Telepathy Helped Build the Russian Internet (2026)

On September 5, 1982, a music festival in San Bernardino, California, organized by Apple’s Steve Wozniak, bore witness to the first-ever public television link between the United States and the Soviet Union. Two large screens on either side of the stage broadcast performances by singer-songwriter Alla Pugacheva and rock band Voskreseniye, while Soviet citizens gathered at a Moscow radio station rocked out to the American lineup—that is, until Grateful Dead promoter Bill Graham, “convinced the whole thing was a KGB trick,” as Jeffrey Kripal wrote in his 2007 book Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion, “literally pulled the plug halfway through the concert.”

This so-called US-Soviet Space Bridge (the first of several, including one co-hosted by television host Phil Donahue) often features in books about the cultural history of the Cold War. But what many of these books don’t tell you is that a large number of the people who organized these events also hoped to lift the Iron Curtain through another method: telepathy. In her new book Hacking the Iron Curtain: A Media Archaeology of the Russian Internet, journalist and “media archeologist” Natalia Konradova reveals how the story of the early Soviet internet—and the role it played during the collapse of the USSR in 1991—can be traced back to early- and mid-twentieth-century dreams of instantaneous and unmediated mass communication.

Though recognized today as a pseudoscientific fantasy, telepathy was, for much of the twentieth century, considered a real possibility—one whose secrets modern science could and would eventually discover. In the Soviet Union, scientific interest in telepathy stemmed not only from a sense of general techno-optimism shared by many countries both before and after the two world wars, but also from beliefs and aspirations particular to communist society. Like cosmism (a philosophical movement that aimed at nothing less than the colonization of space, the attainment of immortality, and the resurrection of every person who ever lived), research into “parapsychology” was expected to help usher in a utopian future.

Of course, what this future looked like depended on who you asked. Some scientists and science fiction authors envisioned a world in which doctors could diagnose patients remotely and one person could beam their skills and talents directly into the bodies of others. The CIA worried that Soviet officials would be able to steal sensitive government information and control “machines on the moon or in the ocean” with their thoughts, according to a 1973 report. Meanwhile, Iosif Goldin—a parapsychology enthusiast and principal organizer of the Soviet side of the first Space Bridge—imagined mass communication as a cure for geopolitical conflict. He once wrote that if “one realizes the observation of the sunrise simultaneously on all continents of the Earth and does it regularly, turning it into a form of bringing people together, there may be no nuclear catastrophe.”

Although the internet itself did not directly contribute to the USSR’s demise, it should come as no surprise that the appearance of one closely coincided with the disappearance of the other. Described by Konradova as a “perfected version of samizdat,” or self-published dissident literature, the rise of the internet and online communities made censorship and the suppression of information virtually impossible—at least for a time. Hacking the Iron Curtain concludes with a brief though warranted reflection on how, amid digital restrictions under Vladimir Putin, the Russian internet ecosystem—Runet—has become increasingly cut off from the rest of the World Wide Web, aiding the country’s return to autocracy.

How did you become interested in parapsychology?

I have worked on many different subjects as an anthropologist and media theorist. But I have always been particularly interested in phenomena or systems that are either created by users or shaped through their efforts and self-organization. It does not really matter whether I’m studying war memorials in small villages, which were one of the subjects I researched in the early 2000s, or internet literature—a phenomenon of the early Russian internet, when users had for the first time the opportunity to publish their literary works without them having to pass through any editorial process.

That was how my research into the Russian-speaking internet began. In the mid-2000s, colleagues in Germany invited me to join their project, where I studied internet forums. At that point, though, neither cybernetics nor parapsychology was anywhere on my research horizon. They emerged only during the research process.

Get your fix of JSTOR Daily’s best stories in your inbox each Thursday.

What did you feel was missing from existing treatments of this subject (like Alaina Lemon’s book) that you wanted to explore with Hacking the Iron Curtain?

Because my research is interdisciplinary, I read literature from a wide range of research fields: the history of the internet and digital culture, Cold War studies, studies of utopias and technological imaginaries, “parascience,” and so on. These fields have been studied for a long time, and each has produced fascinating work. What I felt was missing was precisely the connection between them.

Alaina Lemon’s book was an important discovery for me, not only because it was the only work I encountered that placed Soviet parapsychology within the context of the Cold War, but also because she shows just how powerful the mutual desire for communication was among people in both the USSR and the US. That said, Lemon’s approach was grounded more in theatrical practices, and she was not interested in the history of technology. When Soviet parapsychology is discussed elsewhere, it is typically situated within the history of supernatural beliefs and esoteric practices, as in The New Age of Russia: Occult and Esoteric Dimensions, a substantial volume edited by Birgit Menzel.

