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May 3, 2016 7:33 AM

An excerpt from Ben Peter's How Not To Network A Nation

In late September 1970, a year after the ARPANET went online, the Soviet cyberneticist Viktor Glushkov boarded a train from Kiev to Moscow to attend what proved to be a fateful meeting for the future of what we might call the Soviet Internet. On the windy morning of October 1, 1970, he met with members of the Politburo, the governing body of the Soviet state, around the long rectangular table on a red carpet in Stalin’s former office in the Kremlin. The Politburo convened that day to hear Glushkov’s proposal and decide whether to build a massive nationwide computer network for citizen use — or what Glushkov called the All-State Automated System (OGAS, obshche-gosudarstvennyi avtomatizirovannaya system), the most ambitious computer network project of its kind in the world at the time. OGAS was to connect tens of thousands of computer centers and to manage and optimize in real time the communications between hundreds of thousands of workers, factory managers, and regional and national administrators. The purpose of the OGAS Project was simple to state and grandiose to imagine: Glushkov sought to network and automatically manage the nation’s struggling command economy.

reviewed, reviewed, related: How Should the U.S. Fund Research and Development? from A HN comment by "BJP2010" and the recommended RAND corp study.

Both the book and the 2009 working draft[PDF] draw on Gerovitch's InterNyet: why the Soviet Union did not build a nationwide computer network[PDF]

When East met West: Anatole Klyosov: The original Soviet internet geek. How the Soviet Union Sent Its First Man to the Internet in 1982

r/AskHistorians What was the internet like in the Soviet Union?

posted by the man of twists and turns (11 comments total)

Radio War Nerd had an interview with Andrei Soldatov recently (episode 31) where he talks about the more recent history of the Soviet and post-Soviet Russian internet and its relationship with the state security apparatus. He's written a book on the topic, The Red Web.
posted by indubitable at 8:08 AM on May 3, 2016

The book's key thesis:

That said, let us begin with a slight twist on the conventional cold war showdown: the central proposition that this book develops and then complicates is that although the American ARPANET initially took shape thanks to well-managed state subsidies and collaborative research environments, the comparable Soviet network projects stumbled due to widespread unregulated competition among self-interested institutions, bureaucrats, and other key actors. The first global civilian computer networks developed among cooperative capitalists, not among competitive socialists. The capitalists behaved like socialists while the socialists behaved like capitalists.

Thanks for sharing!
posted by crazy with stars at 9:05 AM on May 3, 2016 [4 favorites]

HN comment link seems to be broken.

No post about Soviet cybernetics would be complete without the obligatory mention of Francis Spufford’s Red Plenty, so I’ll drop it in here :)
posted by pharm at 9:15 AM on May 3, 2016 [1 favorite]

HN comment link seems to be broken.
One more author rant before the thread vanishes, here are a couple points from the book.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:18 AM on May 3, 2016

> One more author rant before the thread vanishes, here are a couple points from the book.

Does anybody know what is meant by "que" here?

The reasons the Soviets did not develop a network are not the reasons we often like to think: it's not because networks are anathema to censorship and control structures (think cybersecurity and dictatorships today), it's not because of technological backwardness (que Soviet military networks since the mid 1950s), it's not exactly because their genuinely screwed up command economy was either too rigid or hierarchical (que the rest of the book).

posted by languagehat at 9:27 AM on May 3, 2016

'que' seems to mean 'qua'
posted by hexatron at 9:29 AM on May 3, 2016

"cue"
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:34 AM on May 3, 2016 [1 favorite]

My favourite tale is of the two groups within Russia and the DDR, one of whom wanted to push ahead with developing their own systems - in conjunction with the UK's ICL, which may not have helped them much, unless they really liked cheese and pickle sandwiches - and the other who wanted to devote resources to cloning Western (specifically IBM) systems. The latter won, and helped kill off the former by planting stories in The Guardian about a sinister Soviet superbrain project designed to further enslave citizens...

It's tempting to compare the failed Soviet efforts with the many failed closed corporate networking systems that predated the hegemony of the IP stack.

(i'm sure que means qua, above)
posted by Devonian at 9:37 AM on May 3, 2016

> 'que' seems to mean 'qua'

Ah, that makes sense. Weird way to spell it.
posted by languagehat at 10:51 AM on May 3, 2016

I think he means 'cue', since 'qua' would mean 'as' and not fit grammatically.
posted by sudasana at 11:03 AM on May 3, 2016

I think he means 'as in', although I suspect he's getting his latinate affectations a little muddled with 'cf' - compare. 'Cue' sounds weird to me in that context and I've never seen that misspelling, but in the words of Manuel the waiter - "¿Qué?"

The world needs more sub-editors.
posted by Devonian at 11:35 AM on May 3, 2016 [1 favorite]