During 1991 Soviet hardline Communist coup d'état attempt Vadim Antonov and his colleagues at RELCOM used their network facilities to gather and disseminate independent information about the current situation in the country, thus undermining the censorship in mass media ordered by the coup plotters.[2][3] As a co-founder of RELCOM, Vadim Antonov was well known to the users of the network,[4] which gave him credibility to act as the moderator for the stream of situation reports during the crisis; he anonymized the reports to protect the sources in case if the coup succeeded.