After Kitov came Viktor Glushkov. He hailed from an academic, civilian background, which perhaps allowed him to assume a more “neutral”, technocratic appearance. He approached the project in a similar way to Kitov, but with an added feature: the promise of a moneyless state economy.
The suggestion to get rid of currency might seem utopian, but it hides Glushkov’s visionary tendencies. As he understood it, an economic network could allow him & the liberal economists with which he consulted to sneak into the Soviet apparatus something it missed dearly: market & incentives.
This proposal hit everyone’s weak spots: Soviet middle management disliked the proposed system’s over-the-shoulder control of their everyday work. On the other side of the aisle, supporters of general reform saw Glushkov’s proposal as too conservative and centralizing.
What did Glushkov do? What would you have done, in his place? Take a moment to reflect.
He partitioned it. Glushkov submitted both ideas: a national economic computer network, and the use of non-monetary incentives, as separate suggestions. The moneyless monkey business was killed right off the bat; The network gained support. Brilliant work. It is unknown whether the Soviet management believed Glushkov’s expected ROI, of 500% after 15 years; but they greenlit it nonetheless, under the name OGAS [ОГАС]: “National Automated System for Computation and Information Processing”.
So there we are, our product has the faith of the stakeholders, and we are ready to go. Glushkov prepares a rudimentary PRD, which includes “tens of thousands of local computer centers to collect ‘primary information,’ 30–50 mid-level computer centers in major cities, and one top-level center controlling the entire network and serving the government.”
So now, in accordance with good 21-century practice, we should build our MVP. We don’t need a POC: the technology exists and is quite well understood. We need to create something with which the customers (economic planners) & users (bureaucrats inputting the information) can work with and get value out of.
Here is when things get tricky. You see, Glushkov did his market research dutifully. In fact, it was the comparison to the American SAGE and ARPANET that helped convince stakeholders of the project’s importance. However, a decade has passed since Kitov. In the meanwhile, local initiatives within different parts of the enormous state apparatus started designing smaller networks for themselves. Between 1971 and 1975, the number of computer information systems serving the soviet economy grew “almost sevenfold”. Which sounds great, until you realize that it was all done with no direction or any planning regarding their synergy. This means every office used whatever system was best for it, meaning the hardware was largely incompatible, disabling the possibility of a cross-agency network.
Civil aviation, weather prediction, the banking system, academic institutions — all had their own unique internal network, isolated from the outside world. Even worse — the digital medium offered greater opportunities for censorship or discreet blackout. Most of these nets collapsed along with the Union itself.
What could have been done otherwise? Perhaps a stronger central authority could have bulldozed the different branches into submission. This certainly worked for ARPA. Maybe a PM should have recognized this myopic state of affairs, and instead pivoted to an MVP that simply allows inter-system compatibility, worrying about general economic transformation later on. Our retrospection goggles do make things more obvious. The trick is, however, to wear them in advance…
Or in Glushkov’s own words: “I was directing a large team for the first time, so I had to define some organizational principles. […] I used the principle of unity between theory and practice with a new twist: when undertaking a large design project, consider both the present and future goals. In a new science like cybernetics, one must always break down a long-term project into smaller, more manageable pieces. [The completion of each stage] would yield an independent result with distinct benefits.” Personal Reminiscences of Viktor Glushkov, January 3rd, 1982.
During the writing of this post I have used material from:
Pioneers of Soviet Computing. A book by Boris Nikolaevich Malinovsky.
Technology and Decision Making: Some Aspects of the Development of OGAS. An article by William J. Conyngham.
How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet. A book by Benjamin Peters.
InterNyet: Why the Soviet Union did not build a nationwide computer network. An article by Slava Gerovitch.
