daemon@decwrl.UUCP (02/08/84)
From: castor::covert (John Covert)
Piet Beertema of the CWI (Center for Math. & Comp. Science), Amsterdam
proposes putting the SU on the net to permit the free interchange of
ideas. I greatly applaud this idea. I only wish it would work.
There's always been a joke that if the U.S. dropped 200 million copies
of the Sears & Roebuck catalog on the SU, the people of the SU would
fix the problem with their government within two weeks.
This would, unfortunately, be just as hard to do as it would be to put
the SU on the net. It would be great for mcvax to act as the gateway
to the SU, but I think you're going to find it difficult for your
autodialers to reach telephone numbers inside the SU. Unless the
Netherlands enjoys a special privilege that has been removed from all
other countries I've checked (the U.S., the U.K., Switzerland, Austria,
the Federal Republic of Germany), direct calls into the SU are no longer
possible.
The SU is so paranoid about counter-revolutionary ideas reaching their
people that they disconnected the incoming direct dial links several
years ago. It appears (from my point of view) that they went in to
service the needs of the 1980 Olympic Games and were then disconnected
as soon as that need no longer existed. The number of circuits into
the Soviet Union has been so drastically reduced from that time that
the remaining circuits are too few to handle the traffic load of incoming,
subscriber dialed calls.
For example, when attempting to call from the Federal Republic of
Germany, you get the recording: "Der Selbstwaehlferndienst in die
Sowjetunion ist zur Zeit nicht moeglich. Bitte melden Sie Ihr
Gespraech ueber das Auslandsfernamt 0010 an." For those who don't
read German, this is roughly the same as the recording obtained in the
U.S.: "International Direct Dial Service is no longer available to the
U.S.S.R. Your local operator must connect you to the International
Operating Center."
Several telephone administrations complained to the SU about this a few
years ago, and received the response from the SU that the telephone exchange
handling incoming calls was undergoing repair. It seems strange that a new
exchange installed only a few years ago is in need of repair which is taking
so long.
Even if it were possible to set up the net dialogue with citizens of the SU,
under current Soviet law, the participants in many of the discussions we carry
on over the net would quickly find themselves in hot water for spreading
anti-Soviet propaganda/hysteria. We certainly wouldn't be able to send them
net.politics or net.religion! A country which doesn't let a tourist bring in
more than one bible, which must be in the tourist's native language, is
certainly not going to permit the free incoming flow of information we are
used to in the west.
Oh, how I wish we could freely exchange ideas with the Soviet people, to
convince them that we don't want to blow them off the face of the earth.
Unfortunately it is their government, not the western governments, that
prevents this interchange.
John Covert ...{ucbvax,decvax,allegra}!decwrl!rhea!castor!covert