“InterNyet: Why the Soviet Union Did Not Build a Nationwide Computer Network”, 2008-08-29 ():
This article examines several Soviet initiatives to develop a national computer network as the technological basis for an automated information system for the management of the national economy in the 1960s–1970s. It explores the mechanism by which these proposals were circulated, debated, and revised in the maze of Party and government agencies.
The article examines the role of different groups—cybernetics enthusiasts, mathematical economists, computer specialists, government bureaucrats, and liberal economists—in promoting, criticizing, and reshaping the concept of a national computer network.
The author focuses on the political dimension of seemingly technical proposals, the relationship between information and power, and the transformative role of users of computer technology.
[Keywords: computers, networks, economics, management, cybernetics, Soviet Union]
…Soviet leaders also envisioned a national computer network as a ‘policy instrument.’ The idea of creating such a network emerged as part of far-reaching proposals to reform the economy by building a nationwide automated management system. The fate of the computer network proved inextricably linked to the fortunes of these larger proposals, which had profound political and social ramifications. The cybernetic vision of automated management as a vehicle of economic reform drew on technocratic aspirations of Soviet cyberneticians. They believed that a technological solution—the combination of the correct mathematical model, an efficient algorithm, and a powerful computer network—would bring about a socioeconomic change, both empowering individual enterprises and providing optimal planning on the national scale.
Soviet cyberneticians envisioned an organic, self-regulating system, but paradoxically they insisted on building it by decree from above. They argued against gradual growth from below, because individual parts would not function efficiently without a comprehensive nationwide system, and a piecemeal approach would only conserve existing practices. However, a nationwide management system, any individual part of which was not viable, could not be viable itself.