Russia's repeated attempts to undermine governments are a part of their long game for economic and technological dominance.
Getty
In the late 1990s, after the fall of the Soviet Empire, I was privileged to be at a meeting in NYC where the former Soviet General Secretary, Mikhail Gorbachov, was speaking. He told the audience in NYC that the fax machine was a critical tool that helped open the Soviet Union up to broader thinking and was used to begin prying open the door for a revolution to take place.
After the event, when he met a few media, I asked Gorbachov for clarification about what he said about the fax machine, and he explained that the seemingly benign office equipment was smuggled into the Soviet Union and the government began to lose control over the flow of outside information sent to these devices and then distributed to the populace. They used the fax machine to call for resistance and spread information about the actual oppressive practices of the Soviet leaders and called for a change.
Ann Cooper, a teacher at the Columbia School of Journalism, writing about how Russian Reporters helped topple the USSR, wrote these comments in The Columbia Journalism Review on August 15th, 2011:
"This spring, when I talked with my students about social media's role in the Arab uprisings, I noted that twenty years earlier Boris Yeltsin's supporters had used what was then the latest technology—the fax machine—to build resistance, just as Facebook and Twitter were used this year."
Ann Cooper
Gorbachov's story of the fax machine’s role in bringing d ..
Support the originator by clicking the read the rest link below.
