CHAPTER SEVEN

“CYBERNETICS MUST SERVE COMMUNISM”: ECONOMIC AND MILITARY APPLICATIONS

Both Korolev and Kurchatov had a supervisor among the Politburo members;they could come to him and resolve any issue. Our problem was that our

enterprise lacked such a person. . . . It was particularly importantto have a direct contact with one of the Politburo members, since

our task was not only scientific and technical but also political.

Director of the Institute of Cybernetics in Kiev Viktor Glushkovon the project of a nationwide automated control system1

Cybernetics as a “Science of Government”

The ambition of Soviet cybernetics to become a universal methodological guide for scientific and engineering disciplines found its expression in the shift from the discussion of particular control mechanisms in organisms and machines to the elaboration of a general theory of control. As an indicator of this transition, the translation of Wiener’s key term, “control,” underwent a notable change in the 1950s. When referring to Wiener’s Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, Soviet critics in the early 1950s translated the word “control” in the title literally as kontrol’.2 In contrast, when the Russian translation of Wiener’s book came out in 1958, Soviet advocates of cybernetics chose a different Russian word—upravlenie—to render the term “control.”3 Both kontrol’ and upravlenie in Russian mean “control,” but nuances differ. The word kontrol’ has such meanings as “checking” and “examining,” while upravlenie refers to “management,” “administration,” “direction,” and “government.”4 Russians speak of kontrol’ when the controller is bound by a preset goal and only monitors the controlled process but does not direct it (e.g., quality control). Upravlenie, on the other hand, applies to administrative decision-making and often involves setting new policies (e.g., managing a factory or governing a state).5

1 B.N. Malinovskii, Akademik V. Glushkov: Stranitsy zhizni i tvorchestva (Kiev: Naukova dumka, 1993), p. 105. Sergei Korolev supervised the design of ballistic missiles and spacecraft; Igor’ Kurchatov was the head of the Soviet nuclear weapons project.2 See, for example, Materialist [pseudonym], “Komu sluzhit kibernetika,” Voprosy filosofii, no. 5 (1953), p. 217; B.E. Bykhovskii, “Kibernetika—amerikanskaia lzhenauka,” Priroda, no. 7 (1952), p. 127.3 See Norbert Viner [=Wiener], Kibernetika, ili Upravlenie i sviaz’ v zhivotnom i mashine, trans. I.V. Solov’ev and G.N. Povarov, 2nd ed. (Moscow: Sovetskoe radio, 1968).4 O.S. Akhmanova, ed., Russian-English Dictionary, 15th ed. (Moscow: Russkii iazyk, 1991), pp. 250, 668.5 Cf. a comment made by Wade Holland, the editor of Soviet Cybernetics: Recent News Items: “The Russian word normally used for control (upravlenie), is often more accurately rendered as management. Thus, although most translations carry it exclusively as ‘control,’ it often means control only in a management sense, and not direct, real-time, process control with sensors, actuating mechanisms, feedback, etc. The Russian word kontrol’ should be translated as ‘monitoring,’ especially when applied in the industrial sphere; in this sense, a ‘monitoring system’ implies no feedback of control commands to actuating mechanisms, and usually simply involves display

Mathematician Gelii Povarov—the editor of the Russian translation of Cybernetics—took special care to trace the genealogy of cybernetics to the French physicist André-Marie Ampère, who in the 1830s introduced the word cybernétique to denote the science of government in his classification of sciences.6 Ampère listed cybernétique among the political sciences;7 and Soviet cybernetics proved to be a very political science indeed.

When academician Aksel’ Berg was reporting on the prospects of cybernetic research before the presidium of the Soviet Academy of Sciences on April 10, 1959, he referred to Ampère in the very first sentence. According to Berg, the main task of cybernetics was the elaboration of methods of control of industrial production and the entire national economy for optimal performance. He mentioned Wiener only at the end of his talk, stressing that the latter “reused” the term “cybernetics.”8 It was at this session that the presidium decided to establish the Council on Cybernetics with Berg as its chairman.

Cybernetics not only provided the technical means for automated control; most importantly, it provided assurance that even the most complex systems could in principle be controlled. Berg put this most eloquently:9

There are no unknowable phenomena, only unknown ones; likewise, there are no uncontrollable processes, only those in which the complexity of the task is not yet matched by the methods and means for its solution. Cybernetics broadens the range of controllable processes; this is its essence and its major merit.

Berg argued that only cybernetics was capable of analyzing control processes in various fields and providing methodological guidelines for optimal control. As one of the philosophers on staff at the Council on Cybernetics put it, “cybernetics is not merely a science of control, but of optimal control, or optimization of control.”10 Berg stressed that cybernetic ideas had great political significance:11

However unusual this may seem to certain conservatives who do not wish to comprehend elementary truths, we will build communism on the basis of most broad use of electronic machines . . . These machines, aptly called ‘cybernetic

of monitored values (normally with no computer intervention)”; see Wade Holland, “Commentary,” Soviet Cybernetics: Recent News Items, 3:4 (April 1969): 83.6 See Viner, pp. 56-57 (editor’s footnote). Povarov later published a book entitled, Ampère and Cybernetics, in which he further elaborated this vision of cybernetics as a political science; see G.N. Povarov, Amper i kibernetika (Moscow: Sovetskoe radio, 1977).7 Murray Eden has provided the following translation of a relevant passage from Ampère: “Only by intensive study and comparison of the various elements that, for each choice, are provided by a knowledge of all that is relevant to the nation—its character, customs, opinions, history, religion, way of life and property, institutions, and laws—can government create the general rules of conduct that must guide it in regard to each particular case. Therefore, it is only after all the sciences that are concerned with these various factors that one must place the science in question here. I would call this science cybernetics from the word kubernhthz. From the restricted definition for the art of steering a vessel, cybernetics took on a meaning—even among the Greeks—of the art of steering in general”; see Murray Eden, “Cybernetics,” in Fritz Machlup and Una Mansfield, eds., The Study of Information: Interdisciplinary Messages (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1983), p. 409.8 A.I. Berg, “Osnovnye voprosy kibernetiki,” [1959] in Idem, Izbrannye trudy, vol. II (Moscow: Energiia, 1964), pp. 34-38.9 A.I. Berg, “Kibernetika i nauchno-tekhnicheskii progress,” [1962] in Idem, Izbrannye trudy, vol. II, p. 155.10 I.B. Novik, Kibernetika: filosofskie i sotsiologicheskie problemy (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1963), p. 33.11 Berg, “Kibernetika i nauchno-tekhnicheskii progress,” p. 152 (emphasis original).

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machines,’ . . . will provide the solution for the problem of permanent optimal planning and control.

“Optimal planning and control (management)” became a motto of the cybernetic movement. Soviet cyberneticians saw the main problem of Soviet economy in its inefficient mechanisms of data-collection, information-processing, and control and offered a solution based on mathematical modeling and computer-aided decision-making. They hoped that cybernetics would provide an opportunity to reform Soviet planning and management practices without cardinal political change; they believed that computers could produce a politically neutral, “optimal” solution. One memoirist aptly called such cyberneticians “considents,” or half-consenting dissidents.12 Soviet cyberneticians were looking for a technological solution to an inherently political problem; by its own nature, however, their project was doomed to play a political role. Cyberneticians chose cyberspeak as their language of negotiation with the authorities, hoping to limit the discussion to technical terms; instead, cyberspeak itself became politicized.

Berg mobilized his Cybernetics Council in publishing a volume appropriately entitled, Cybernetics Must Serve Communism, in time for the opening of the Twenty-Second Congress of the Communist Party in 1961. His efforts paid off: a new Party program adopted at this Congress mentioned cybernetics among the sciences destined to play a crucial role in the creation of the material and technical basis of communism. While the draft program stated mildly that it was “necessary to organize a wide use of cybernetics,” the final version adopted at the Congress asserted positively that cybernetics “will be widely applied” in production, research, planning, and management.13 Popular press began to call computers “machines of communism.”14

“Military Cybernetics”: An Engineering Approach to Command

Soviet cyberneticians maintained that military command was one of the forms of cybernetic control, and therefore cybernetics was to be incorporated into military science. In February 1960, Berg, his deputy at the Council on Cybernetics mathematician Aleksei Liapunov, and mathematician Sergei Iablonskii published an article in the military journal Morskoi sbornik (The Navy Series), in which they introduced the main cybernetic ideas to the military reader and argued: “Studies of military actions make it necessary to evaluate how effective is the activity of various forces in diverse conditions. This is a characteristic cybernetic problem, which can now be solved with the help of special electronic machines.”15 In their view, the introduction of computers for processing military information was to place military command on an entirely new basis.

