My relationship with the Internet began fairly early on in life: I was about 8 when I figured this thing out. Back then, though, it was boring - not much was going on where I could reach it or learn about it, and I didn't speak English as well as I do now back then - and slow - dial-ups and dedicated copper wire connections were the first ones I've used personally.

At home, we had a dial-up modem - 56.6 kbps, if I recall correctly - which was funky because you'd have to wait until the phone is free (remember the phones that you had to stand next to if you wanted to hear someone? weren't they charming?), and when somebody wants to make a call while you're online - nothing you can do but severe the connection. But it felt free - I never had to pay for it, though I was once given a lecture when the telephone bill came to 2k rubles (something like $66 back then, while the family was making 40k rubles a month) - and it gave me everything I wanted from it back then (mainly cheats for the videogames I was so into), so I was content enough with it.

My mother had copper wires at work - which I didn't know at the time and am deducing from present experience - and it was both faster and free (the government paid for the traffic - the fact which I routinely abused by downloading dozens of .MP3s at the time). I could play some simple Flash games with it! It wasn't very satisfying, but it was a new experience, and I was drawn to it.

To my knowledge, it was about that time that something called Runet was being formed.

Given how separate the people of the former Soviet Union were from the rest of the world for most of the time, they had no choice but to embrace their lingustical equals for the information - the idea that rolled over onto the Internet once that became available in Russia. (Interesting fact: the Soviet Union desired Internet presence as much as any superpower would, so they've filed the claim for the top level domain .SU. Since the Soviet Union broke down soon after the registration of the domain, the former Soviet states inherited it, and it is now most common to see .SU-websites with Russian-language content.) That, compounded with the fact that "the West" was considered Enemy Number One (or, in Russian, "Враг Номер Один"), led to the mentality of hard separation from the "evil" westerners and, by extension, their "evil" languages. Naturally, I'm exaggerating the claim to portray just how ridiculous that is, but it seemed quite real at the time, and the traces of such thinking are still lingering in the Russian spirit.

And so, the Runet ("RUssian interNET", pronounced "roo-NET") was formed, spawning along its existence several traits characteristic only to it. The websites are all in Russian, with some rarely providing Ukrainian translation (due to Ukrainians being a prominent Slavic nation alongside Russians, and despite the political tensions between the states, the people have always been friends - barring, of course, the nationalists and the otherwise biased). The website URLs do their best to be in Russian, spawning something like "dveri-v-tomske.ru", a website that's prominently displayed on the streets of Tomsk advertising custom-built house doors - "двери" in Russian. Both of the most popular Russian social networks are - or, were, it seems - prominent examples as well (I'll talk about those later down the post).

Don't be confused: Runet is not another network but a self-semi-isolated part of the Internet. People that generally lean towards the Runet - be it due to lingustic restrictions of the person or proximity of views - might surf the English-speaking parts of the Internet but prefer to stay close to their kin, and the Russian jingoism currently in acting promote such an isolationist behavior. At the same time, people who are able to often prefer to not stay in the Runet because currently, the Russian culture is an echo chamber of biases and prejudices inherited from the supposedly-friendly militaristic Soviet Union. It's not to say that Russia can't provide good people to spend time with - it's to say that currently, such people would be difficult to find, at least if you engage in only a cursory search.

Like I said, there are two popular social networks: VKontakte - or VK for short, meaning, roughly, "InContact" - and Odnoklassniki - meaning "classmates". Odnoklassniki is a network for older people, with its name referring to the fact that you can now find your former classmates there; this doesn't prevent younger people to spend time there, but that wouldn't be very popular among the young peers. VK, on the other hand, is more popular among the youngsters and is considered the "cool" social network between the two. You'll find plenty of people there who speak foreign languages. You can submit the languages you speak to your profile, for everyone to see, which is far too often used to indicate the languages you can barely speak a word or two in as well as the ones you're fluent in. Mostly, the features of the two networks are similar - if not outright copying each other - but it's the social status that matters.

