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How not to network a nation : the uneasy history of the Soviet Internet
Peters B., The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2016. 312 pp. Type: Book (978-0-262034-18-0)
Date Reviewed: Mar 9 2017

Why was the Internet invented in the US and not in the Soviet Union? Was its creation in the US the outcome of unique circumstances, or could it have been conceived, more or less independently, elsewhere? I know, it sounds like an academic question and several partial answers could be offered a posteriori, maybe based on philosophical interpretations of the superiority of market economy versus planned economy. But still, in the absence of precise information of a historical nature, drawing a definitive response to such a broad question does not seem easy. At least until now.

With his How not to network a nation, recently published by MIT Press, technology historian Benjamin Peters provides a comprehensive and documented account of the uneasy history of the Soviet Internet. Acquiring a wealth of information such as the one presented in the book must not have been an easy task. In fact, it took the author almost a decade of interviews and mining within international archives to complete his doctoral dissertation, which was eventually developed into this release that fills a significant gap in computing history.

The book is organized in five chapters, the first of which serves as an introduction to cybernetics, describing the development of its transdisciplinary approach to regulatory systems (biological, mechanical, social) during the period from World War II to the mid-1960s. In a fascinating account, the reader is introduced to the founding fathers of cybernetics, such as Norbert Wiener and Warren McCulloch, and well-known personalities of modern computing and communications science, such as John von Neumann, Claude Shannon, and J. C. R. Licklider. The interactions between different characters are illustrated, together with their international connections that led to the diffusion of cybernetic thinking in nations such as France, England, and Chile. In the Soviet Union, instead, cybernetics was considered a pseudoscience, at least until the post-Stalin era, when a new Khruschev doctrine resulted in increased openness toward approaches to “the automation of machines and operations,” leading to the emergence of a Soviet school of cyberneticists. This emergent Soviet school, led by personalities such as Kitov, Lyapunov, and Sobolev, however, was characterized by a narrower focus in comparison to the Western counterpart, where Eastern cybernetics concentrated mainly on the aspects related to the informatics field.

The second chapter drills down into the topic by exposing the challenges and limitations that Soviet cyberneticists had to face in respect to the monumental problem of managing and reforming the command economy. Their approach to rebalance the growing tension between command economy, gray economy, and reform of social life was to define magnificent plans to automate and model the decision planning process. In practice, those plans did not work because their idea of rebuilding the command economy as a hierarchy did not take into account the complex network of relations and informal favors that characterized government structures.

One exception to this nonlinearity was constituted by the superpower-grade military apparatus of the USSR, which always enjoyed massive funding flows and access to the best intellectual and technological resources. The strictly managed military sector was indeed able to produce and sustain world-class space and computer programs, to include nuclear-blast-resistant computer chips and secret computer networks to connect launch pads deep in Siberia, but the results of this high-tech research never found a way to be transitioned to the civilian sector, making them practically useless from the “public good” perspective. This disconnect between military and civilian sectors is exemplary of the gap between the Soviet national economy and its stated goals, and appears orthogonal to the approaches taken in the US where, for example, the Department of Defense was the direct sponsor to the development and launch of the ARPANET.

In the subsequent two chapters, the author documents how the Soviet Cold War race for advanced technologies did not limit itself to the advancement of space and nuclear capabilities, but also included attempts to establish large-scale computer networking initiatives. Peters was able to identify six different proposals to develop computer networks that could span the whole of the Soviet Union. The most relevant of those proposals, on which the author concentrates his attention, was the OGAS, an acronym for “All-State Automated System for the Gathering and Processing of Information for the Accounting, Planning, and Governance of the National Economy, USSR.”

Its proposer, the prominent cyberneticist Viktor Glushkov, had estimated in 1962 that without a change from paper-driven bureaucracy to a more modern approach, the manpower required just to sustain planning efforts would have grown by almost 40-fold by 1980, requiring the entire adult population of the USSR to be employed to manage its own bureaucracy. The design of OGAS was conceived to deliver decentralization through a global-local approach, thus stripping away formal power and the potential to abuse that power for corruption and personal gain from the hierarchy.

The initial level of ambition was not negligible, where the final goal was to deliver “electronic socialism.” Not surprisingly, resistance to change was strong, especially from the Central Statistical Administration (CSA) that up to that point was in charge of sustaining an essential part of the planning process. So, the project had to face obstacles since its first moment, starting from the decision by the Central Committee to put the CSA in charge of finalizing the project. It took Glushkov a decade to secure the political support required to proceed with pilot projects in the 1970s, but those never resulted in the global level of adoption initially envisioned, making OGAS, in practice, an “InterNyet.”

My probably oversimplistic summarization of the reasons for the failure is that the cultural approach of shooting for excessively ambitious and highly visible objectives resulted in strong pushback from those whose self-interest would have been affected the most. Again, looking at the history of the American counterpart, ARPANET, it is useful to remember the words of Robert Kahn, who once said, “We were very fortunate to be at a place and time when the technology allowed this to happen. We had the resources, and nobody cared” [1].

In conclusion, this is very well-documented and enjoyable book. On a lighter note, in addition to the history of the OGAS, I appreciated the section on the virtual country of “Cybertonia,” conceived as a fairytale by the group or cyberneticists working in Glushkov’s team, with its own constitution, passport, and even wedding certificates, as a way to demonstrate intellectual, political, and social autonomy, and maybe a relaxed protest against the regime.

More reviews about this item: Amazon, Goodreads

Reviewer:  Alessandro Berni Review #: CR145110 (1705-0269)
1) Riordan, T. Internet pioneer Robert Kahn reflects on Internet's past, contemplates its future. Princeton School of Engineering and Applied Science website, Oct. 18, 2007, http://www.princeton.edu/engineering/news/archive/?id=804. Accessed 02/26/2017.
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