Liapunov was instrumental in bringing Western literature on mathematical methods of decision-making to Soviet readers. He edited the translation of and wrote introductions to such

12 I.B. Novik, “Normal’naia lzhenauka,” Voprosy istorii estestvoznaniia i tekhniki, no. 4 (1990): 14.13 Richard D. Gillespie, “The Politics of Cybernetics in the Soviet Union,” in Albert H. Teich, ed., Scientists and Public Affairs (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1974), p. 272.14 V.D. Pekelis, “Chelovek, kibernetika i bog,” Nauka i religiia, no. 2 (1960): 27.15 A.I. Berg, A.A. Liapunov, and S.V. Iablonskii, “Teoreticheskie i prakticheskie problemy kibernetiki,” Morskoi sbornik, no. 2 (1960): 55.

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books as Automata Studies, Theory of Games and Statistical Decisions, and Games and Decisions: Introduction and Critical Survey;16 in 1960, he launched The Cybernetic Collection, a series of translations of Western articles on computing and mathematical methods in various fields, which fell under the general rubric of cybernetics. Within the next few years, a large number of Western monographs on this subject appeared in the Russian translation.17 Introducing one of the translated books to the Russian reader, Liapunov wrote:18

[The cybernetic approach] consists in the elaboration of algorithms, which, with a certain degree of precision, describe the processes of transmission and processing of information for control purposes.

An important case of the elaboration of control algorithms is one in which the aim of an algorithm is the struggle against another control system or another algorithm. . . . [Such problems] emerge before a reflexologist who is planning experiments, which may be regarded as a struggle against the nervous system of the experimental animal. The same issues arise before an economist who is planning the work of an enterprise or a branch of industry and is calculating the most rational way of overcoming external difficulties. Finally, the commander on a battlefield faces similar problems.

Cybernetics first came to the attention of the Soviet military in connection with reports received from the West about new weapons automatically controlled by digital computers. In July 1953, at the height of the anti-cybernetics campaign in Soviet press, director of the newly established Institute of Scientific Information Dmitrii Panov submitted to the Party Central Committee a secret report entitled, “On Small-Size Electronic Computing Devices and Their Application for Control Purposes.” He wrote: “From materials published in American journals, it is clear that the USA is conducting extensive work on designing various electronic control devices.”19 Panov went on to cite examples of control devices used in American aircraft and anti-aircraft gunnery and flight control; he pointed out that the greater efficiency of the F-86 aircraft over the Soviet MIG-15 demonstrated during the Korean war might be due to the automated control system on board of F-86. “Besides gun control and flight control,” continued Panov, 16 C.E. Shannon and J. McCarthy, Automata Studies (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1956) [the Russian translation, 1956]; David Blackwell and M. A. Girshick, Theory of Games and Statistical Decisions (New York: Wiley, 1954) [the Russian translation, 1958]; R. Duncan Luce and Howard Raiffa, Games and Decisions: Introduction and Critical Survey (New York: Wiley, 1957) [the Russian translation, 1961].17 See, for example, Russell L. Ackoff and Patrick Rivett, A Manager's Guide to Operations Research (New York, Wiley, 1963) [the Russian translation, 1968]; Stafford Beer, Cybernetics and management (New York: Wiley, 1959) [the Russian translation, 1963]; Federal Electric Corporation, A Programmed Introduction to PERT (Program Evaluation and Review Technique) (New York: J. Wiley, 1963) [the Russian translation, 1965]; Robert W. Miller, Schedule, Cost, and Profit Control with PERT: A Comprehensive Guide for Program Management (New York, McGraw-Hill, 1963) [the Russian translation, 1965]; Philip M. Morse and George E. Kimball, Methods of Operations Research (Cambridge: MIT Press and Wiley, 1951) [the Russian translation, 1956]; John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1944) [the Russian translation, 1970]; Thomas L. Saaty, Mathematical Methods of Operations Research (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959) [the Russian translation, 1963].18 A.A. Liapunov, “Predislovie,” in D. Blekuell [=Blackwell] and M. A. Girshik [=Girshick], Teoriia igr i statisticheskikh reshenii, trans. I.V. Solov’ev (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo inostrannoi literatury, 1958), p. 6.19 D.Iu. Panov, “O malogabaritnykh elektronnykh vychislitel’nykh ustroistvakh i ikh primenenii dlia tselei upravleniia,” July 13, 1953, the Center for Preservation of Contemporary Documentation (Tsentr Khraneniia Sovremennoi Dokumentatsii [TsKhSD]), f.5, op. 17, d. 412, l. 78.

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“electronic computing devices are being applied more widely for automated control of complex industrial installations (for example, in chemical industry).”20

In the fall of 1953, soon after Engineer Admiral Aksel’ Berg’s appointment as Deputy Minister of Defense, he asked his then subordinate Anatolii Kitov to prepare a report on computers and cybernetics.21 Soon Berg put Kitov in charge of organizing the first military computer centers. As soon as the Soviet Union started serial production of digital computers, they were put into operation in several military installations. Computer Center Number 1 of the Ministry of Defense was created on August 3, 1954; shortly thereafter the Navy Computer Center and the Air Force Computer Center were established. Computer Center Number 1 provided computing support for nuclear weapons, ballistic missile, and space programs. Closely following Western developments in cybernetics and computing, Soviet military specialists soon realized that “universal” digital computers and the algorithms of “optimal” control could be used to control not only automated weapons, but also military units, and the Center began to develop the principles of automated troop control systems.22

In March 1955, a special governmental committee under Berg’s chairmanship prepared a classified report, “On the State of Radioelectronics in the USSR and Abroad and Measures Necessary for Its Further Development in the USSR,” which emphasized the significance of Western cybernetics research for the military.23 After Berg became chairman of the Council on Cybernetics, the study of principles of automated control in military affairs came under the rubric of “military cybernetics.” The proponents of a cybernetic approach among the Soviet military viewed military units, including both the weapons and the humans who operated them, as cybernetic systems:24

Any combat item (a tank, an aircraft, or a ship) can be seen as a typical cybernetic system with all its characteristic elements. The controlling organs or devices in such systems are the commanders and their control points, while the controlled objects are the weapons and the technical elements of the combat item. . . . With respect to troop control, the controlling organ is the commander and his staff, while the controlled objects are subordinate military units or combat items.

Historian David Holloway has noted that “inasmuch as [the cybernetic approach] legitimates the transfer of concepts and techniques from engineering to troop control, military cybernetics may be seen as the engineer’s approach to command.”25 He has summarized the main directions of Soviet research in military cybernetics as follows:26

20 Ibid., l. 82.21 See A.I. Kitov, “Rol’ akademika A.I. Berga v razvitii vychislitel’noi tekhniki i avtomatizirovannykh sistem upravleniia,” in V.I. Siforov, ed., Put’ v bol’shuiu nauku: akademik Aksel’ Berg (Moscow: Nauka, 1988), p. 131.22 “27 TsNII—stareishaia nauchnaia organizatsiia Ministerstva oborony,” Chelovek i komp’iuter, no. 21-22 (1996): 4.23 “Dokladnaia zapiska o sostoianii radioelektroniki v SSSR i za rubezhom i neobkhodimykh meropriiatiiakh dlia ee razvitiia v SSSR,” March 1955, RGAE, f. 300, op. 1, d. 797, l. 64; quoted in N.S. Simonov, Voenno-promyshlennyi kompleks SSSR v 1920-1950-e gody: tempy ekonomicheskogo rosta, struktura, organizatsiia proizvodstva i upravleniie (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1996), pp. 259-60.24 V.A. Abchuk et al., eds., Vvedenie v teoriiu vyrabotki reshenii (Moscow: Voenizdat, 1972), p. 310.25 David Holloway, Technology, Management and the Soviet Military Establishment, Adelphi paper no. 76 (London: Institute for Strategic Studies, 1971), p. 2.26 Ibid., pp. 17-19.

