Soviet scientists have been trying to network their country for decades. What prevented them then is splitting the global internet today.
On the morning of October 1, 1970, cyberneticist Viktor Glushkov entered the Kremlin, where he was to meet with members of the Politburo. He was a lively and observant man with a piercing gaze from under black horn-rimmed glasses. He had such a mindset that when solving one problem, he created a methodology for solving all similar problems. And at that moment the Soviet Union had a serious problem. A year earlier, the United States launched the first ARPANET packet-routing computer network, which over time laid the foundation for the Internet as we know it. This distributed network was originally intended to allow the US to overtake the Soviets. It was supposed to provide communication between the computers of scientists and state leaders, even in the event of a nuclear attack. It was the peak of the technology raceand the Soviets had to react somehow.
Glushkov's idea was to move to the era of electronic socialism. He called his incredibly ambitious project the National Automated System (OGAS). It was intended for the optimization and technological modernization of the entire planned economy. He believed that such a system should make economic decisions in accordance with government plans, and not at market prices, but believed that its work would accelerate thanks to computer simulations, and it would be able to predict the balance of payments equilibrium before reaching it. Glushkov wanted decisions to be made more quickly and wisely, and even thought about electronic money. All he needed was the Politburo purse.
But when that morning Glushkov entered the spacious room, he noticed that two chairs at the long table were empty. Two of his main allies were absent from the meeting. Instead, he was looked at by ambitious ministers with steel eyes, who themselves wanted to put their hands in the Politburo's wallet and receive state support.
Between 1959 and 1989, leading Soviet scientists and statesmen repeatedly tried to create a nationwide computer network, pursuing mainly public goals and interests. The deep wounds from World War II had not yet healed (80% of Russian men born in 1923 died in this war), but the Soviet Union continued to carry out large-scale modernization projects that, over several decades, turned the backward tsarist country with illiterate peasants into a world nuclear power.
When Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin's personality cult in 1956, the country was seized with a sense of great opportunity. On this stage, many socialist projects have emerged that involved connecting the national economy to the networks. Among other things, there appeared the world's first proposal to create a nationwide computer network for the population. This idea belonged to the military researcher Anatoly Ivanovich Kitov.
Kitov in his youth was frail and had outstanding mathematical abilities. During World War II, he fought in the ranks of the Red Army, where he made significant advances in service. In 1952 Kitov in the secret military library got acquainted with Norbert Wiener's major work "Cybernetics" (1948). The title of the book was a neologism derived from Greek words. It meant the post-war science of self-directed information systems. With the support of two leading scientists, Kitov translated this book into good Russian in order to develop self-driving and communication systems using computers. The rich systemic vocabulary of Cybernetics was supposed to equip the Soviet state with a high-tech set of tools for a reasonable Marxist state administration,which could become an antidote to the violence and personality cult characteristic of the Stalinist dictatorship. In fact, cybernetics could even have prevented a brutal new dictator from emerging in the country. At least that's what the technocrats have dreamed of.
In 1959, as director of the secret computing center of the Ministry of Defense, Kitov began to tackle other issues, drawing attention to the "unlimited amount of reliable computing power" that was supposed to ensure optimal planning in the Soviet economy. At that time, the problem of information interaction and coordination significantly complicated the Soviet socialist project. (For example, in 1962 it turned out that due to an error in the calculations that were made manually, the population projections in the census increased by four million people.) Kitov wrote a letter to Khrushchev, in which he shared his thoughts on this topic (they were named the "Red Book" project). He proposed allowing civilian organizations to use military computer "complexes" for economic planning at night, when the bulk of the military was sleeping. He thought economic planners could harness the military's computing power to solve problems in real time. Kitov called his military-civilian national computer network the "Unified automated system for managing the national economy."
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It so happened that Kitov's military commanders intercepted his letter, and it did not get to Khrushchev. The fathers-commanders were angered by his proposal to share the resources of the Red Army with civilian planning authorities. In addition, Kitov dared to declare that these resources are lagging behind the requirements of the time. A secret military tribunal was convened to review his transgressions. Because of them, Kitov was immediately expelled from the Communist Party for a year, and also fired from the armed forces. This ended the very first proposal for a public nationwide computer network.
