In the post-World War II tech race, both the Soviet Union and the United States understood the benefits of a broad information network. One of the projects turned into today's Internet, the second remained a dream of coordinating the entire Soviet bureaucracy.
The Cold War was a war of territories, ideologies and political principles. At the end of World War II, a technical race was launched between the USA and the USSR, which developed nuclear weapons, built rockets, satellites, and spacecraft. For a long time, the blocs managed to maintain military parity. Computers played a critical role in both programs, needed to control rockets and satellites in low-Earth orbit. But only one of the two superpowers managed to create the system that later became the Internet. The fact that Soviet scientists also tried to construct a wide national computer network became known only after the collapse of the communist system.
The words "Soviet Internet" sound like an oxymoron. The society of electronic networks is based on decentralization, openness, cooperation, which is completely inconsistent with such realities of the Soviet Union as censorship, hierarchy, control. The Internet has given us Wikipedia, social mobilization through Twitter, globalization. And the first communist state left behind Chernobyl, collective farms and a rusty ring of industrial cities in the Urals.
But in practice, the development of the Internet was much more difficult. Its predecessor, the American network Arpanet, was launched in 1969, made possible by government grants, academic collaboration, and a strong focus on defense. Arpanet's original mission was to decentralize data packet routing, which had little to do with free speech and liberal ideals. Arpa (Advanced research projects agency) was part of the US Department of Defense, and one of its goals was to create a stable connection between different branches of the defense system in the event of a nuclear war. The possibilities of using the network for peaceful purposes became apparent only after the final launch of the project.
The Soviet state had an excuse, technical capabilities and resources to create an analogue of Arpanet, and Soviet scientists early realized what role this project could play. Their attempts to develop a national computer network were described by Benjamin Peters of the American University of Tulsa in How not to network a nation: The uneasy history of the Soviet internet. The story begins at the end of World War II, followed by a decade of technological breakthroughs in atomic energy, satellite launches, DNA research, dishwashers, polio vaccines, and the spread of television.
The computer was at the center of almost all projects, but it was applied in different ways in different areas. Peters' book complements our knowledge of the Soviet dimension of computing and what has evolved over time into cybernetics with Soviet-style hallmarks.
In the days of Joseph Stalin, data on cybernetics were available only in classified military libraries. Soviet propaganda called cybernetics "semantic idealism" and "reactionary American pseudoscience," which could hardly win universal approval. Cybernetics was rehabilitated only after the death of Stalin in 1953, when the strategic importance of computers became clear. In a speech at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party behind closed doors, Nikita Khrushchev announced that the future lies in automation and efficiency. There was a hidden implication in his words: the Soviet economy is ineffective. The Bolsheviks built socialism without regard to costs and consequences for ordinary people, and the main stumbling block was the need for such reforms and technologies that would allow the system to survive.
The Soviet economy was based on plans, the most famous of which are the so-called five-year plans. The plans were established by government agencies and implemented at the sectoral and national-industrial levels. At the end of each reporting period, the results achieved were announced and future targets were formulated based on these. There are several reasons for the fact that the planned economy practically did not work in practice, and it is not difficult to identify the main one: as the industry and its bureaucratic superstructure developed, the number of state structures grew. The result was a shortage and poor quality of goods, as well as the development of informal industries outside the plan. In 1954, it was calculated that 15% of the able-bodied Soviet population worked in the administration. This figure confirms the internal systemic error of the planned economy: the bureaucracy has spread and itself has become a factor of power, but at the same time coordination problems have worsened.
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In such conditions, Soviet cybernetics was born. It was based on management and control, on this are built artificial intelligence, control systems, information theory. Leading mathematicians and theorists such as Anatoly Kitov, Viktor Glushkov and Leonid Kantorovich (later the winner of the State Bank of Sweden Prize in Economics in Memory of Alfred Nobel 1975 for work in the field of linear programming) realized that it was possible to connect computers to a network and make it work for the benefit of the ideas of communism. Coordination problems in the Soviet economy could be solved mathematically. The national computer network based on the principles of linear programming by Kantorovich could theoretically be applied in all structures and areas of industry. It was about a fully automated system for managing the country's economy,which would minimize the risks of administrative errors. The best replacement for Stalin would not be another person, but a technocratically organized computer network for optimal resource allocation.
Outstanding mathematician and economist, academician Leonid Vitalievich Kantorovich
Photo: ria.ru / A. Zhigailov
From 1959 to 1962, a number of projects were presented to digitize the civilian industries of the USSR. The most purposeful and long-lasting attempt to create a national network was the OGAS project (National Automated Accounting and Information Processing System), presented by Viktor Glushkov and approved by Khrushchev in 1962. Unlike Arpanet, OGAS was not only intended for data exchange. Having created a system of thousands of computers at the enterprise level, connected to a central computer, Glushkov intended to create a “thinking” network that could manage the entire economy of the country in real time as one factory. OGAS engineers assumed that a completely finished and optimized system could be launched by 1990.
Like many other scientists and strategists, Glushkov was a forward-thinking specialist, deeply passionate about computer technology. And the outstanding Soviet chess player Mikhail Botvinnik devoted a lot of his free time to creating a digital version of the Pioneer game, the algorithms of which were supposed to imitate the grandmaster's brain. Unlike the OGAS, which provided for any step in the decision-making process, Botvinnik's game was much simpler, and only the most likely moves were spelled out in it. But it also had its advantages: much lower requirements for computer power and, as a result, wider areas of application. Botvinnik well understood the importance of a computer chess game for the economy.
In the 1980s, which were crisis for the Soviet Union, he proposed a program that, by analogy with Pioneer, calculated generalized options for solving economic problems in the country. But there was stagnation in the national cybernetic program, so the words “glasnost” and “perestroika” became the slogans of the reforms.
There are several reasons why the notion of digital socialism never came true. According to Glushkov's own assessment, the OGAS network would cost the state more than the space and nuclear programs combined. In addition to economic and technological obstacles, the project faced serious protests. Military, industrialists and bureaucrats perceived the idea of digital administration as a threat to their own power, and for the ruling elite it would be an instrument of political control. In a state where KGB security controlled all copiers so that dissidents circulated carbon-copy information on typewriters, it was not hard to guess why the premise of a national computer network tended structurally to inter-no.
The Internet in its present form emerged in the same decade that the Soviet Union collapsed. Both of these events became the harbingers and preconditions of globalization that followed right after them. But political impulses to control the flow of information have not gone anywhere. Today, China and Russia have the most extensive internet rules of any major country. The global advancement of technology is more likely to create new methods for surveillance and censorship. Beijing and Moscow unanimously talk about "digital sovereignty" and await international approval of their claims to control electronic communications at the national level. In Russia, there is no analogue of the Chinese "big firewall", but since 2012 it has been blocking thousands of pages of "extremist content", which includes support for the territorial integrity of Ukraine.and criticism of the verdict of the punk group Pussy Riot, and information about Jehovah's Witnesses.
History lessons were wasted. Soviet leaders could have set up a network, but chose not to give information out. Today's Kremlin wants to use the Internet to keep the country under control, but that equation has no solution.
Governments can introduce sophisticated surveillance systems, but they should not stop Internet users from avoiding them. The successor to Arpanet, a decentralized information system created during the Cold War to survive a nuclear attack, is still strong enough to circumvent the demands of neo-totalitarian censorship. The hierarchy of tracking structures is reminiscent of the Soviet era, but it is effective only as long as people believe it works.
Martin Krag is the Director of the Russia and Eurasian Studies Programs at the Institute of Foreign Policy, lecturer at the Center for Russian Studies in Uppsala.