Relevant—here are IRC logs from the 1991 Soviet coup d'état attempt: <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090628013626/http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/academic/communications/logs/report-ussr-gorbatchev" rel="nofollow">http://web.archive.org/web/20090628013626/http://www.ibiblio...</a>
<i>"Thus the first cyber-activists were able to use this decentralized architecture and Usenet (developed in the USSR in 1982) to circumvent traditional censorship."</i><p>That should read, <i>"re-inveneted in USSR"</i>.<p>Tom Truscott [0] and Jim Ellis [1] are the creators of Usenet. Bnews was indeed released in '82, using UUCP to exchange between machines. [2] This was before NNTP. In '95, Truscott and Ellis received the Flame award at USENIX.[3] Guess what for?<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Truscott" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Truscott</a><p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Ellis_%28computing%29" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Ellis_%28computing%29</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.tldp.org/LDP/nag/node256.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.tldp.org/LDP/nag/node256.html</a><p>[3] 1995: <i>"the third Lifetime Achievement Award was presented to Tom Truscott, Steve Bellovin, and Jim Ellis for their work in creating USENET."</i> ~ <a href="https://www.usenix.org/about/flame" rel="nofollow">https://www.usenix.org/about/flame</a>
Relcom and USENET indeed played a role in helping the people of Moscow and Leningrad to defeat that coup d'état: the mere fact, that it continued to operate was an indication of a weakened grip of the KGB.
"All channels were blacked-out except for one; Usenet, which is the grandfather of chat-rooms and is capable or [sic] surviving without the Internet."<p>Do they mean Usenet doesn't require IP to work? And did that matter here? Would actually be fascinating if some alternative federated server comms played a pivotal role, but more likely this is careless writing.
There's a good account of the coup attempt in <i>The Dead Hand</i>[0] in the last 1/3 of the book. According to it, Gorbachev and family were isolated in his dacha, and his "Nuclear Football" -- the <i>Cheget</i>, that controlled their ICBM launch codes was taken from him.<p>[0] <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Dead-Hand-Untold-Dangerous-Legacy-ebook/dp/B002PXFYPQ" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Dead-Hand-Untold-Dangerous-Legacy-eboo...</a>
Usenet probably did play some small part in taking power away from the government and Gosplan, and handing it to the people of the USSR.<p>This is one of the main reasons the US government and the corporations which monopolize the last mile of communications effectively killed off Usenet in 2009.