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(1) Research into military operations; this aims to develop logical and mathematical methods of analysing the processes of armed conflict; the purpose of this research is to work out methods of optimizing command decisions;

(2) The theory of military information, the task of which is to develop and optimize the methods of receiving, transmitting, collecting and storing information, and also to ensure noise-immunity and secrecy in the conditions of armed conflict;

(3) The theory of describing the processes of troop control in algorithms; this attempts to formalize the connections and interrelations of armed conflict, and to develop operational-tactical algorithms and create programmes for solving military problems on computers;

(4) The theory of military control systems, the aim of which is to study the principles of constructing and analysing different systems for controlling troops, and of automating and optimizing such systems.

Using operations research techniques, Soviet military specialists aspired to formalize military problems, define the criteria of effectiveness of control, and develop methods of “optimizing” military decisions. “Optimization” in this context, however, as Holloway remarked, meant little more than “improvement.”27 A Soviet specialist in military cybernetics later described the initial excitement, which was followed by disappointment:28

Under the slogan, ‘Automata can do everything!’, attempts were made to exclude a human being from troop control systems entirely. The idea that automata could indeed replace humans in troop control was supported by the fact that by that time control of certain types of weapons was successfully automated. . . . All practical attempts to fully eliminate humans from troop control systems, however, resulted in failure.

In 1961, Computer Center No. 1 was renamed the Central Scientific Research Institute Number 27 and devoted its activity to more modest tasks of introducing means of automation into separate military activities, rather than trying to build a wholly automated chain of command. Besides technical difficulties, automation of control in military affairs faced a political problem, caused by the controversy over the nature of military command. Military officers with training in engineering insisted on quantitative methods of decision-making, while traditional commanders opposed this novelty. The tension between the two groups found its expression in the debate between the specialists in the traditional discipline of military tactics and the “military cyberneticians.” The traditionalists were particularly concerned with defending the status of military tactics from the encroachment on the part of military cybernetics:29

A machine can neither replace the commander, nor, more importantly, eliminate military tactics. . . . Outside cybernetics’ field of vision, there appear such cardinal questions about controlling military forces as the relationship between

27 Ibid., p. 19.28 A.B. Pupko, Sistema: chelovek i voennaia tekhnika (filosofsko-sotsiologicheskii ocherk) (Moscow: Voenizdat, 1976), p. 174.29 G. Telyatnikov, “Cybernetics and the Theory of Troop Control,” trans. John Schneider, Soviet Cybernetics: Recent News Items, no. 13 (1968): 28.

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objective and subjective factors, the distribution of functions among control organs, the role of ideological and psychological factors, and so on.

The cyberneticians, on the other hand, argued that a “decision reached with the help of an electronic computer is a more objective one, for it is based not on a subjective opinion of a single person (the commander) and his intuition but on collective experience, on those operational-tactical views that are generally adopted in a given military area.”30 They pointed out that “elementary calculations and criteria based on personal experience are being replaced by more profound methods of analysis borrowed from the arsenal of exact sciences”31 and insisted that “the numerical evaluation of possible solutions is the most suitable form in which to present to the decision-maker the qualities which characterize the advantages and disadvantages of alternate variants.”32

The specialists in military tactics appealed to a different set of values. They argued that the subjectivity of personal military decisions could be a positive factor:33

Controlling military forces is above all controlling people and their activity and therefore carries with it a social character. The subjective factor plays an important role in controlling military forces. . . . the effectiveness of control depends on the knowledge of the commander and his tactical talent, including his skill at dialectical thought.

The cyberneticians attacked such views, dismissing personal knowledge as unreliable “intuition.” They argued that intuition “cannot be relied on for certain, it can work mistakenly, it cannot be taught to somebody else, it cannot be transferred to a machine. In an age of enormous responsibility for the decisions which are taken, to put intuition in the forefront is at least inadvisable.”34

Abstract theoretical arguments, however, often lost their appeal in the face of practical considerations. Citing examples of cybernetic systems constructed by a “potential enemy” proved the most powerful argument for both Soviet “military cyberneticians” and their superiors. Soviet specialists were genuinely fascinated with the design of the American air-defense system SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment), which comprised a centralized nationwide network of computerized command-and-control centers capable of coordinating a response to a massive air offensive.35 They readily cited Western sources, which claimed such advantages of SAGE over conventional systems of air defense as the “high speed of collection and processing of information, a greater number of simultaneously tracked targets, and the high precision of tracking.”36 Academician Aleksandr Kharkevich even proposed to build a unified statewide information transmission system37 (for civilian purposes) on the principles of SAGE.38

30 Abchuk et al., eds., Vvedenie v teoriiu, p. 314.31 Ibid., p. 307.32 Quoted in Holloway, Technology, p. 36.33 Telyatnikov, “Cybernetics,” p. 28.34 Quoted in Holloway, Technology, p. 23.35 On the history of SAGE, see Paul Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).36 Abchuk et al., eds., Vvedenie v teoriiu, p. 335.37 Edinaia obshchegosudarstvennaia sistema peredachi informatsii.38 A. Kharkevich, “Informatsiia i tekhnika,” Kommunist, no. 17 (1962): 93-102.

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Since the Soviet military leadership tended to accept only those cybernetic ideas that had already earned the approval of the Western military establishment, Soviet systems of automated control and corresponding mathematical methods and models look remarkably similar to those elaborated in the West. The “method of network planning and control,”39 proposed by Soviet “military cyberneticians,” presented a rather accurate copy of Programme Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT), developed by American military and business analysts within the framework of operations research. The cyberneticians claimed that this method was “the most universal of all control techniques” and could be applied “in most varied fields of human activity.”40 They pointed out that PERT contributed significantly to the success of the Polaris project and drew the attention of Soviet leadership to the reports that “presently not a single industrial firm, not a single military project can receive funding from the US Department of Defense without a [PERT] network model.”41 In the middle 1960s, institutes for the problems of management, economics, and information science were created at each of the nine Soviet defense industry ministries, and the heads of these institutes constituted a committee with Director of the Kiev Institute of Cybernetics mathematician Viktor Glushkov as science advisor. Under his guidance, these institutes created automated systems for planning and management based on this “method of network planning and control.”42

The idea of trusting control to “control machines” found a particularly strong support in the Soviet space program. Echoing the slogan, “Control everything controllable and make controllable everything else,” which Soviet authors picked up from the German control engineer Hermann Schmidt in early 1941,43 the Soviet cosmonaut Konstantin Feoktistov espoused the opinion that “every operation that can be automated on board a spaceship should be automated.”44 The Soviet belief in the power of automation to exclude the possibility of human error exceeded even that of Americans. Former longtime executive director of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics James Harford has argued that “the Russians preferred to depend on automated systems, with the cosmonaut in a passive role. The Americans, however, gave the astronaut a more controlling role, allowing him to override automated systems.”45

Soviet cyberneticians’ insistence on the necessity of automation was based on their profound belief that machines could perform control functions better than people. For example, the computer designer Isaak Bruk, speaking at the 1956 Academy of Sciences session on automation, argued:46

The necessity to replace people in the position of control is conditioned by the following circumstances: the physiological abilities of man and his capability to react to external stimuli correctly and quickly can develop only within certain

39 Metod setevogo planirovaniia i upravleniia.40 P.G. Skachko, ed., Planirovanie boevykh deistvii i upravlenie voiskami s pomoshch’iu setevykh grafikov (Moscow: Voenizdat, 1968), p. 133.41 Ibid., p. 5.42 Malinovskii, Akademik V. Glushkov, pp. 82, 103.43 See S. Sobolev et al., “Lzhenauchnye raboty Instituta avtomatiki i telemekhaniki Akademii nauk SSSR,” Bolshevik, no. 9 (1941): 90.44 V.D. Pekelis, Cybernetic Medley, trans. Oleg Sapunov (Moscow: Mir, 1986), p. 287.45 James Harford, Korolev: How One Man Masterminded the Soviet Drive to Beat America to the Moon (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1997), p. 163.46 I.S. Bruk, “Perspektivy primeneniia upravliaiushchikh mashin v avtomatizatsii,” in V.A. Trapeznikov, ed., Sessiia Akademii nauk SSSR po nauchnym problemam avtomatizatsii proizvodstva, 15-20 oktiabria 1956 g.: Plenarnye zasedaniia (Moscow: AN SSSR, 1957), p. 132.

