reconfiguration of international information infrastructure assistance since 1991, The

Before 1991 the Soviet Union had an international information assistance program that dwarfed that of the United States government in many specific areas, such as conference support, book donations and support for advanced graduate study. This Soviet system, which reached its apogee in the mid- 1980s, might be seen as a 20th century descendant of Czarist cultural imperialism, which had Russified Eurasia from St. Petersburg to the Northern Pacific by 1917.

But Soviet cultural expansion differed from its predecessor in important ways. First, Czarist efforts had limited themselves to territories contiguous to and eventually annexed by Russia (even far-flung Alaska actually bordered Russia), while the Soviets launched major cultural offensives in places as geographically removed from Russia as Cuba, Ethiopia and Vietnam. Second, Soviet technical and educational assistance stressed not Russian culture and Orthodox Christianity but rather the relevance to the developing world of the Soviet experience as the world's first socialist (and officially atheist) country - one which the Soviets believed could serve as an example for other nations, especially those hoping to free their populations from the yoke of superstition, racism and imperialism in order to establish productive societies whose fruits could be shared by all citizens. Their own successful example of manipulating information media to establish and maintain a centralized and industrialized modern socialist society convinced the Soviets of the importance of information infrastructure assistance to socialist countries abroad.

Within a few years of the founding by the Soviets of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon) in 1949, Comecon began to organize conferences where librarians and technical information center heads from member Eastern European socialist countries (Albania, Hungary, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Poland, Rumania and, after 1964, Yugoslavia) could meet with Soviet colleagues to discuss the centralization of information resources so beloved by the Soviets and so attractive to countries with inadequate hard currency.

The Soviet socialist approach to information gathering, organization and dissemination had enormous appeal abroad, for a variety of reasons beyond its low monetary cost. As the great colonial empires were dismantled in the decades following World War II, scores of impoverished new nations were inspired by Russia's 20th century transition from feudal absolutism to an apparent industrial powerhouse. The success of the Soviets in wiping out the Czarist legacy of mass illiteracy (75%) was legendary, and the Sputnik launching in 1957 seemed to emphasize the correlation between Soviet socialism and scientific innovation, stimulated by the efficient and centralized dissemination of information.

Another factor in the appeal of Soviet socialist information policies was their use in encouraging acceptance of the Marxist doctrine of the international brotherhood of the proletariat, regardless of race. It is hard to overestimate the damage to the overseas image of America's material success that was done by our nation's continued racial segregation into the 1960s. Marxism, aided by the information systems that produced its apparent efficiency, seemed to offer the possibility to all peoples, regardless of color, of access to a dignified existence and material sufficiency.

Beginnings in the 1960s

The Soviets had already begun encouraging socialist European countries to adopt Soviet-style centralized information systems through Comecon conferences organized in the 1950s, but their major international efforts were launched after the establishment in 1963 of Comecon's Permanent Commission for the Coordination of Scientific and Technical Research. One of the commission's working groups had the responsibility of raising the professional qualifications of information workers in the socialist member countries (after 1962 joined by Mongolia, while Albania ceased participating in Comecon after 1961). Before 1970, 11 conferences were organized by the working group, including one in September 1965 on "the training and continuing education of personnel of scientific and technical information centers of the Comecon." The conference proceedings were usually published in the various national East European bibliographic journals.

During this time the working group also organized exhibits on information technology and published a dictionary of information terminology. More advanced training in information science was offered after 1963 in months-long continuing education courses set up at Moscow's All-Soviet Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (VINITI), part of the Soviet Academy of Sciences since 1952. Here more than 300 students from Comecon countries were trained between 1963 and 1972. VINITI also sent syllabi, curriculum plans, and information science and pedagogy textbooks to the central scientific and technical organs of the Comecon countries so that they could run mini-VINITIs of their own.

The Soviet's International System for Scientific and Technical Information

Moscow's support for international information training was stepped up after the founding in 1969 of the International Center for Scientific and Technical Information in Moscow, a Comecon organ whose mandate was to develop and maintain an international system for scientific and technical information to standardize and centralize the information systems of all the Comecon countries. A formal Institute for the Raising of the Qualifications of Information Workers (IPKIR) was founded in 1971 and located at VINITI. On the basis of bilateral agreements with different socialist countries (but largely paid for by Moscow), IPKIR educated - just between 1972 and 1976 alone - 853 students from Bul-garia, Hungary, Germany, Mongolia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia. IPKIR, in collaboration with the International Center, was to serve for the remaining years of the Soviet Union as a central point for recruiting information science trainees from the socialist countries;

pooling training materials and methods;

research on training;

lectures by leading specialists; and

consultation on training the personnel for different national systems of scientific and technical information.

A special word is necessary here to explain the importance attached by the Soviets to the standardization and centralization of socialist scientific and technical information systems. Before World War II the Soviets had combined enforced standardization and centralization with a command economy to compensate for lack of resources and trained manpower. Whatever the inefficiencies of such a system, they were more than counterbalanced - in Soviet eyes - by the enhanced control it offered. It is these two qualities - compensation for inadequate resources and enhanced possibilities for political control - that underlie the (continued) fascination of centralized information systems for totalitarian regimes in less developed countries.

