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Before the Web · Era 2 · Into the Internet

1989–1992Relcom JSC and the Demos cooperative parted ways in 1991–1992; in…

Relcom

A Soviet computer network put together in 1989–1990 by programmers of the Demos cooperative together with staff of the Kurchatov Institute, at first simply to exchange mail with the outside world. A year after the first letter to Helsinki the network was the only independent channel of communication during the coup of 1991, and it went on to become the country's first commercial internet provider.

Founders Valery Bardin · Alexey Soldatov · Vadim Antonov · Dmitry Burkov · Mikhail Davydov
Domains relcomdata.ru · demos.ru
infrastructureemailussrb2bcooperativeclosed-market

In brief

Relcom was a network put together in 1989–1990 by programmers of the Soviet cooperative Demos together with staff of the Kurchatov Institute, at first simply to exchange mail with the outside world over telephone modems. A year later, during the coup of 1991, it turned out to be the main independent channel of communication in a country where the rest of the media had been suppressed, and one of the country's first commercial providers grew out of it. What makes it interesting is not the coup in itself but what came before and after: how ordinary engineers turned a Soviet Unix club into a business the state neither planned nor controlled, and how decades later the state remembered it anyway, to its own advantage.

How it started (the founders)

Demos began not with the internet but with the Interface cooperative, which Mikhail Davydov gathered around himself in the spring of 1987 to write software for automobile testing. Cooperatives became legal in the USSR only in 1988, so the registration of the new name, Demos, in 1989 was personally approved by Yuri Luzhkov, at the time the curator of the cooperative movement at the Moscow City Executive Committee and the future mayor of Moscow. Valery Bardin, Sergey Borodko, Dmitry Burkov, and Anatoly Soldatov gathered around Davydov, ordinary Soviet programmers and research staff rather than entrepreneurs by training.

Even before the cooperative, around 1983, part of the same team obtained the Unix v7 sources from Berkeley on magnetic tape and adapted them to Soviet SM-1425 machines. The resulting DEMOS operating system was first shown publicly at a seminar in the autumn of 1984, and its developers received a USSR Council of Ministers Prize. Long before the Relcom network, in other words, the team already knew how to turn someone else's Western technology into a working product for local hardware, and that same skill later shaped how the network itself was built.

The first contact with the outside world came as early as the summer of 1989: Dmitry Volodin got through by telephone to the administrator at the University of Helsinki and agreed on an exchange of mail, free of charge, with no domain and no infrastructure at all. Regular UUCP communication with the EUnet network through Helsinki started only a year later, in August 1990, and that is what is usually counted as the birth of the network; it was done by Vadim Antonov.

Year-by-year timeline

Lesser-known but significant facts

  1. The registration of the Demos cooperative in 1989 was personally approved by Yuri Luzhkov, the future mayor of Moscow, at the time the curator of the cooperative movement at the Moscow City Executive Committee.
  2. The official date of the first letter to Helsinki (August 1990) was not the first attempt: a year earlier, in July 1989, another Demos employee, Dmitry Volodin, had already arranged an exchange of mail with a free telephone call, with no domain and no regular link.
  3. After the split of 1991–1992 the Relcom trademark stayed not with the JSC of the same name but with Demos, and the confusion had to be cleared up twenty-one years later, in 2013, by merging the companies back together estimate.
  4. Alexey Soldatov, first president of Relcom JSC and deputy minister of communications in 2008–2010, received two years in a penal colony in 2024 in the case over rights to the IP addresses of RosNIIROS, the organization that administers .su in the IANA database; in August 2025 the sentence was commuted to a fine.

Legend vs. the record

The first growth lever

The lever was not advertising but the structure of demand itself: this was the only cheap and fast way to exchange messages with the outside world and between cities in a country where an international call cost half a salary and a fax machine was a scarce item. The mail exchange with Helsinki started out free, but when the telephone bills for international calls to Finland began arriving at Demos, the organizations that connected had to be charged. With the revenue the team bought a Telebit T2500 modem, which pushed the link up to 2 KB/s even on bad Soviet lines, and that in turn made it possible to connect more organizations at once. Growth was explosive: about 30 organizations at the end of 1990 became 391 organizations in 70 cities by September 1991, more than tenfold growth in under a year without a single ruble spent on marketing. What was sold was neither software nor consulting but the fact of connection itself. An organization paid for the ability to send a letter to a place that previously could not be reached by telephone in under a week of waiting for an international line.

Parallels today (projects from the catalog)

What a builder can take from this in 2026

  1. Sell infrastructure to organizations before a market for it has formed: Demos took money from institutes for mail at a time when private individuals had nowhere to get a computer at all.
  2. A closed or heavily regulated market is a niche rather than an obstacle: the cooperative form of 1988 gave Demos a legal way to do what an ordinary research institute was not permitted to do.
  3. An infrastructure monopoly is more often born of necessity than of a plan: Relcom was not prepared as a channel of glasnost; it simply turned out to be the only working connection when everything else was switched off.
  4. Separate the operating role from the capital in advance and in writing: the split between Demos and Relcom dragged on for years and cost both sides their reputation precisely because the participants' shares were settled after the fact rather than at the outset.
  5. A state that ignores a grey zone today may remember it tomorrow to its own advantage: engineers administered the .su domain for thirty years with no state interest in it, and when the interest arrived, it was the administrator who was put on trial.

Discrepancies and what we could not verify

Sources (primary first)

Secondary (context, cross-checking):

The same thing, about today

The same breakdowns, but of projects launching right now: what the product is, where the first users came from, how they charge. The card is free, the full dossier is $5 (the dossier itself is written in Russian).

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