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limits, while technological devices created by man could evolve and complicate indefinitely. If man remains an essential part of these devices, he may become a deterrent factor for further development.

Academician Kharkevich similarly maintained that people processed information more slowly and in smaller amounts than computers; information processing, he reasoned, often consisted in formal logical operations, where “creative or willful actions are seldom needed and are often playing but a damaging role.”47 Liapunov and Kitov also argued that the use of computers “in principle allows to fully eliminate man from those links in the control system where [only] formal-logical and reflexive actions are required.”48

Military cybernetics, however, remained on the margins of military science. Despite the efforts of cyberneticians, the use of cybernetic methods of automated control was limited to defense production and did not spread into the automation of military command. The transition from the construction of separate automated control devices to building large-scale systems of automated command was very slow. In 1956, the Ministry of Radio Industry organized the Scientific Research Institute of Automatic Equipment to design an automated air defense system, the Soviet version of SAGE. In 1962, the first Soviet semi-automatic air defense complex was built, based on eight TETIVA computers. Only in 1969, however, the construction of a nationwide automated air defense control system began. The system eventually built was fully automated; although the Central Control Point allowed for human operators, their presence was not required.49

The story of the automation of Soviet military command seem to follow the familiar pattern of “fits and starts” in the history of Russian and Soviet technology.50 The leadership feels quite content with the status quo, until it is forced to notice a great lag behind the West in a particular field. Then titanic efforts are applied to close this gap and, for a brief period, Russian technology in the given field reaches the world level. Then the leadership switches attention to other problems, transfers main resources to other fields, and leaves this particular field without substantial support, until a new lag is discovered. As long as the pace of technological development is controlled in a centralized fashion by a group of top administrators, the development of Russian technology follows this discontinuous pattern.

In the early 1970s the Soviet military leadership finally paid attention to the reports that the USSR was seriously lagging behind the US in the area of automated troop control and gave this field a great push. The Institute Number 27 was subordinated directly to the General Staff and charged with the elaboration of an “ideology of complex automation of armed forces control” and the creation of an automated control system for the entire Armed Forces of the USSR.51 In the spirit of the “catch-up-and-surpass” attitude, the Soviets intended not merely to reach the American level of automation of military command, but to surpass this level.

47 Kharkevich, “Informatsiia i tekhnika,” p. 98.48 A.A. Liapunov and A.I. Kitov, “Kibernetika v tekhnike i ekonomike,” Voprosy filosofii, no. 9 (1961): 80.49 B.N. Malinovskii, Istoriia vychislitel’noi tekhniki v litsakh (Kiev: Kit, 1995), pp. 204-05.50 See Loren R. Graham, Science in Russia and the Soviet Union: A Short History (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 251-57.51 “27 TsNII”, p. 4.

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From the Control of Weaponry to the Control of the Economy

The development of early digital computers in the Soviet Union was propelled by the military; economic and business applications, which played a prominent role in Western computing, were an exception rather than a rule. The initiative in applying computers for economic information processing and control came from Soviet computer engineers and the military; the economic establishment was rather skeptical and less than supportive. As a result, developments in the field of automated economic management were heavily influenced by the Soviet conception of automated military command. The same people often worked in both fields and applied the same concept—the concept of cybernetic control—to both management and command.

In 1957, the Soviet Academy of Sciences appointed a special commission on computing, which included several leading computer designers and mathematicians with strong military connections but no prominent economists.52 In its report, summarized by the Academy leadership for the presidium of the Party Central Committee, the commission emphasized the great significance of computers for both national defense and the national economy:53

The use of computers for statistics and planning must have an absolutely exceptional significance in terms of its efficiency. In most cases, such use would make it possible to increase the speed of decision-making by hundreds of times and to avoid the errors that are currently produced in the unwieldy bureaucratic apparatus involved in these activities.

Computers are destined to play a decisive role in military technology. Suffice to say that at the current level of aviation and rocket technology it would be impossible to build an efficient national defense system without computers. The speeds of modern aircraft and especially guided missiles (rockets) are so high that fighting them is possible only with an automated defense system. Again, the brain of this defense system has to be a computer.

Thus, the significance of computer technology for the economy and national defense is absolutely clear.

The commission proposed to create a computer center in each economic region; such a center would provide solutions to the problems of planning, statistics, engineering design, and scientific research for that region.54 The report stressed the fact that in the United States nearly 300 large computers were already operating, while the Soviet Union in 1953-56 built only 14 digital computers and ceased serial production of such machines in 1955. The Academy leadership warned the Party authorities that within the next 10 years the United States would produce 10,000 more general-purpose computers and concluded:55

52 Among the members of this commission were academicians A.A. Dorodnitsyn, N.G. Bruevich, M.V. Keldysh, V.A. Kotel’nikov, M.A. Lavrent’ev, S.A. Lebedev, and S.L. Sobolev, the corresponding members of the Academy I.S. Bruk and S.N. Mergelian, and others.53 Nesmeianov and Topchiev to Presidium of the Central Committee, December 14, 1957; TsKhSD, f.5, op. 35, d. 70, l. 119.54 Ibid., l. 120.55 Ibid., l. 122.

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In this situation, the existing gigantic gap between the USSR and the USA in the introduction of computer technology into science and engineering would continue to grow, and this would inevitably and significantly delay our technological progress in comparison with the USA.

The development of computer technology, the introduction of mathematical methods into economics and military science, and the rise of cybernetics were all part of the same movement. Various groups, each with its own agenda, formed a sort of coalition, in which the success of one group helped the others to further their own goals. Computer specialists lobbied for a greater governmental support for computing, stressing the potential benefits of computer-based information processing and control for the economy and the defense. Technical officers in the military, striving to use their expertise in quantitative modeling to change the basis of military decision-making, developed “military cybernetics” and computer-based automated control systems. Mathematical economists fashioned themselves as “economic cyberneticians” and argued that computer modeling would make economic decisions more objective. Cyberneticians, in turn, argued that since economic management and military command were both forms of control, and control was the subject of cybernetics, cybernetics was to provide methodological guidance for both the economists and the military.

Cybernetics provided the avenue for the transfer of “optimal” computer-based decision-making techniques from the military sphere to the civilian sector. Military specialists in automated control turned cyberneticians, universalized their techniques, and began advising how to reform the control of the national economy. In late 1959, Kitov began working on a report submitted later to the Party Central Committee, in which he put forward an ambitious proposal to create a nationwide unified automated control system for both the military and the civilian sectors of the economy on the basis of the network of computer centers developed under the Ministry of Defense. Kitov harshly criticized the low tempos of computer developments in the Ministry, and this prompted a strongly negative reaction to his proposal. He was expelled from the Communist Party and lost his responsible position at the Ministry of Defense.56

Not only individuals, but whole institutions made a transition from working on the automation of control in the military sector to solving problems of the civilian economy. In the late 1950s, the Institute of Electronic Control Machines57 built specialized computers M-4 for automatic radar stations. Later the Institute was transferred from the Academy of Sciences to the State Economic Council under the State Planning Committee and shifted the focus of its research to economic problems. In the early 1960s, the Institute built a specialized computer M-5 for economic applications and elaborated a proposal for a far-reaching price reform based on computer calculations of “optimal” prices.58 The experience acquired at solving military problems, however, was not lost. One of the Institute’s economists V.D. Belkin, for example, compared controlling the national economy to launching a missile. Before the advent of computers, he reasoned, calculating a missile trajectory took too much time, which precluded the construction of guided missiles. Now computers could calculate missiles’ trajectories faster than the missiles could move, and this made it possible to guide missiles in real time. Similarly, Belkin argued, the introduction of computers in economics and the ability to calculate and

56 Malinovskii, Akademik V. Glushkov, pp. 83-84.57 Institut elektronnykh upravliaiushchikh mashin (INEUM).58 This proposal was shelved. The Institute’s director Isaak Bruk clashed with the State Planning Committee leadership and was forced to retire; see Malinovskii, Istoriia vychislitel’noi tekhniki, pp. 192-93.

