Riding the Infobahn to Russia

It has been pretty hard to miss the hype about the internet this past year. News media have been rife with gushing stories about the revolutionizing effect the ‘global information superhighway’ will have on commerce, education and government.

Needless to say, the internet has a lot of housecleaning and organizing to do before it will be an easily searchable, truly useful business or educational resource. But that will come.

In the meantime, Russian Life editors spent a good deal of time searching the internet to offer our readers a short, Practical Traveler’s guide to the internet’s World Wide Web (unless otherwise specified, web addresses are in the inset boxes). Our emphasis is not on superficial, ‘surfing the net’ in search of pretty graphics or games. Instead, we went in search of content — information that would be of use and interest to someone fascinated by Russia.

Get on-line

If you are not already on-line (the best place for novices to start is Compuserve, Microsoft Network, Prodigy or America On-line, all of which have Web Browsers and are very user-friendly), then you should be. There is just too much potentially valuable (and often free) information out there that may be of use to you, your family and your business.

Emphasis is placed on the word ‘potentially.’

Given the Web’s anarchic, amorphous nature, there is not yet, nor will there be soon, a really ideal search engine for the Web. The best so far seems to be Excite (http://www.excite.com), which provides good, context-specific listings and has good breadth of coverage. In close second is Yahoo! (http://www.yahoo.com). For more subjective and area-specific guides, it takes someone doing constant legwork.

Note: To view pages in Russian, you will need some fonts to work with your driver. Many have been there before you and there are good sets of instructions out there (see the Relcom and Friends & Partners pages)

Where to begin

Thankfully, for Russia-related sites, there are sites that do the legwork to pull together links to the most important Web pages on Russia. Unquestionably, the Friends & Partners server, the brainchild of Greg Cole at the University of Tennessee and Natasha Bulashova in Pushchino (where a mirror site is located), is the best of these. Graphically pleasing and easy to navigate and search, it should be the first stop of anyone searching the Web for Russia-related topics (after the Russian Life page, of course).

Less glamorous but of equal value is the text-based catalog of sites of the REESWEL Virtual Library. Every conceivable link is here and the site is updated very frequently.

All the News...

Daily news from Russia can be sparse or non-existent in national or local media. But, on the net, you can get up-to-date news direct from the source. And in English! One of the best sources is OMRI, but you can also access the weekly St. Petersburg Times (formerly Press), selected articles from The Moscow Times (off the Russia Today server) and read the Vladivostok News — that city’s English language weekly. For newspapers in Russian, start your search at the Relcom home page.

Russia-bound

The best Russia-related travel sites are found off the main page of Friends & Partners. Otherwise, there is a virtual tour of Kizhi Island off the Little Russia homepage; there is a home page devoted to Chukotka; there are CIA maps of Moscow and St. Petersburg; Metro maps for Moscow and St. Petersburg can be found on the Russian Railways page; Aeroflot has a page (including maps of Sheremetyevo airport and flight schedules), as does the Russian Consulate and Russian National Tourist Board; Regional and city servers offer local information — see the Russian server map. For those who wish to travel a bit farther, you can get the latest from the Mir space station on-line too.

On-line stores

If you are looking to buy something Russia-related on-line, there are several good places to go. For books, maps, software and travel accessories, go to Access Russia; for gift items and collectors items, check out Fulcrum Trading’s Russian Gifts Catalog; for audio books of Russian classics, see the selection on offer by JimCin; for Siberian Ginseng, jump to the Taiga Tea page.

All of this is only a sliver on the tip of the WWW iceberg. Which is why we are giving most of this month’s Practical Traveler over to two boxed listings. In fact, the Web itself is just the tip of the iceberg. Listservs, FTP and gopher servers also offer their own unique ways to access the endless volumes of information on the net. But Web searching is the best place to get your feet wet. You will find information on Russia-related information via listservs, gopher and ftp on the Friends & Partners and REESWEL servers, as well as other home pages of interest.

Russian Life’s
Top 10 Web Sites

So.... you are interested in Russia and are looking for a good place to start exploring the chaotic and disorganized WWW. For help with places to begin, Russian Life magazine offers up this list of our Top Ten sites with Russia-related content. The evaluation was based on (1) richness and originality of content, (2) parsimony of design (no clunky, oversized graphics, good site organization, etc.), and (3) graphic stun factor). Note: The Russian Life (see Hot Links) and all RIS Publications sites were disqualified from this ranking due to our extreme bias. (this ranking is to be constantly updated at the Russian Life site, http://www.friends-partners.org/rispubs/access/rltop10.html)

Alexander’s Palace. A visual potpourri of the sights and sounds of St. Petersburg’s amazing Alexander’s Palace, last home to Tsar Nicholas and Tsarina Alexandra before they were exiled to Siberia. For multimedia glory and info content, this is the site to beat. http://www.travelogix.com/emp/Batchison/BobHome.html

Friends & Partners. Begin here. Links to every important Russia-related site imaginable. The entire site (and its links) are searchable by keyword and there is now a new, searchable events calendar, a joint venture of Friends & Partners and Russian Life magazine. http://solar.rtd.utk.edu/friends/opt-tables-unix-english-

Omri News. The best Russia-related on-line news service, courtesy of the Open Media Research Institute (formerly RFE/RL) in Prague. From here you can find out how to access the famous (and FREE!) listserv of daily news from Russia and the FSU, sent you by email. http://www.omri.cz

REESWEL Virtual Library. After Friends and Partners, our favorite, best-linked info-thread site. Well-organized and parsimonious (just text) it links to anything of value and is a very useful research tool! http://www.pitt.edu/~cjp/rees.html

Dazhbog’s Grandchildren. As quirky as it is interesting. Just jump there and look around. Literature and art are only the beginning... The page describing the history and origins of Russia and Russians (grandchildren of Dazhbog) is a must-see! http://sunsite.unc.edu/
sergei/vnuki.html

St. Petersburg Page. One of the best Russia-located pages. With information on the Petersburg Youth Hostel and an on-line version of the St. Petersburg Times, Prospects, the on-line culture and lifestyle guide published by this English language paper, plus links to other Russian sites. http://www.spb.su/sppress

Little Russia. Loads of general information and a beautiful, if just a bit weighty, graphically speaking. Includes a link to the Kizhi Museum of Wooden Architecture (in Karelia) and an on-line CD catalog, among other resources. http://mars.uthscsa.edu/Russia/

The Russian Chronicles. A fascinating photo trip across Russia, from East to West. Featuring the latest in digital photography and fine writing: this is the future of on-line journalism... http://www.f8.com/FP/Russia/
index.html

Russia Today. The second-best on-line news source we’ve found, with late-breaking info on Russia, particularly politics. And it is also based in Czechoslovakia. But one of the best aspects of this site is that it features selected articles from The Moscow Times daily edition. http://www.russiatoday.com/

Izhevsk. The Web page everyone is talking about. Ok, not everyone. But us, anyway. You may never get to Udmurtia otherwise, so why not visit it by modem? Actually, one of the sites best features (like many other Russia-based sites) is a very lengthy (unannotated) listing of main Russia-based Web servers. http://www.mark-itt.ru/