When a Moscow television tower caught fire, causing the main TV channels to temporarily suspend their broadcasts, several months ago, Russians turned to an alternative source of reliable news ? the Internet.

While some of the Russians who are now on the Web discovered online news as a result of the failure of TV networks, the Internet in Russia ? or RuNet, as it is called ? has been drawing wide audience in the last couple of years. The number of Internet users in Russia at the end of year 2000 is up nearly 3 million from 600,000 in 1998.

It?s not much considering that Russia has a population of about 150 million. However, it is significant in a country where economic constraints translate into expensive telephone lines and unaffordable computer equipment for the majority of the population.

According to a survey, 46 percent of Russia?s population is now interested in Internet access. Residents of the famous communist apartment buildings are in some cases pooling their money to get dedicated lines or radio modems for their building. More than 100 condos in Moscow were wired collectively in 1999 alone, said InterNet, a monthly magazine dedicated to the Web.

RuNet?s coming to life was a long process, which gained momentum with the possibility of putting Russian Cyrillic characters on the Web ? the so-called 'Russification'.

Only several years ago, there was no such thing as the Russian Internet, said Anton Nossik, recently labeled as the Russian Internet guru by the French paper Le Monde.

?There was no single and generally accepted standard for Russian characters' representation on the WWW, therefore Russian-speakers were mostly setting up Web sites in English, or transliterating Russian to Roman characters which was quite a nuisance,? Nossik said, in an email interview with Online Journalism Review.

Indeed, even a couple of years ago several Web sites dispensed instructions for installing Cyrillic on personal computers and on the Net, though the tips didn?t always work.

It all became easier with the official release of Windows 95, which came with the Microsoft standard for Russian encoding, named CP1251, or Windows Cyrillic. ?As the acceptance of Windows 95 grew, there came a possibility to write Russian texts in Russian,? Nossik said. ?But as a matter of fact, most Russian Web servers still offer their content in five encodings, (Windows, UNIX, DOS, MAC and transliteration) on different ports.?

?Russification? dramatically enlarged the potential audiences of the Russian Internet, as Russians who didn?t know the Latin alphabet or foreign languages were able to find online content they could understand.

The demography of the Russian Internet population changed in the last couple of years. According to Nossik, it matched global patterns.

'While the Russian online audience grew from 100,000 to one million between 1996 and 1998, there were mostly computer specialists online, 85 percent of them male, and the average age was somewhere between 18 and 25.

?Nowadays with 3 million users online in Russia alone, women account for 45 percent of users, the average age is nearing 30, and all sorts of professionals are represented ? academics, journalists, IT and financial managers, government clerks, entrepreneurs, students and schoolchildren.?

The audience of RuNet is not limited to users in Russia. There are millions of Russian-speaking people in all the countries of the former Soviet Union, in other Slavic countries of Eastern Europe as well as in Israel, Canada, Germany and USA, where Web penetration is much greater than in Russia. Nossik estimates the number of Russian-speaking Web users outside Russia to be about 1.5 million, and ?it could reach 2.5 million in the nearest future.?

Technically, RuNet?s audience is quite advanced, according to Design.ru, a site providing real-time log analysis from Reklama.ru banner-ad network servers.

With the largest Internet population in Eastern Europe (although it is hard to consider Russia within an Eastern-European context given its size and population), RuNet became journalists? alternative to traditional media.

In a country where almost all newspapers, TV and Radio stations are serving the interests of a certain political-economic group or another ? as it happens in other East-European countries as well ? the Internet gave journalists a means to become independent.

Allena Ponomareva, chief editor of InterNet, said things have changed since the times when any opinion in Russia could find itself a place inside a traditionally-published magazine or newspaper. Back then, 'the only additional freedom that the Internet offered to journalists was freedom from the world of editors and proofreaders.'

'But now, as MediaMost-owned media are facind extermination, the Internet could become the last place where Russian journalists who want to criticize Kremlin could publish their articles,' Ponomareva added.

MediaMost is Vladimir Goussinsky's media empire, which has been enganged in a long-lasting conflict with Russian authorities because of alleged debts of NTV, its television broadcasting company. MediaMost claims that 'the ultimate goal of the present Kremlin dwellers has been declared, openly and unabashedly ? any media outlets which dare to criticize the authorities and tell about their mistakes, errors of officials, and corruption should be liquidated.'

Andrey Sebrant, who is a Web expert and the virtual guide of the GoRussia travel and information site, said, 'the freedom of the Internet is an illusion,' when it comes to the goal of informing the public. According to Sebrant, 'the journalist can reach only a very thin layer of the people who anyway can compare a variety of sources from all over the world.'

In Russia, the Internet is not truly part of mass media, Sebrant said. 'It remains a medium for the selected few,' although 'it is yet another source, often more valuable and definitely more diverse than traditional mass media.'

However, said Allena Ponomareva, in Russia it has become very hard to obtain any valuable information from TV. 'Everybody seems -- and is -- biased, people are being manipulated to think this and that. There aren't many TV channels to choose from, and everywhere you go you are subjected to some kind of propaganda.'

