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

This 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.