A principal task of Moscow's International Center for Scientific and Technical Information was the establishment and maintenance of a socialist international scientific and technical information network, called MSNTI. The MSNTI was consistent with the United Nations National Technical Information System (NATIS), developed by UNESCO in the early 1970s. NATIS proposed the development of coordinated national scientific and technical information systems which would ultimately become the basis of a global standardized information network, UNISIST, specifically supporting the creation of national bibliographies for countries without them. NATIS was based on the principle that the best information on printed materials could be supplied by the countries in which they were produced. The Soviets intended their international system to demonstrate superior Soviet experience in information centralization, as well as international Soviet-led socialist collaboration in information science. Furthermore, the system would compensate for the inability of socialist countries short on hard currency to pay for multiple copies of expensive Western journals. Ideologically, the international system was justified as a means of supporting the struggle of the masses for peace and disarmament - an argument that reappears like a mantra throughout the Soviet information professional literature on the system.

In practice, the system did ultimately create an obligatory set of standards for information formats and numerization for all Comecon information centers. These centers, usually located in the capitals of their countries, worked as massive photocopying centers of journals held by the centers. As early as 1971 the International Center for Scientific and Technical Information in Moscow published its first list of registered members of the international system. The 1973 edition of registered members contains elaborate descriptions of the history and activities of the different member countries' participating technical centers (Bulgaria having the most, besides the USSR, with 68; Mongolia the least, with 2).

In support of the activities of the international system, numerous conferences were organized in the 1970s and 1980s in all parts of the socialist world, many with the support of UNESCO, others under the aegis of International Federation for Documentation (FID) and of the project of the International Federation of Library Association (IFLA) for universal bibliographic control. Comecon paid for five separate international conferences on standardization and centralization between 1975 and 1979 (and in 1978 actually organized a separate academic department and course of study on the International Scientific and Technical Information System at IPKIR in Moscow). Increasing international access to burgeoning new Western information systems was a factor in the priority given by the Soviets to their own international system. One Soviet scholar in 1981 pointed to the necessity of fusing a common "proper orientation" to the new Western material which would "arm the socialist brother countries for the struggle with bourgeois, reformist and revisionist ideologies. A major challenge for the immediate future was seen for information professionals in the socialist countries who would "have to evaluate this new material with class consciousness and a partisan approach."

A recurring theme of the 1970s conferences was the need to counter the overseas influence of the U.S. Library of Congress' MARC (MAchine Readable Catalog) system, which was expanding its original purpose of making LC cataloging machine readable and becoming an international system for the exchange of bibliographic information in machine-readable form. The Soviets claimed that this enabled the United States to exercise influence on the information activities of participating countries.

Publication Distribution Programs

Besides organizing conferences, the Soviets supported a massive international book publishing and distribution program which aided its international information system. In 1982 alone the USSR produced 74.5 million books in 56 non-Soviet languages, a large proportion of these being in scientific and technical fields. By 1986 one out of every four books produced in the world was published in the Soviet Union. The overseas distribution of publications included extremely low-cost or free issues of the review journals published by VINITI in Moscow, which by the mid-1970s was annually reviewing and abstracting one million scientific and technical articles from 25,000 journals in 65 languages.

Assistance in Education of Information Professionals

Perhaps the most important method of assistance - and certainly the one whose influence was the greatest - was in the area of the education of information professionals. Ultimately thousands of young people from all the socialist and non-aligned nations of the world were brought to the Soviet Union, taught Russian and given free higher and continuing education in library and information science at IPKIR, at VINITI and at the faculties of library and information science at Leningrad's Krupskaia Institute, the State Institute of Culture in Kiev and in other locations. The Leningrad faculty alone graduated (with 5-year diplomas) about 100 fully Soviet-subsidized foreign students each year between 1975 and 1991, in addition to granting Ph.D.s to students from Vietnam, Cuba, Syria, Afghanistan, Cambodia, Laos, Guinea, Congo and Kenya. In total, there may be close to 20,000 Soviet-trained information professionals working in the developing world today.

Conclusion

All of this Soviet international assistance in building information infrastructure has now stopped. In 1998 the Leningrad Institute (now the St. Petersburg Academy of Culture) will graduate its last Russian-subsidized foreign students. Together with the possibilities of higher and continuing education, the subsidized flow of scientific and technical information from Moscow to its former client countries has also stopped as Russia's publishers struggle to enter the market economy. At this date, the only former members of the Soviet bloc that have substantial access to current scientific and technical information are those like Hungary, the Czech Republic and Poland which have the hard currency to pay for it.

At the same time, the non-Soviet agencies that in the 1970s and 1980s subsidized information to hard currencypoor countries have radically diminished their assistance. UNESCO has been downsizing since the 1984 withdrawal of the United States, and the United States Information Agency's (USIA) once-lavish book distribution programs have shrunk dramatically. The United States, no longer competing with the USSR for the affections of the non-aligned developing world, has shifted its focus to influencing Russia itself. Since 1994, under the aegis of the Freedom Support Act, the USIA has been subsidizing the American library and information science education of scores of students from the former Soviet Union. Meanwhile the developing world is littered with centralized, government-operated information centers operating in a virtual vacuum since the Soviet information supply has vanished. Unless another substitute for the market system is found (and the USSR acted for 30 years as such a substitute), this vacuum will continue far into the 21st century.

Pamela Spence Richards is professor, School of Communication, ln(formation and Library Studies, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey. She is immediate past chair of SIG/Ill and was three-term chair of the ASIS International Relations Committee.

Copyright American Society for Information Science Jun/Jul 1998
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