But the idea itself survived. In the early 1960s, Kitov's offer was picked up by another person, with whom he subsequently became so close that their children were married decades later. His name was Viktor Mikhailovich Glushkov.
The full name of Glushkov's plan is "A nationwide automated system for collecting and processing information for accounting, planning and managing the national economy in the USSR." It speaks for itself and testifies to the colossal aspirations of its author. He first proposed this system (OGAS) in 1962, intending to make it a national computer network in real time with remote access based on the existing and new telephone network. In its most ambitious version, this network was supposed to cover most of the Eurasian continent, becoming a kind of nervous system that penetrates every enterprise of the planned economy. The model of this network was hierarchical, corresponding to the three-tier structure of the state and its economy. One head computer center in Moscow was supposed to connect to 200 mid-level computer centers in large cities, and those, in turn, were to connect to 20 thousand computer terminals distributed across key industries of the national economy.
Fellow of the Institute of Cybernetics
In accordance with Glushkov's beliefs in life, this network should have become deliberately decentralized. That is, Moscow could indicate who gets what permissions, and the authorized user was able to contact any other user across the entire network of this pyramid. At the same time, he did not need to obtain permission from a higher center. Glushkov was well aware of the benefits of introducing local knowledge into the construction of the network, since most of his life he solved similar mathematical problems, wandering between Kiev and the Soviet capital (he jokingly called the Moscow-Kiev train his second home).
Many statesmen and planners believed (especially in the late 1960s) that the OGAS project was the best solution to an old conundrum: the Soviets agreed that communism was a bright future, but no one since Marx and Engels knew how best to get there. According to Glushkov, the computer network with its computing base could bring the country closer to the era that writer Francis Spufford would later call "red abundance." Through this network, the scientist set out to transform the clumsy command economy, with its quotas, plans, and mind-boggling industrial standard catalogs, into a highly responsive nervous system operating at the astounding speed of electricity. This project, neither more nor less, was supposed to initiate the era of "electronic socialism".
But this required smart and purposeful people who were ready to abandon the old thinking. In the 1960s, such people could be found in Kiev, a couple of blocks from the place where the Strugatsky brothers wrote their science fiction at night and worked as physicists during the day. There, on the outskirts of Kiev, Glushkov headed the Institute of Cybernetics for 20 years, starting in 1962. He staffed his institute with ambitious young scientists, whose average age was 25. Glushkov, along with his youth, took up the development of OGAS and the implementation of other cybernetic projects, seeking to put them in the service of the Soviet state. Among them was an e-bookkeeping system for virtualizing hard currency in an online ledger. And this is in the early 1960s! Glushkov, who knew how to shut the mouths of the ideologists of the Communist Party with quotations from Marx,which he memorized whole paragraphs, called his innovations the exact fulfillment of the Marxist prophecy of a socialist future in which there will be no money. Unfortunately for Glushkov, the idea of creating a Soviet electronic currency caused anxiety, which did not help the cause, and in 1962 was not approved at the top. Fortunately, his grandiose economic network project has survived to other, more favorable days.
These Soviet cybernetics wrote ironic works such as "On the need to remain invisible - at least for the authorities." They imagined a kind of "smart" neural network, the nervous system of the Soviet economy. This cybernetic analogy between the computer network and the brain has left its mark on other innovations in computing theory. For example, instead of the so-called von Neumann bottleneck (which limits the amount of data transmitted on a computer), Glushkov's team proposed streaming data processing in the image and likeness of the simultaneous excitation of many synapses in the human brain. In addition to countless fundamental computer projects, they developed other theoretical frameworks including automata theory, paperless paperwork, and natural language programming.allowing people to communicate with a computer on a semantic, or semantic level, and not on a syntactic level, as programmers do today. The most ambitious idea of Glushkov and his students was the theory of "informational immortality". Today we would call it “brain loading”, remembering Isaac Asimov or Arthur Clarke. Decades later, while on his deathbed, Glushkov reassured his saddened wife with his bright ideas. “Don't worry,” he said. - Someday the light from our Earth will pass by the constellations, and in each constellation we will appear young again. Thus, we will be together forever and ever! "remembering Isaac Asimov or Arthur Clarke. Decades later, while on his deathbed, Glushkov reassured his saddened wife with his bright ideas. “Don't worry,” he said. - Someday the light from our Earth will pass by the constellations, and in each constellation we will appear young again. Thus, we will be together forever and ever! "remembering Isaac Asimov or Arthur Clarke. Decades later, while on his deathbed, Glushkov reassured his saddened wife with his bright ideas. “Don't worry,” he said. - Someday the light from our Earth will pass by the constellations, and in each constellation we will appear young again. Thus, we will be together forever and ever!"