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correct economic plans in a timely fashion would offer new opportunities.59 The mathematical model he proposed was intended to play the role of a guidance system for the national economy.

Director of the Kiev Institute of Cybernetics Viktor Glushkov also found a military metaphor most suitable for describing computer-based economic decision-making. “Scientifically based control of the economy” without computers, he argued, was “just as impossible as, say, military operations without the use of weapons.”60 Soon after Kitov lost his position at the Ministry of Defense, he was hired by Glushkov to supervise the introduction of automated management systems, based on the “method of network planning and control,” in nine branches of the defense industry. Glushkov later tried the same method in a number of civilian enterprises.

In the 1960s, Kitov supervised the design of several management-information systems for the civilian sector.61 He argued that “the national economy as a whole may be regarded as a complex cybernetic system, which incorporates an enormous number of various interconnected control loops with various levels of subordination.”62 Kitov believed that the application of cybernetic methods, computer modeling in particular, would place economics, like biology, linguistics, and other “cybernetized” disciplines, on a solid scientific foundation: “Computer modeling makes it possible to forecast economic processes and to conduct mathematical experiments in economics. Thereby economics turns into an exact experimental science.”63

In 1960, Berg, Kitov, and Liapunov published an article in the leading Party journal Communist, in which they argued:64

In contrast to capitalist countries, where different companies create separate automated control systems for themselves, [in the USSR,] in the conditions of socialism, it is quite possible to organize a unified complex automated system to control the national economy. It is obvious that the effect from such automation would be much greater than from the automation of control of separate enterprises.

They proposed to create a unified state territorial network of information computer centers with centralized control65 for automatic statistics collection, planning, distribution of resources, banking, transportation control, etc. In a 1961 article in Problems of Philosophy, Liapunov and Kitov promised that a unified automated control system for the national economy would make it possible to “fully implement the main economic advantages of communism: centralized control and the planned economy. This would secure full harmony and the agreement between the

59 V.D. Belkin, “Kibernetika i ekonomika,” in Berg, ed., Kibernetiku—na sluzhbu kommunizmu, vol. 1, p. 191.60 Viktor Glushkov, “The Art of Control and the Computer,” trans. Pat Stephan, Soviet Cybernetics: Recent News Items, no. 6 (July 1967): 55.61 “Spravka o nauchnoi deiatel’nosti Zamestitelia direktora Vsesoiuznogo NII meditsinskoi i mediko-tekhnicheskoi informatsii Minzdrava SSSR, doktora tekhnicheskikh nauk, professora Kitova A.I.,” n.d.; Natal’ia Liapunova’s archive.62 A.I. Kitov, “Kibernetika i upravlenie narodnym khoziaistvom,” in A.I. Berg, ed., Kibernetiku—na sluzhbu kommunizmu, vol. 1 (Moscow and Leningrad: Gosenergoizdat, 1961), p. 207.63 Ibidem.64 A. Berg et al., “Radioelektroniku—na sluzhbu upravleniiu narodnym khoziaistvom,” Kommunist, no. 9 (1960): 23.65 Edinaia gosudarstvennaia territorial’naia set’ informatsionno-vychislitel’nykh tsentrov s edinym tsentral’nym upravleniem.

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political and economic structures of the communist state and the technical means for controlling the national economy.”66

Optimal Planning: A Vehicle of Economic Reform or an Obstacle to It?

As in the case of military cybernetics, the introduction of mathematical modeling into Soviet economic decision-making proved controversial. Although Soviet economists were among the first in the world to apply mathematical methods for large-scale economic planning in the 1920s, by the middle 1950s mathematical economics was pushed to the margins of Soviet economic studies. In 1926, the State Planning Committee (Gosplan) calculated the first balance sheet of the Soviet economy for 1923-24. The idea of balanced development did not match well with Stalin’s plans for shock industrialization, and in his 1929 speech he dismissed the Gosplan calculations as “not a balance of the national economy but a game with figures,” and many of the “players” soon disappeared in purges.67 By the early 1950s, Soviet economics was dominated by political economists, who thoroughly avoided mathematical methods.

The cybernetics movement provided a public forum for mathematical economists, who struggled for recognition in their own professional community. Aleksei Liapunov’s open seminar on cybernetics at Moscow University attracted a number of economists interested in mathematical and computer methods. At a session of this seminar in May 1956, the Leningrad mathematician Leonid Kantorovich—a pioneer of linear programming models in Soviet economics—delivered a paper on mathematical methods in economic planning.68 In the same audience ten days later the Moscow cyberneticians N.E. Kobrinskii and L.M. Shekhtman spoke about a “high-speed machine for economic analysis.”69 When a few years later the Academy of Sciences Council on Cybernetics was created, mathematical economists formed the economics section of the Council, regularly published their papers in the Council’s publication, Cybernetics Must Serve Communism, and organized several conferences under its aegis.

Disturbed by the economic difficulties the Soviet Union was experiencing in the early 1960s, the Soviet leadership permitted an open discussion in the Soviet press of the possible directions of economic reform. Liberal economists proposed to use profit figures for evaluating economic performance, decentralize economic management, and stimulate market mechanisms in the Soviet economy. Economic cyberneticians, on the other hand, saw the solution in automation, optimal planning, and the centralization of information processing.70 Both sides appealed to Western experience for supporting examples. In 1962, the Academy of Sciences

66 A.A. Liapunov and A.I. Kitov, “Kibernetika v tekhnike i ekonomike,” Voprosy filosofii, no. 9 (1961): 88.67 I.V. Stalin, Voprosy leninizma, 11th ed. (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1951), p. 326.68 In 1975 Kantorovich received the Nobel Prize in economics. On his work, see N.S. Dvortsina and I.A. Makhrova, comps., Leonid Vital’evich Kantorovich: Materialy k biobibliografii (Moscow: Nauka, 1989); D.A. Pospelov and Ia.I. Fet, eds. and comps., Ocherki istorii informatiki v Rossii (Novosibirsk: OIGGM SO RAN, 1998), pp. 417-62, 512-14.69 See M.G. Gaaze-Rapoport, “O stanovlenii kibernetiki v SSSR,” in B.V. Biriukov, ed., Kibernetika: proshloe dlia budushchego. Etiudy po istorii otechestvennoi kibernetiki (Moscow: Nauka, 1989), p. 75.70 On this debate, see Mark R. Beissinger, Scientific Management, Socialist Discipline, and Soviet Power (Harvard University Press, 1988); Martin Cave, Computers and Economic Planning: The Soviet Experience (Cambridge University Press, 1980); John P. Hardt et al., eds., Mathematics and Computers in Soviet Economic Planning (Yale University Press, 1967); Richard W. Judy, “The Economists,” in H. Gordon Skilling and Franklyn Griffiths, eds., Interest Groups in Soviet Politics (Princeton University Press, 1971), pp. 209-51.

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dispatched a group of experts to visit the USA and England. Upon its return, the delegation reported:71

The science of control in the United States incorporates the main ideas of automated control of machinery, the principle of feedback, and the methods of application of this principle. The main purpose of this science is the elaboration of methods of optimal planning and industrial management.

The delegation believes that now is the time to utilize in a serious way the achievements of the “science of control” under the conditions of planned economy in our country in order to place solid scientific principles in the foundation of economic management and production control with the help of operations research methods.

Many of the issues that we discussed in the United States and in England are known in the Soviet Union, and some work is being done in this direction. This work, however, is conducted with very little manpower and without much coordination.