There are, of course, others social networks, but those seem to not be very prominent. There's, for example, the My World, from Mail.Ru, the e-mail host; it seems to be popular among the even younger audience. I don't know of any more, but I know there are some, a number of them - local to the cities, oblast's (regions), universities or communities. Facebook is considered a level-beyond place to be - not quite desirable, but it might be considered cool if you spend active time there talking to foreigners. Other English-speaking social networks are almost unheard of among the general population.

Given the kind of conversations that take place in Runet, there are quite a few Internetspeak traditions of Russia's own. For example, it's common to end sentences with a right parenthesis instead of a period to indicate smiling. Compare окей, a neutral statement of agreement, to окей), which might indicate either eager agreement or playfulness, as well as other ways in which a smile can be abused in a face-to-face conversation. Emoticons - called "смайлики" [SMY-lih-kih], "smiles", due to popularity of the most common emoticon - are also possible, especially those portraying extreme emotions like the LMAO equivalent "xD"; adding the "nose" dash to the emoticon - ":-)" - is rare and might be considered somewhat odd but isn't frowned upon, and most often emoticons are "noseless" - ":)". Abbreviations are somewhat prominent, with gaming jargon (like "гг", from "gg" - "good game") steadily taking over the younger male population due to the amount of time they spend playing various online games. That's to say nothing of the exclusive lexics - in which I'm not at all versed - which the Internet seems to exaggerate to extreme proportions: I've recently learned of a word "зашквар" which... well... elizabeth, can you guess what that might mean? Listen to the way it sounds. I'll post the meaning in the comments either way.

Currently, the Internet is provided via optical cables as well as routers capable of transmitting Wi-Fi (is there a specific name for this kind of items?), and it's possible to easily switch the provider without changing the cable that you've spent a long time positioning. The situation is highly competitive at the moment and has been for a long time, with providers doing their best to beat one another with either a lower price or a higher speed, as well as giving additional benefits like access to the provider-exclusive file-sharing network (which is usually city-wide and provides access to the files other users have marked as publicly available). In Tomsk and in Kemerovo - both around 600k citizens, not very big geographically - you can get a great deal of 100 Mbit/s for 300 rubles ($5, or ten loafs of white bread's worth). Switching to a different provider is as simple as calling the one you want and signing a new contract, with no repercussions from the old provider (they just cut the Internet access to the old channel).

It's rare to find an open Wi-Fi spot - I haven't encountered any so far - but there are public free Wi-Fi spots in places. In Kemerovo, there's a whole street - the Vesennyaya street - covered with Wi-Fi connection of the local provider, free of charge and with no restrictions. In Tomsk, the Izumdrudniy Gorod ("Emerald City") mall near where I live at the moment has free Wi-Fi coverage from not one but two providers - Beeline and Megafon - around the food court - to say nothing of the universities. In the apartment I currently rent, there's no Internet, and yet, thanks to the free spots, I'm able to lead quite an active online life. Finding out some time ago that free Wi-Fi is basically non-existent in the US proved to be quite a surprise to me, having even had trolleybuses with free Wi-Fi around. Most of the younger people use 3G Internet access not to rely on Wi-Fi constantly.

It's very common - almost ubiquitous - to pirate stuff in Russia. It's illegal, naturally, and you wouldn't want to tell officials that you do that, because they'd be forced to persecute you despite, undoubtably, doing some pirating of their own. It isn't frowned upon and is considered completely normal. Downloading movies, music or videogames from torrent trackers is a common practice, and refusing to do so in public might be considered odd or even weird, with the rationale being "Well, it's available and in the open, isn't it? Why not take it?".

That being said, it's also a good source of material you wouldn't be able to get legally otherwise or might have to go through too much trouble getting. I've gained access to many movies I wouldn't otherwise even know of, and there's no legal way to gain access to the original-language voicework other than buying an expensive legal videodisk (there's a whole industry of making illegal bootleg multi-movie DVDs in Russia which is dying out due to the new strict rules regarding illegal downloading and such stuff). Russians are reluctant to pay for things they can get for free, and with pirating at its highly viable, moving to the legal downloads will take some time and require economic prosperity.

That's about as much as comes to mind on the topic of the Internet in Russia. Feel free to ask questions in the comments. If you have a topic you'd like me to shed some light on - send it to me in the form of PM.

P.S. Thanks to lil for inspiring me to continue writing for #russiabynatives.