As I go through product-manager training, I find myself eager to apply the acquired methodologies to sharable examples. I am, however, unable to use my work experience – as organizational trade secret policy dictates. I therefore turn to my other passion, history: we shall be investigating the soviet attempt and failure to build a national economic computer network.
Why, though? This choice is hardly obvious. The best-practice examples would probably come from more recent times, with ample hard data, market reactions, and so on. That is indeed good & well, which is why the dedicated communities are filled to the brim with these thought-provoking analyses. I want to do something different. Will it succeed? Well, the Agile motto is to “fail fast”, and I am wholly committed to this end.
We shall be assuming the role of several groups of soviet scientists between the formation of the Scientific Council on Cybernetics in 1958 and the demise of this grand project during the ’70s. Our goal will be to improve soviet economic planning and performance through building computer centers, with a network to connect them all. Remember: no internet yet exists. We are doing speculative, imaginative work that will have to be shaped to specs later on. But before we get to that fun (difficult) part, we first have to convince our stakeholders.
The main idea is that economic data is, well, data. It consists of monthly grain production, tram oil consumption, demographic expectations, and world stock rates. It is a vast network of inputs with coeffects and hidden variables. And up to this point it had been all handled manually by an ever-expanding bureaucracy. In our soviet-scientist minds we evoke the 1957 attempt by Khrushchev to decentralize economic management and cut bureaucratic red-tape by introducing a system of regional
economic councils. This reform, crucially, failed: all inter-region operations (such as industrial supply chains) were disrupted, creating the need for intermediate government bodies to facilitate communication between these regional councils. Thus, the bureaucratic burden was not cut down but instead tripled. We will have to do better.
At this point I break to remedy several possible objections. “Liberalize! Privatize!” I expect some of you will respond. “No computer or computer network can solve the economic calculation problem [as formulated by Mises in 1920]!”
Perhaps, perhaps not. This debate I leave to economists. We, I remind you, are soviet scientists. We seek to improve national economic planning and performance. Some of us, perhaps, carry a secret wish for reform, which could be slyly snuck into this technocratic apparatus. But there is no doubt that “Privatize!” is an incoherent sentiment, at best: Not only is it unclear what should actually be done (aside from total dissolution of the state), but also we personally would be removed from office, losing any real chance to better soviet economy and quality of life.
What then could realistically be achieved? The computer would have enormous advantages: It cannot be bribed, it cannot (purposefully) lie; It can work long and fast; data fed into the machine in Kyiv, warning of crop failure, could be instantly communicated to Moscow, mobilizing a relief effort, and to Irkutsk, signaling the need to increase imports. Graphs could be hurriedly printed, trends analyzed, and conclusions ordered, all in the speed of light. Several advantages of today’s online stock market capitalism could be utilized, but in the early 1960s.
It may sound ridiculous, but to the American intelligence community, this was a credible threat. The Soviets had the space race lead, and sputnik-panic was prevalent. The CIA created a special branch to investigate the Soviet Cybernetic Threat, to assess the potential dangers it could pose to the USA’s world-leading position.
So, where are the MVPs, KPIs, sprint planning, and bug-backlog in all of this? For that, dear readers/soviet-scientists, you will have to stick around for the next episode…
Next chapter: Kolkhoz Kickoff
During the writing of this post I have used material from:
InterNyet: Why the Soviet Union did not build a nationwide computer network. An article by Slava Gerovitch.
Challenge to Apollo: The Soviet Union and the Space Race, 1945–1974. A book by Asif A. Siddiqi.