What interested me was a phenomenon identified in the 1960s by Lynn Schroeder and Sheila Ostrander, authors of the classic Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain: for a considerable period in the USSR, parapsychology was treated as a science. Researchers used scientific methods in their experiments and attempted to identify patterns in telepathy, telekinesis, and other phenomena. Yes, this no longer fits within our contemporary scientific understanding of the world, but I am talking about events that took place sixty years ago, when faith in the power of science was virtually limitless. As far as I know, before my work, no one had considered research into telepathy as one scientific field among others—regarded today as a dead end, but one that at the time could be seen as almost equivalent in status to computer science.

At what stage in your research did it become clear to you that there was a connection between parapsychology—telepathy in particular—and the early Russian internet?

I originally set out to study the history of the Russian internet. I interviewed figures from the Runet of the 1990s and worked with online archives. In those archives, I discovered that one of Russia’s first internet providers had actually been founded in the 1980s. This simply did not fit with my understanding that the internet could only have appeared after the collapse of the USSR in 1991.

Once I delved into the history of the first network connections from Soviet territory, I found myself dealing with an entirely new set of questions and, for me, an entirely new research field. Media archaeology is exactly the kind of (proto) discipline that is interested in dead ends, unrealized projects, and strange coincidences. It is still not particularly well known in the US, but I live in Germany, the birthplace of media archaeology.

To what extent was parapsychology research responsible for the rise of the Russian internet?

I distinguish between several levels of this connection. One is relatively simple and straightforward. The first contact between American and Soviet users on Usenet became possible thanks to American entrepreneur Joel Schatz, who came to the USSR in the mid-1980s. He did so because of his connections to the Esalen Institute in California, a well-known center of “alternative research,” now better known as a popular retreat destination for California tech people.

Esalen, in turn, had those connections because people associated with the institute had begun traveling to the USSR in the early 1970s hoping to establish contacts with Soviet parapsychologists (and they did). Later, they established a Soviet-American exchange program and joined the citizen-diplomacy movement, but initially it was the parapsychologists—with their desire for grassroots communication and their refusal to accept conventional boundaries of what was possible—who proved capable of connecting people from two countries on opposing sides of the Cold War.

While studying this phenomenon, I also arrived at another, conceptual level of connection. In a sense, the internet is telepathy, except that a digital signal plays the role of the brain waves that science has never succeeded in discovering. In the 1960s, an era of techno-optimism and great hopes that human reason would triumph over war, disease, and death, computer science and the development of computer networks advanced alongside research into other possible forms of communication—forms that do not exist in nature but that, theoretically, could exist.

You mention on multiple occasions that telepathy was researched more extensively in the USSR than elsewhere. Why was this?

I think the USSR, as a project intended to realize a socialist utopia—and I am not discussing here how successful that project ultimately proved to be—had much stronger investments in radical scientific discoveries expected to fundamentally transform human life. Some of these ambitions were realized, such as spaceflight. Scientists today are still working on others, such as immortality. Others, such as telepathy, have disappeared from the scientific agenda.

One could probably add that the USSR had an obvious overproduction of specialists in the natural sciences, which was connected to the military-industrial complex. At some point, the Soviet Ministry of Defense also began investing in this new field because it seemed potentially useful for defense purposes. As a result, Soviet laboratories could often find room for experiments involving new and uncertain phenomena.

Still, I think all of this was more a consequence of the first factor: an exceptionally strong belief in scientific progress. Both American and Soviet societies were modern societies, if by modernity we mean above all a reliance on rational knowledge and technology. But in the USSR, this modernity was particularly radical and allowed virtually no alternative: it lay at the very foundation of the state as the only possible form of its existence.

You mention that Soviet scientists like Vladimir Bekhterev continued to research telepathy even after failing to find proof of its existence. Why did this interest persist, including among the CIA and US politicians?

In general, I have the impression that, from the 1920s through the end of the 1980s, scientists around the world were reluctant to abandon the subject completely. I do not know enough about Bekhterev’s activities to speculate confidently about his motives, but I do know that he was aware of the research his former student Vasiliev was conducting at his institute. I interpret this as an attempt not to burn any bridges—simply to keep the possibility open, “just in case.” What if the experiments ultimately did produce results, and you found yourself among those accused of suppressing something new and progressive? But of course, that is only my theory.

As for the CIA and politicians, that belongs to a different period. Judging from documents in the declassified CIA archives, they were de