After a day of work, the cyberneticians were having fun in a comedy club full of frivolous frivolity and cheerful mischief, bordering on outright challenge. Due to the lack of other places to let off some steam, they turned their nightclub into a virtual country, not subject to the Moscow authorities. On New Year's Eve in 1960, they named their group Cybertonia, and regularly organized events such as weekend dances, symposia and conferences in Kiev and Lvov. They even wrote ironic works like "On the need to remain invisible - at least for the authorities." Instead of invitations, young scientists handed out fake passports, marriage certificates, news bulletins, money on punch cards, and even the text of the constitution of Cybertonia. Cybertonia was ruled by a council of robots (it was a parody of the Soviet control system),and at the head of this council was the talisman of this country and the supreme leader - a robot playing the saxophone. It was a nod to the jazz imported from America.
Glushkov also joined in the fun, calling his memoirs "Contrary to Power," although he held the official position of Vice President of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. Counterculture, as defined by Fred Turner as a force to be reckoned with and opposed to other forces, has long been a relative of cyberculture.
But all this required money, and a lot of money. Especially for the Glushkov OGAS project. Therefore, it was necessary to convince the Politburo to separate them. So Glushkov ended up in the Kremlin on October 1, 1970, hoping to continue the work of Cybertonia and give the battered Soviet state the Internet.
Learning on displays
One man stood in the way of Glushkov: Finance Minister Vasily Garbuzov. Garbuzov did not want glittering, real-time computers and computer networks to run the state economy and provide information to it. Instead, he insisted that simple computers flash lights and play music in chicken coops, stimulating the production of eggs, which he saw on a recent trip to Minsk. Of course, the minister was guided by pragmatism and common sense. He wanted the funds to go to his own ministry. In fact, there were rumors that prior to the October 1 meeting, Garbuzov had an informal meeting with reform-minded Soviet Prime Minister Alexei Kosygin and threatened him that if his department's rival, the Central Statistical Office, took over the OGAS project,then he and his Ministry of Finance will torpedo any reform efforts initiated by this system. This is exactly what he did with the Kosygin stage-by-stage reforms aimed at liberalization five years earlier.
Glushkov needed allies to siege Garbuzov and give life to the Soviet Internet. But at that meeting he had no allies. That day the seats of the prime minister and technocratic general secretary Leonid Brezhnev were empty. And these were the most influential people in the Soviet state who could support the OGAS. But apparently they decided to skip the meeting so as not to suppress the Treasury revolt.
Garbuzov convinced the Politburo that the OGAS project, with its ambitious plan for optimal modeling and information management in a planned economy, was hasty and excessive. The participants in the meeting, who almost went the other way, felt that it was safer to support Garbuzov - and the top secret OGAS project was left to gather dust on the shelf for another decade.
The forces that destroyed the OGAS are very similar to the other forces - which over time destroyed the Soviet Union. We are talking about the informal behavior of ministries and departments. Subversive ministers, status quo bureaucrats, jittery business leaders, confused workers, and even reform economists opposed the OGAS project because it was in their selfish inter-agency interests. Having received no government funding and leadership, the national network project to create electronic socialism in the 1970s and 1980s disintegrated, and in its place a hodgepodge of dozens and then hundreds of isolated and functionally incompatible local control systems in factories and plants appeared. … The Soviet state failed to network the country,but not because it was too rigid or centralized in its structure, but because it turned out to be too capricious and harmful in practice.
