for another on Gorbachev’s response, an attempt to clamp down on the media. The core of Ganley’s book is her seven-chapter treatment of the August 1991 coup attempt against Gorbachev, in which hard-line opponents sought to halt the disintegration of the USSR by seizing power. Ganley details the coup conspirators’ maladroit information handling during the takeover attempt and their oddly incomplete efforts to block communication among Gorbachev, his supporters, and the outside world. She recounts the breathtaking accomplish ments ofYeltsin and his allies in spreading the word about unfolding events, by means of telephone, fax, and e-mail; by alternative and makeshift radio and television facilities; by relay through Western media and news services; by photocopying or clandestine printing of banned newspapers; and by surreptitious transmission ofproscribed information through broadcasts and publications permitted by the junta. She tells the now-familiar but always gripping story ofhow the captive Gorbachev, with phone lines cut, relied on Western radio services to learn what was happening and on smuggled-out video tapes to send what would have been his final message if he had been killed. Ganley concludes her study with a chapter on the dissolution of the USSR in the aftermath of the coup, which offers her reflec tions on the difficulty that modern communications technologies now clearly pose for governments anywhere that seek to control in formation flow unless they possess the political will and resources to do so thoroughly and by force. Unglued Empire is not a...