In the Soviet Union, long before the advent of the Internet, attempts were made to breathe new life into a stagnant planned economy by creating a large-scale computer network. The BBC Future correspondent explains why this venture failed.
For 12-year-old Oleg Gimautdinov, teaching programming in the Soviet school boiled down to reading textbooks. Many of his classmates soon got tired of dry theory, and they lost interest in the subject.
But Oleg was not going to give up - he was fascinated by computers, and he really wanted to practice on real machines. Gimautdinov and several of his friends began looking for opportunities to make this dream come true.
In the early 1980s, there were no computers in schools. They could only be found in universities and enterprises, the administration of which did not favor schoolchildren.
But Gimautdinov and his friends managed to come to an agreement, and they were allowed to work on real computers, many of which were clones of American cars.
Unbeknownst to them then, these bulky keyboards and monitors were the first knots of the Russian Internet, which, as a handful of researchers hoped, would breathe new life into the Soviet economy.
By that time, these specialists had been trying for several decades to convince government agencies of the need to create a computer network that would connect thousands of computers across the country.
It would be an analogue of the network that was created in those years in the United States and Western Europe - a network that eventually turned into the modern Internet.
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"It was about Internet version 1.0," explains Ben Peters, a researcher at the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma and author of How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet.
"A decentralized hierarchical computer network in real time would control all information flows of the Soviet command economy."
But the Soviet project, known under the abbreviation OGAS (State-wide Automated System), remained on paper. And that's why.
The Soviet Internet was the brainchild of one of the founders of cybernetics, Viktor Glushkov, who, in turn, was inspired by the works of Anatoly Kitov, the creator of the first Soviet computers.
Kitov first proposed creating a national computer network back in 1959. A Russian documentary dedicated to him called Colonel Kitov's Internet is available online; the beginning of the tape looks like a great James Bond films.
Kitov sent his proposal to Khrushchev, the then General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee, but even then it became obvious that it would not be easy to bring his idea to life - and not only because of technical difficulties.
“It must be remembered that there were computer networks in the USSR, but they were used for military purposes,” Peters says. But a purely civilian network that could stimulate economic growth was a fundamentally new project.
Glushkov began the theoretical part of the work on the OGAS project in the early 1960s. It was assumed that any citizen of the USSR might need access to a network for work, so for a start it was necessary to collect an array of information about literally everything - from the structure of the labor force in the country to the level of production and the size of markets for products.
By 1970, Glushkov had developed a detailed implementation plan for the project and sent it up the chain of command.
But when it came to discussion in the leadership of the Communist Party, the finance minister announced his categorical disagreement with the project.
He stressed that computers are already used to turn on and off the lights in chicken coops, and there is no need to create a national network of such machines.
According to rumors, the minister was actually worried that OGAS might affect the balance of power between his department and the Central Statistical Office.
Despite some support from other members of the government, Glushkov's proposal was rejected. But his idea didn't die - and he fought for his project for another 12 years.
In a number of Soviet cities, small-scale local computer networks already functioned. And many years later, while studying at Novosibirsk State University, Gimautdinov came across a computer, which at one time was connected directly to Moscow, located more than 3 thousand kilometers.
But, according to Peters, the then Soviet "Internet" was not a network in the modern sense of the word, but a patchwork quilt.
Maintaining the operability of local networks required constant serious work on the hardware, says Boris Malinovsky, a member of the academic council of the Ukrainian Institute of Cybernetics named after Glushkov and author of a number of books on the Soviet computer industry (one of them was even written in English).
But the production of computers in the country was not very effective and efficient. This gave skeptics additional reason to worry about the cost of implementing the OGAS project.
According to some estimates, its full implementation would require spending 20 billion rubles - about $ 100 billion at current prices. In addition, to maintain the network, it would be necessary to attract 300 thousand people.
All these circumstances led to the fact that the Soviet Internet was never created.
Anatoly Kitov's son Vladimir knows firsthand about the work on the development of Soviet network technologies. Now Vladimir teaches at the Plekhanov Russian University of Economics in Moscow. And in the 1970s and 1980s, he wrote software for managing large tank-building enterprises.
According to Kitov, the OGAS project would have a positive impact on the Soviet economy - as its supporters expected.
Gimautdinov recalls lectures at the university, where teachers emphasized the advantages of such a network: "It sounded very exciting - a significant increase in efficiency due to the increase in the accuracy of routine calculations and the reduction of personnel involved in these processes."
It was assumed that simplifying and speeding up data exchange would lead to greater control over the economy.
But it all came down to the ossification of the Soviet system, Kitov notes. “Everything happened in accordance with the plan, outside of which nothing could be done,” says Gimautdinov. - There were only two styles of shoes available - brown or black. The shops were filled with them, but nobody wanted to take them."
And conflicts often flared up between different ministries and regional authorities - according to Gimautdinov, every element of the bureaucratic machine was afraid of losing its sphere of influence.
By the 1980s, reforms were urgently needed. Ultimately, they tried to solve the deep problems of the Soviet economy through Gorbachev's perestroika. But was it possible to achieve this with the help of the OGAS project?
One of the obstacles was the death of Glushkov, who stood at the origins of the Soviet computer network and played a key role in the struggle for its creation. Glushkov died in 1982 at the age of 58 after a long illness.
“After his death, the project was virtually doomed,” Peters notes.
However, in the 1980s, the idea of OGAS was already covered in the media - they talked about it in schools, including the school of Oleg Gimautdinov. Some time after Glushkov's death, his project continued to be promoted by followers.
One of them was Mikhail Botvinnik, a renowned grandmaster who was interested in programming.
Botvinnik experimented with early versions of computer chess programs in an attempt to make them "think" like a grandmaster. Its algorithms were used to plan maintenance schedules for Soviet nuclear power plants.
In the chaos of the 1990s, Peters said, Botvinnik, then in his 80s, tried to interest President Yeltsin in the idea of a computer network that could save the country's economy.
But he failed - just like Glushkov, Anatoly Kitov and many others.
And just a few years later, the Internet, known to all of us, appeared - the World Wide Web, which grew out of the American project Arpanet.
The history of the Soviet Internet largely repeats the history of the Soviet Union itself. But it also reflects the technological dreams of that period - dreams that have become reality in our time.
Peters mentions in his book the community of cyberneticists working under the leadership of Glushkov, who invented a utopian state called Cybertonia and even issued the passports of this virtual country to colleagues.
In a sense, it was the prototype of the social networks that we all use today.
“The first global civilian computer networks emerged among cooperating capitalists, not competing socialists,” Peters writes. "The capitalists behaved like socialists and the socialists behaved like capitalists."
The Soviet Internet never became a social platform. Neither did he achieve his main goal - to restart the Soviet economy, which was going through difficult times.
Now, from the height of our digital age, it becomes obvious that the adherents of OGAS and similar projects were ahead of their time. People like Anatoly Kitov, Glushkov, and Botvinnik knew that the future lay in broad networking.
But although the USSR lost the race for the Internet, it undoubtedly took a direct part in it.