At the November 1962 Central Committee Plenum, Khrushchev acknowledged that profit could play a significant role in the evaluation of the work of an individual enterprise; at the same time he called on his Party comrades to borrow widely Western “rational” managerial techniques; in the conditions of planned economy, he argued, these techniques would be even easier to implement than under capitalism.72

During the same month of November 1962, then deputy chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers Aleksei Kosygin met with the president of the USSR Academy of Sciences mathematician Mstislav Keldysh and director of the Institute of Cybernetics in Kiev mathematician Viktor Glushkov to discuss the prospects for creating a statewide automated economic management system. Glushkov suggested to build a unified state network of computer centers73 to automate economic management on a national scale. Soon the Council of Ministers established a commission headed by Glushkov to prepare a detailed proposal.74

Work in this field greatly intensified after the 1963 decree of the Party Central Committee and the Council of Ministers “On Improving the Supervision of Work on the Introduction of Computer Technology and Automated Management Systems into the National Economy.” Each of the major participating agencies created a special institution for the problems of automated management: the Central Economic Mathematical Institute of the Academy of Sciences (TsEMI);75 the Main Computer Center of the State Planning Committee;76 and the Scientific Research Institute for Design of Computer Centers and Economic Information

71 “Otchet delegatsii Akademii nauk SSSR o poezdke v Angliiu i SShA,” 1962; the Russian Academy of Sciences Archive (Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Akademii Nauk [ARAN]), f. 395, op. 17, d. 39, ll. 58-59.72 N.S. Khrushchev, Razvitie ekonomiki SSSR i partiinoe rukovodstvo narodnym khoziaistvom: doklad na Plenume TsK KPSS 19 noiabria 1962 goda (Moscow: Politizdat, 1962).73 Edinaia gosudarstvennaia set’ vychislitel’nykh tsentrov (EGSVTs).74 Malinovskii, Akademik V. Glushkov, p. 95.75 Tsentral’nyi ekonomiko-matematicheskii institut Akademii nauk SSSR. On TsEMI, see Simon Kassel, Soviet Cybernetics Research: A Preliminary Study of Organizations and Personalities, report R-909-ARPA (Santa Monica: The Rand Corporation, December 1971); and Judith Thornton Leber, “The Central Economic Mathematics Institute,” Soviet Cybernetic Review 4:6 (June 1970): 29-32.76 Glavnyi vychislitel’nyi tsentr Gosplana SSSR.

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Systems of the Central Statistical Administration.77 To coordinate all work in this area, the Council of Ministers State Committee for the Coordination of Scientific Research set up the Chief Administration for the Introduction of Computer Technology into the National Economy.78

TsEMI was established with the active support of Berg’s Council on Cybernetics and became the hotbed of economic cybernetics. Director of TsEMI academician Nikolai Fedorenko became also the chairman of the Academy of Sciences Scientific Council on Optimal Planning and Management of the National Economy. Fedorenko adopted a program of optimal economic planning on the national scale, based on cybernetic models of control for large-scale complex systems. In 1964, the major tasks of TsEMI were stated as follows:79

(1) Elaboration of a theory of optimal planning and management and the construction of a general mathematical model of the national economy;

(2) Development of a unified system of economic information;(3) Development of a unified state network of computer centers; (4) Development of mathematical methods for the general model;(5) Creation of concrete planning and management systems based on

mathematical methods and computer technology; and(6) Elaboration of standards and algorithms for planning and management.

TsEMI’s proposed method of optimal planning differed somewhat from that of Glushkov’s Institute of Cybernetics, but the two institutions eventually agreed to define basic structural features of the future unified state network of computer centers in such a way that this network would be capable to accommodate possible changes in the methodology of optimal planning. In 1964, Glushkov and Fedorenko published a joint proposal for a “unified system of optimal planning and management” on the basis of a three-tier unified state network of computer centers. According to the plan, this network would consist of tens of thousands of nodal computer centers to collect “primary information,” 30-50 basic computer centers in major cities, and the head center controlling the entire network and serving the government. This network, they wrote, “should naturally combine the territorial and the branch [structural] principles and should be invariant to possible changes in the structure of planning and management agencies.”80

While previously the central planning organs collected primary economic information from individual enterprises through four parallel relatively independent channels (the planning system, the material-technical supply system, the statistical system, and the financial system), now economic data would be collected only once, stored in data centers, and made available to the relevant agencies. By this cardinal restructuring of economic information flows, the authors hoped to reduce the number of documents prepared by an individual enterprise by a factor of 20

77 Nauchno-issledovatel’skii institut po proektirovaniiu vychislitel’nykh tsentrov i sistem ekonomicheskoi informatsii Tsentral’nogo statisticheskogo upravleniia SSSR.78 Glavnoe upravlenie po vnedreniiu vychislitel’noi tekhniki v narodnoe khoziaistvo pri Gosudarstvennom komitete po koordinatsii nauchno-issledovatel’skikh rabot SSSR.79 “O rabote Tsentral’nogo ekonomiko-matematicheskogo instituta,” Vestnik Akademii nauk SSSR, no. 10 (1964): 3-14; see also Kassel, Soviet Cybernetics Research, pp. 94-95; Abraham S. Becker, “Comments,” in Hardt et al., eds., Mathematics and Computers, p. 129.80 V. Glushkov and N. Fedorenko, “Problemy vnedreniia vychislitel’noi tekhniki v narodnoe khoziaistvo,” Voprosy ekonomiki, no. 7 (1964): 89.

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or 30.81 Glushkov and Fedorenko promised the “optimal decision-making on the national scale” through “processing the entire body of primary economic information as a whole.”82

Glushkov envisioned a system that would monitor all labor, production, and retail and effectively eliminate the need for a money economy, thus bringing Soviet society closer to the Marxist ideal of communism. Perhaps, he hoped that this idea would appeal to Khrushchev, who in 1961 promulgated the Party goal to build communism in the Soviet Union by 1980. The Academy president Keldysh reportedly told Glushkov, however, that the idea to eliminate money might “arouse unnecessary emotions” and Glushkov decided to exclude this section from his major document and to submit it to the Party Central Committee as a separate proposal. If ideology were to play any role in Soviet top-level decision-making, that was its best chance. Glushkov’s separate proposal, however, elicited no response from the Party authorities.83

In opposition to the bureaucratic centralization of Soviet economic management, economic cyberneticians proposed “indirect centralization,” which they described as “the setting of such prices and coefficients for the calculation of outlays and effects as will enable the local unit itself to find the variants most appropriate to the national plan and to the general minimization of production outlays.”84 Glushkov suggested that the centralization of information processing would increase the possibility for decentralizing management.85 Kantorovich proposed the so-called “objectively determined valuations” as a basis for calculating shadow prices; he envisioned that these prices would reflect relative scarcity of products and thus would take into account the relationship between supply and demand. In the absence of real market mechanisms in socialist economy, computer modeling of these mechanisms would provide quasi-market stimuli for individual enterprises. Economic cyberneticians viewed optimal planning as a way to introduce an economic incentive system and let the economy self-regulate within some general constraints imposed by the overall plan.

The emphasis economic cyberneticians placed on “objective” computation and “objective” valuations as a basis for price formation stood in clear opposition to the traditional discourse of Soviet political economists, which rested on a dogmatic interpretation of the Marxist theory of value. Mathematician Golanskii dismissed political economists’ objections to Kantorovich’s objective valuations theory as “scholasticism” and asserted the discursive autonomy of economic cybernetics from political economy. He argued that “[the Marxist concept of] value and objective valuations are two completely different and incommensurable things. Value is a category of political economy and objective valuations are an algorithmic formula for the calculation of equilibrium prices in an optimal plan.”86

The idea of optimal planning met stern opposition from traditional economists and planners. Specialists from the State Planning Committee tried to preserve their right to manipulate economic plans; an introduction of optimal planning would have transferred this authority to mathematical economists. The opponents of economic optimization proposed to start with local planning, and only later move up to a nationwide system, while cyberneticians argued that local optimization without reforming national economic policy would be impossible. At the same time, some of the objections raised by the critics—the economic processes were too 81 Richard W. Judy, “Information, Control, and Soviet Economic Management, “ in Hardt et al., eds., Mathematics and Computers, pp. 38-39.82 Glushkov and Fedorenko, “Problemy vnedreniia vychislitel’noi tekhniki,” pp. 87-88.83 Malinovskii, Akademik V. Glushkov, p. 99.84 Quoted in Becker, “Comments,” pp. 132-33.85 Quoted in Cave, Computers and Economic Planning, p. 182.86 Quoted in Becker, “Comments,” p. 133.