In this context, 'going online might be the only choice for Russians who choose to think withtheir own heads rather than be brainwashed by government-manipulated traditional media,' Ponomareva said.

'To set up a Web site, visited by hundreds of thousands, you need neither tremendous amounts of money, nor serious political connections,? Anton Nossik said. ?That's why Internet sites do not require politicians' support or permission to operate. Hence, they can afford to be independent from local authorities on both federal and regional level.?

Nossik himself is a pioneer of Russian Web sites. He has been involved ?in just about every one of the early Web news projects? in Russia, according to Melissa Akin, who writes about the Russian Internet for The Moscow Times. Among other projects, Nossik runs Lenta.ru [English version: AllNews.ru], offering timely news about Russia and the former Soviet Union.

Other top Russian sites are Rambler.ru [a content provider that owns Lenta.ru and other sites], and Port.ru. Mail.ru is a Port.ru project, with some two million registered mailboxes. Yandex.ru is another big internet project, a search engine with a dozen accompanying services. And a site with great appeal to specialists is Spylog.ru, providing Web site ratings.

Even the famous communist newspaper Pravda, was recently brought to life, this time on the Web. Pravda.ru, which comes with an English version, is a Web-only newspaper published by an editor of the original Pravda, and now aims to offer independent, reliable news.

The phrase 'If you are not on the Web, you don?t exist' has caught up in Russia. ?One of the last holdouts against free online editions, Kommersant, gave in and launched a site recently,' said Melissa Akin.

Competition is tough, with the main content providers offering not only well-designed sites, but also freebies to attract more Web users. Competition led to a fierce fight between Net companies and to a division of RuNet: some content providers decided to withdraw their sites from the competitors? 'Top 100' rating services because they were unhappy with the rankings.

Others thought originality was the key to attract wide audiences and beat the competition. Andrei Soldatov, a journalist who used to write for the newspaper Izvestia, gathered a few journalists who covered spies and intelligence and started Agentura.ru.

'We decided that now in Russia we have an information vacuum about the secret services,' Soldatov said in an interview with the New York Times.

But some Russian leaders don?t like the way the Internet has become a vehicle for all kind of information. With recent moves to control the media, online journalists worry that the Kremlin might attempt to put a leash on the Internet.

'It's hard to predict what might happen to the [Russian] Internet in the next few years of Putin's reign,' said Allena Ponomareva. 'My guess is the government will deal with it pretty soon, imposing fierce China-like regulatory laws on anything published in the .ru domain. They've been preparing these laws for more than a year already.'

Russian Press Minister Mikhail Lesin called, several months ago, for new rules requiring the registration of Internet media outlets, saying they should be subject to registration in the same way any other media is under the law.

The new bill would look at all 30,000 Russian Web sites as mass media. 'As long as they identify themselves as mass media outlets, they should be subject to registration in compliance with the established order,' Lesin said on radio station Ekho Moskvy.

A more recent initiative of the Press Ministry seeks to ban foreign media for reasons of national security. 'This is going to affect Internet media as well,' since under Russian media law Web sites have to be registered with the Press Ministry to be able to function legally, Moscow-based journalist Ana Uzelac told Onlinejournalism.com.

However, Anton Nossik doubts that the government is ever going to succeed in putting a leash on the Internet in Russia. ?They can either strangle it, or let it be as it is,? he said, arguing that, if restrictions are applied to Web sites operating from Russia, they will start operating from abroad.

?Therefore, if the authorities get keen on restricting free information exchange, they?ll have to follow the Iraqi model, sealing national backbones,? Nossik said. With the satellite technology, this is not likely to happen, he added.

Political harassment is not the only problem of the Russian Internet. In recent months, small Web sites had to close their operation, and big players like NetBridge had to let go of 25 percent of the staff, because of lower than expected revenues from advertising and other online activities. After two years of never-seen-before growth, the Russian Web is facing a reality check, much like everywhere else in the world.

In Russia, as well as in other transitional countries, it's the economic difficulties which prevent most people to become Internet-active. 'In contrast to over-optimistic predictions made a few years ago, we do not observe explosive growth of the Internet usage in Russia,' Andrey Sebrant said. Thus, 'the poeople who might need the alternative information from the Net do not have resources (mostly financial) to access it.'

But in spite of these difficulties, Net strategists such as Nossik are optimistic. In the future, he said,?there will be more users, more Internet-related jobs, and more spending on online ads.?

The question is when, as Sebrant put it, 'and the answer perhaps depends on the general economic situation.' As long as the cost of technology is too high compared to the average Russian income, the Internet will remain a very limited medium, Sebrant said.

According to Anton Nossik, until 2005 the evolution of the RuNet will only change the lives of those 10 million people who will be online by that time. ?The remaining 140 million of Russia's population will hardly notice ? as they don't notice such things as computers in general, DVD or satellite TV.?