As Georgia’s geographic boundaries were being crossed by Russian forces, many of Georgia’s official Web sites were attacked. The Georgian National Bank and President Mikhail Saakashvili’s sites were disabled, and the foreign ministry’s homepage was defaced with photos of the president next to Adolph Hitler.

When Georgia accused Russian bloggers of being behind the attacks, Estonia, which suffered its own cyberattacks during a 2007 dispute with Russia, offered some of its expertise to help out. In the meantime, some Russian media outlets and separatist Web sites in South Ossetia also reported cyberattacks.

After hearing rumors that hackers were receiving their orders from the Russian government, Slate.com writer Evgeny Morozov enlisted himself as a Russian “cybersoldier” in a research project to “test how much damage someone like me, who is quite aloof from the Kremlin physically and politically, could inflict upon Georgia’s Web infrastructure.”

It was pretty easy. After only two or three minutes, Morozov found a way to get his Internet browser to overload a list of Georgian Web sites by automatically sending them thousands of queries. Hacking is a game that almost anyone with a political axe to grind can play.

Bobbie Johnson of The Guardian, a British newspaper, is troubled by the chaos of “hacktivism,” as he describes the grassroots movement. When cyberwarfare shuts down a Web page, it affects governments and news media outlets as well as individual users. And, as shown by the Morozov example, much of the Internet is pretty vulnerable.

That’s Johnson’s critical point. Today the justification for cyberattacks is a nationalist war. Once it’s over, hackers’ next targets could be whatever they felt like going after when they got out of bed that particular morning.

So, instead of imagining hackers as patriotic fighters, Johnson advises seeing them as “a mob of untraceable louts who cause havoc for no real reason other than they can. Think of them as unruly, unhinged and unrepentant - just like the worst trolls you’ve encountered.”

For more about developments in Georgia, see Georgia in Crisis.

Author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who passed away August 3, revealed the abuses of Soviet Gulag prison camps in the 1970s. For many, his death brought back memories of secretly copying clandestine writings and passing them hand to hand under the noses of the Soviet authorities.

Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum, whose 2003 book Gulag: A History won a Pulitzer Prize, recalled how the first copies of Solzhenitsyn’s 1974 The Gulag Archipelago his Russian audience saw were unbound and hand-typed — “blurry, mimeographed text” with “dog-eared paper.”

“Usually, readers were given only 24 hours to finish the lengthy manuscript … before it had to be passed on to the next person. That meant spending an entire day and night,” she wrote. Readers also were encouraged to type or write another copy if they could.

Clandestine books and writings by Russian authors were known as “samizdat,” meaning “self-published,” as opposed to “tamizdat” which was forbidden literature smuggled in from overseas. Along with Solzhenitsyn, some of today’s Russian classics such as Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak and The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov began their public life as samizdat.

Famous scientist and political dissident Alexander Bolonkin tried to publish samizdat on a large scale in the 1970s before his arrest, imprisonment and eventual exile to the United States. Knowing the KGB monitored printing houses, he first experimented with photo printing, and then discovered a crude form of mimeography.

“The text was typed on the fibrous paper sodden with paraffin with the help of typewriter. The obtained matrix was put on the bland print and was pressed by the roller with paint. There appeared a copy below. All the process took few seconds. The components were sold at stores. Anybody could make or buy a photoroller. Indeed the quality of the imprints was quite low,” he wrote in his memoirs.

After the collapse of Soviet Union in the late 1980s, once-forbidden literature, much of which had been smuggled abroad, became widely available. But, thanks to samizdat, writers like Solzhenitsyn did not have to wait for a new era but instead had the chance to hasten its arrival.