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complex for linear models, the concept of economic “optimum” was too difficult to define, and a single criteria for optimization could hardly be found—had some validity.87

In the eyes of Party and government bureaucrats, the aspiration of Soviet cybernetics to become a “science of government” presented a veiled political challenge to the existing administrative structure and to their authority within this structure. The 1957 report of the Academy of Sciences commission on computing already hinted that computers would perform a better job than the “unwieldy bureaucratic apparatus.”88 A mathematical analysis of economic information flows threatened to expose serious flaws in the Soviet economic management system. Liapunov, for example, argued that studies of data collecting procedures adopted by industrial management often showed that89

certain data required for expedient control are, in fact, neglected, while much information, which is collected with great effort, has no function to fulfill, for this information does not effect decision-making in industrial management. . . . As a result, many agencies and information channels duplicate one another and make no real impact on production. A detailed mathematical modeling of production control would help to find out which links in the control system are not needed and would perhaps help to arrive at a more rational system of control in general.

This project could hardly gain support from those managers who feared to become superfluous control links. Kitov recalled that a Party bureaucrat had once told him: “There is no need for optimization methods or automated management systems, since the Party has its own methods of management: the Party consults the people.”90 In a 1968 personal letter to Liapunov, Kitov admitted that their attempts to introduce cybernetic methods in economic management were initially opposed by the leadership and later resisted by industrial managers:91

The current situation with the introduction of computers into the national economy is somewhat different from the period of 1956-1960, when you and I started this business. Now the top leadership realizes the importance of that but does not take effective measures to support such work, while direct supervisors at ministries and other governmental agencies so far have taken a purely formal attitude and generally displayed no interest in the automation of management or the optimization of planning. The problem is apparently rooted not in their personalities but in their positions and overall traditions, which change very slowly.

Besides, optimization of national economic planning faced enormous technical difficulties. TsEMI researchers estimated that the problem involved a system of fifty million variables and five million constraints. They admitted that even a computer performing one

87 See “Ekonomisty i matematiki za ‘Kruglym stolom,’” Voprosy ekonomiki, no. 9 (1964): 63-110.88 Nesmeianov and Topchiev to the presidium of the Central Committee, December 14, 1957; TsKhSD, f.5, op. 35, d. 70, l. 119.89 A.A. Liapunov, “O roli matematiki v sovremennoi chelovecheskoi kul’ture,” [1968] in Idem, Problemy teoreticheskoi i prikladnoi kibernetiki (Nauka, 1980), p. 305.90 Malinovskii, Akademik V. Glushkov, p. 15.91 Kitov to Liapunov, October 27, 1968; Natal’ia Liapunova’s archive.

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million operations per second (not available in the Soviet Union at that time) would require a month to solve a system one-billionth as large.92

While traditional economists rejected optimal planning because it upset the existing power structures, radical reformers, on the other hand, looked at Glushkov’s proposal as too centralized and suppressing local initiative. Glushkov admitted that his project for a nationwide computer network would cost more that the space program and the atomic project taken together.93 Reformer economists argued that Glushkov’s project would merely conserve the obsolete forms of centralized economic management and also divert the resources urgently needed for economic reform. Economist Gavriil Popov, who would later play a prominent role in Gorbachev’s perestroika, wrote in 1970:94

[The construction of] the pyramids of Egypt was one of the factors that turned that fertile ancient country into a desert. If an economically meaningless decision is implemented vigorously, this ruins the economy. According to the blueprint of a unified state network of computer centers, these centers would spread over the country as a kind of pyramids, designed by talented mathematicians and able engineers with the participation of unqualified economists.

Indeed, all of the leading Soviet cyberneticians involved in economic projects—Berg, Bruk, Glushkov, Kantorovich, Kitov, and Liapunov—were either engineers or mathematicians, not economists. Their vision of optimal planning was based on mathematical optimization; the question to what extent their mathematical models reflected economic reality was bracketed out. Glushkov’s attempts to implement computerized production control systems at a metallurgic plant in Dneprodzerzhinsk, a chemical factory in Slaviansk, and a ship-building plant in Nikolaev had little success.95 “Optimal” control yielded poor results when the technology of production was old and obsolete, as was often the case. The use of computers saved minutes, while hours were wasted because of technological inefficiency and the lack of coordination between various stages of production.96 Glushkov had to admit that any potential profit from management-information systems was “lost because of poor external ties and interruptions in supply.”97 “Optimal” planning turned into a pure mathematical abstraction when confronted with the frequent practice of feeding false data into computers processing economic information.

Glushkov’s team looked upon the automation of production control as a merely technical task and performed little socioeconomic analysis. A cybernetics graduate student told his supervisor after visiting a plant under automation: “[I] walked around the plant and watched my back so that nobody throw a stone at me. . . . The carbonization equipment is now controlled by a [computing] machine; the [former] operators have nothing to do, there is no work for them, so they are angry.”98 The designers of production control systems regarded such occurrences as merely vexing incidents; they never seriously considered the social change their efforts would bring, nor were they encouraged to do so. For decades, Soviet engineers were narrowly educated

92 V. Pugachev, “Voprosy optimal’nogo planirovaniia narodnogo khoziaistva s pomoshch’iu edinoi gosudarstvennoi seti vychislitel’nykh tsentrov,” Voprosy ekonomiki, no. 7 (1964): 93-103.93 Malinovskii, Akademik V. Glushkov, p. 102.94 G.Kh. Popov, Problemy teorii upravleniia (Ekonomika, 1970), p. 160.95 Malinovskii, Istoriia vychislitel’noi tekhniki, p. 285.96 Ibid., p. 337.97 Quoted in Beissinger, Scientific Management, p. 254.98 Malinovskii, Istoriia vychislitel’noi tekhniki, p. 338.

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to deal with purely technical issues and not to engage in discussions of broader social, economic, or political issues.99

Having limited political options, Soviet cyberneticians tried to work out a mathematical solution to the political problem of reforming the Soviet economy. This mathematical solution, however, proved inadequate precisely because it attempted to bracket politics and the complexities that politics brought with it. Glushkov tried to win support of the top Soviet leadership for the implementation of a nationwide automated control system; he did not realize that such an implementation from above would only reinforce the existing managerial structures rather than reform them.

In November 1964, the presidium of the USSR Council of Ministers discussed Glushkov’s proposal and decided to transfer the responsibility for “finalizing” this proposal to the Central Statistical Administration.100 This agency already possessed a network of statistics-collecting stations and, trying to place itself in the central position in nationwide information-collecting, transformed Glushkov’s concept of a unified state network of computer centers into a simple extension of the existing network of statistics-collection. This idea, however, did not suit the State Planning Committee, which found planning absent in the new project and feared that it would give preference to a rival governmental agency. As the two powerful agencies struggled, trying to accommodate Glushkov’s project to their own ends, the plans for building a unified system of optimal planning and management on the basis of a statewide network of computer centers quietly withered away.

Cybernetics in the Service of Bureaucracy

Eventually industrial managers and traditional economists realized that there were many ways to skin the cybernetic cat without necessarily losing their grip on power. Instead of building a nationwide territorial management system, they proposed to develop automated management systems along branch ministry lines; this approach was announced as the official policy in a joint decree of the Party Central Committee and the USSR Council of Ministers in March 1966.101 Instead of sharing information/power with an interbranch agency for automated management, each ministry set out to create a separate automated management system to serve its internal needs. Instead of facilitating the decentralization of power through simulated “indirect centralization,” computer technology now served to strengthen centralized control within each ministry. The growing power of ministries quickly reduced the autonomy of individual enterprises to minimum, and, in conjunction with the political reaction to the 1968 Soviet invasion in Czechoslovakia, effectively buried economic reforms.

