Database politics: informational infrastructure and network utopias in Soviet and post-Soviet Estonia

This article argues that Sovietera expert institutions, such as the Tallinn Institute of Cybernetics, played a central role in the post-1991 development of the so-called digital state. By tracing the origins of the decentralized and distributed data exchange layer, the Estonian X-Road, to Soviet attempts in building a national Automated Control System, this article shows how information networks and databases became central to late socialist politics, and how questions over the structure of the network (centralized vs decentralized) and content of accumulated data (economic vs social) became sites of contestation during Perestroika. Having won this struggle in the 1980s, anti-Soviet Estonian engineers and visionaries then rewrote their own histories, arguing that the X-Road was a distinctly novel, Western-oriented technology, rather than the continuation of a decades-long Soviet debate.