This has its own irony. The first global computer networks originated in the United States thanks to well-regulated government funding and a collaborative environment in the scientific community, while in the Soviet Union, attempts to create a modern (and highly independent) national network failed due to the chaotic rivalry and inter-agency squabble of Soviet officials. The first global computer network came about thanks to capitalists who behaved like cooperative socialists, not socialists who behaved like rival capitalists.
In the fate of the Soviet Internet, we can see a clear and relevant warning about the future of the world wide web. Today, the "Internet", defined as a single global network of networks dedicated to promoting freedom of information, democracy and commerce, is in serious decline. Consider how often companies and governments try to build up online experience? Widespread applications like Prince are more like a walled garden serving profit messengers rather than a public interface. Inward-facing gravity centers (such as Facebook and China's Golden Shield) are increasingly crushing sites that provide external links (such as Aeon). The heads of France, India, Russia and other countries are doing the same. Seeking to internationalize the Domain Name and IP Address Corporation and to impose local rules on their citizens. In fact, hundreds of non-Internet networks have been operating in many corporations and countries for many years. There is no doubt that the future of computer networks lies not in one Internet, but in many isolated online ecosystems.
In other words, the future is very much like the past. In the 20th century, there were many national computer networks that claimed international status. The drama of the Cold War, and the element of it, which we can ironically call the "Soviet Inter-NET", as the historian Slava Gerovitch did in the title of his excellent book, helps to conduct a comparative study of computer networks, taking the Internet as a basis 1.0. If you balance the many networks from the past and possible networks from the future, the notion that there is only one global network of networks is an exception to the rule. The underlying paradox of the Cold War is that cooperative capitalists outsmarted rival socialists. He didn't do anything good for the Soviets in the old days,and we hardly need to confidently say that the Internet of tomorrow will have a better fate.
Anthropologist and philosopher Bruno Latour once joked that technology is a society that has become resilient. He meant that social values are embedded in technology. For example, Google's PageRank algorithm is considered "democratic" because, among many other factors, it counts links (and directs them to linking sites) as votes. Like politicians in an election, pages with the most links rank highest. Today, the Internet is like an engine of freedom, democracy, and commerce, in part because it has become entrenched in our minds just as Western values triumphed after the Cold War. The history of the Soviet Internet also turns Latour's aphorism in the opposite direction: society is technology that has become temporary.
In other words, our social values are changing, and at the same time those features of the Internet that seemed obvious are changing. The Soviets once introduced values into the network (cybernetic collectivism, state hierarchy, planned economy) that seemed alien to us. Likewise, the values that the modern reader ascribes to the Internet will seem strange to future observers. Network technologies will continue and develop, although our overly optimistic ideas about them will already fall into the trash bin of history.
The Glushkov case also sharply reminds investors and other agents of technological change that astounding genius, astounding foresight and political foresight are not enough to change the world. It is sometimes extremely important to support institutions. This is clearly demonstrated by the Soviet experience and the media environment where there is a constant search for digital data and new forms of exploitation of confidentiality: those departmental networks that support the development of computer networks and their culture are extremely important and far from isolated.
Networked computing projects and their founders will continue to publicly glorify a bright networked future. And the departmental forces, if they are not restrained, will profitably use the surveillance and control systems, seeking to penetrate the most intimate corners of our life. (Perhaps this is the individual sphere of the personality: the eagerly absorbing information and power forces are trying to spy on our private life, and they are opposed by the human right to protection from such penetration). The Soviet example reminds us that the US National Security Agency's internal espionage program and Microsoft's cloud have their roots in an older tradition of the 20th century, when secretariats general tried to privatize personal and public information for the benefit of their agencies.
In other words, we must not comfort ourselves with the idea that the global internet was born of capitalists who behaved like cooperative socialists, not socialists who behaved like rival capitalists. The history of the Soviet Internet reminds us: the Internet user has no guarantee that the emerging Internet private entrepreneurs with their own interests will behave better than those powerful forces whose unwillingness to cooperate has ended the Soviet e-socialism, and will not put an end to the current chapter of our network era …