I was online (in the US) since mid-90s as well, so definitely many of these artifacts resonate. That said, I was also a new transplant from Russia so was looking for anything I could find from my homeland - there was very little. I could probably count Russian-language websites (those I could find, anyways) on my fingers, and they all IIRC were university-based. I do believe there was a lively BBS tradition via FidoNet, but I never got into that. Circa '97 I was stoked to find a .wav fragment of a new song (still remember which one!), the first audio file I happened upon. By 2000 Russian-speaking web was huge and I was downloading music videos and full movies from FTP dumps.