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Cybernetics in the Soviet Union
In spite of World War II's devastating impact, the Soviet Union produced
leaders in the burgeoning ield of cybernetics, formally the science of
communication and control in machines and animals. In the West, the
computer scientist Norbert Wiener led the ield of luminaries, with a stel-
lar group that in 1953 included John von Neumann, Claude Shannon,
William Ross Ashby, Gregory Bateson, and Roman Jakobson, who met
regularly under the auspices of the Macy Foundation from 1946 to 1953.
Rebelling against established approaches to theory and applied science,
they transformed established disciplines and helped to create new ones.
Little was left untouched in ields as diverse as biology, communication
studies, computer science, linguistics, and psychology. It might only be
the gentlest of overstatements to conclude that cybernetics became a Holy
Grail of general theory that many believed would revolutionize human
thought (Parkman 1972).
These ideas slowly simmered in Soviet science, permitting quiet ques-
tioning of rigid theory enshrined in the work of Troim Lysenko in biology
and Ivan Pavlov in psychology while Joseph Stalin retained his iron grip
on power. But when Nikita Krushchev consolidated his control as Premier
in 1958, change accelerated and the cybernetics that had been oficially
denounced as “not only an ideological weapon of imperialist reaction but
also a tool for accomplishing its aggressive military plans” was by 1961
hailed as the primary technical means to realize the Communist ideal
(Gerovitch 2010). In that year the Soviet Academy of Sciences published
Cybernetics in the Service of Communism , a detailed examination of how
cybernetics would transform practically every ield of knowledge and
application, but especially, to the pleasure of the representatives meeting
that year in the Twenty-Second Congress of the Communist Party, the
modern Soviet economy.
For its supporters, economic cybernetics would demonstrate the
superiority of the Soviet system by applying the new science to the new
technology of powerful computers to precisely plan for the production
and distribution of goods and services throughout the Soviet Union. In
1962 the chairman of the U.S.S.R.'s Academy Council on Cybernetics
made the importance of the marriage between cybernetics and economic
planning absolutely clear when he declared that “However unusual