The mission and significance of TsEMI were gradually reduced. By 1966, only five out of the initial six areas of research were preserved; the elaboration of standards and algorithms for planning and management were dropped. By the end of the 1960s, the creation of a nationwide

99 On the role of political passivity and narrow technical education of Soviet engineers in constructing large-scale engineering projects lacking proper socioeconomic basis, see Loren R. Graham, The Ghost of the Executed Engineer: Technology and the Fall of the Soviet Union (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).100 Malinovskii, Akademik V. Glushkov, p. 100.101 Resheniia partii i pravitel’stva po khoziaistvennym voprosam, vol. 4 (Moscow, 1968), pp. 21-27.

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automated management network was no longer on TsEMI’s agenda. Its areas of research were defined as follows:102

(1) Elaboration of systems theory for optimal national economic planning;(2) Development of automated systems for planning and management; and(3) Analysis of problems of national economic development for the period, 1971-75, and

forecasting future economic growth.

Mathematics and computing were now “on tap, not on top” of economic decision-making; TsEMI became just another information-supplying agency for the State Planning Committee. The reference to cybernetic algorithms was replaced with an appeal to the now fashionable “systems theory,” which placed emphasis on qualitative rather than quantitative analysis.

Nevertheless, the idea of a statewide computer network did not completely disappear. A new impetus came, as usual, from the West. In his memoirs, Glushkov recalled:103

In the late 1960s, the Central Committee and the Council of Ministers received information that Americans had prepared a draft design of an information network (several information networks, to be precise) as early as 1966, i.e., two years later than we did [Glushkov is speaking about his 1964 proposal for a unified state network of computer centers.—S.G.]. Unlike us, however, they did not argue but did the job, and in 1969 they already planned to launch ARPANET network, and later CYBERNET, and others, which linked computers installed in various American cities.

Then some concern began to show in our quarters. I came to see A.P. Kirilenko [a secretary of the Central Committee—S.G.] and handed him a memo suggesting to return to the ideas contained in my original project. “Write down in detail what must be done and we will create a committee,” he said. I wrote something like this: “The only thing I ask to be done with my memo is not to create a committee, for a committee operates on the principle of subtraction of brains, not summation, and this may wreck any project.” They created a committee all the same.

Glushkov predicted that, unless major changes were implemented, by the middle 1980s nearly the entire adult population of the Soviet Union would be engaged in planning, accounting, and management.104 He proposed to build a Statewide Automated Management System (OGAS)105—a network of regional and agency management-information systems, starting from the top governmental level and going down to technical production control systems. Glushkov argued that the larger was the object controlled by an automated management system, the greater was that system’s economic effect.106

102 Kassel, Soviet Cybernetics Research, pp. 97-98.103 Malinovskii, Akademik V. Glushkov, p. 104.104 G. Maksimovich, Besedy s akademikom V. Glushkovym (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1976), p. 56.105 Obshchegosudarstvennaia avtomatizirovannaia sistema upravleniia.106 Maksimovich, Besedy s akademikom, p. 66.

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The OGAS project was approved in general by the Twenty-Fourth Party Congress in 1971; when it came down to implementation, however, only the least ambitious part of the plan—the automation of production control—survived. One Western observer has described the failure of this cybernetic project, ironically, in cybernetic terms—as a failure to combat bureaucratic “entropy”:107

OGAS was clearly the most ambitious Soviet rationalization project since Lenin’s reorganization of NKRKI [People’s Commissariat of Worker and Peasant Inspections] in 1923; in scale and cost it has frequently been compared with the Soviet space program and the industrialization projects of the 1930s.

As with the NKRKI in the 1920s, the massive computerization campaign aimed at alleviating bureaucratic entropy was itself mired in bureaucratic entropy.

With each enterprise fending for itself, a confusing variety of incompatible programs, each written in a different language but performing similar and related tasks, appeared. Thus, instead of aiding the integration of administration, computerization actually reinforced existing organizational boundaries.

Glushkov insisted that OGAS should be built from the top down and integrated on a regional basis, while branch ministries clearly preferred the construction of agency management-information systems to be integrated at the top later. The latter approach eventually prevailed, and the ministries quickly went on to design their private information systems. Built without much coordination, these systems proved incompatible with one another and with that of the State Planning Committee, thus making their integration impossible. If compatible, computer technology would unite; if incompatible, it would divide just as well, and Soviet industrial ministries took full advantage of this fact. By constructing isolated information systems, they lay a technical foundation for their managerial autonomy. “Having different ministries is like having different governments,” one Soviet author has observed.108

Lacking political support, Soviet cyberneticians never succeeded in their attempts to establish control over the national economy in the sense of upravlenie; their mission was limited to creating information management systems of the kontrol’ type. The idea to reform the government with the help of a nationwide automated management system was abandoned. Instead of upsetting the existing power structures, cybernetics was enrolled to reinforce them.

Cybernetics Between Capitalism and Communism

The fate of Wiener’s cybernetics was deeply ironic. He developed a cybernetic critique of the manipulation of social communications for political purposes; the same cybernetic framework, however, was employed to develop pragmatic theories of political control. After Hiroshima, he became an outspoken critic of the military-industrial complex; cybernetic theory, however, was widely used for military purposes. He insisted that information could not be a commodity; nevertheless, cybernetic techniques of measuring and processing information facilitated the

107 Beissinger, Scientific Management, pp. 248-52.108 V. Golovachev, “A Hercules is Born,” trans. Sharon Breit and Wade Holland, Soviet Cybernetics: Recent News Items, no. 5 (June 1967): 72.

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marketing of this product. He spoke against military secrecy, while information theory greatly improved cryptography. In Wiener’s view, cybernetic knowledge was to liberate rather than further enslave an individual. Cybernetic analysis of control mechanisms, however, helped create new controls in addition to the old ones.

While Wiener hoped that his cybernetic analysis would expose the flaws of both capitalism and communism, cybernetics was widely employed on both sides of the Atlantic to supply decision-makers with technological solutions to political and organizational problems. The idea of rational automated control had equally powerful appeal to technology-minded managers, whether they were representatives of the “bourgeois” middle class or members of the Communist Party. The advancement of engineers to managerial positions in the Soviet Union from the 1930s on provided fertile ground for the aspiration of Soviet cybernetics to become a “science of government.”109

Rather than being inspired by professional Soviet ideologues, the ideology-laden discourse around cybernetics was produced by Soviet cyberneticians themselves, who tried to impose cybernetic schemes on the reluctant Soviet leadership. Cybernetics was not the only science mentioned in the new Party program, but cyberneticians capitalized on this fact more successfully than many other professional groups. Eventually, however, it was not the ideological argument about the “full harmony” between the mechanism of cybernetic control and the political and economic structure of the communist society that attracted the attention of the Party and government authorities to the concepts of automated control and rational management, but the reports about recent developments in that direction in the West. The American air defense system SAGE, for example, served as a direct inspiration for the Soviet project of a unified statewide information transmission system. The economic and military projects of Soviet cyberneticians could hardly be called unique products of Soviet ideology. Projects for large-scale optimal planning and military command and control have also been developed in the West with a completely different set of ideological assumptions.110

American and Soviet cybernetic systems shared both their strengths and their inherent deficiencies. One Western observer has noted that “the wonder is not that the [Soviet economic information] system works badly but that is works at all” and added: “To be fair, I must admit that during several weeks’ work with large U.S. military logistics systems, I was filled with the same wonder—albeit of a lesser order of magnitude.”111 Cybernetics seemed to serve different political ideologies equally well, or maybe equally badly. A capitalist dystopia turned into a communist utopia and ended up a pragmatic management device.

109 See Kendall Bailes, Technology and Society under Lenin and Stalin: Origins of the Soviet Technical Intelligentsia, 1917-1941 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978).110 See Edwards, The Closed World.111 Richard W. Judy, “Information, Control, and Soviet Economic Management,” in Hardt et al., eds., Mathematics, p. 32.

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