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Not many word pairs sound as exotic to the Western ear as "Soviet" and "cybernetics." Yet this article argues that what may be most significant about the history of Soviet cybernetics-however full of fascinating figures and tales of an alternative imagination for a midcentury information society- is precisely how normal or representative the Soviet experience with cybernetics appears in the larger context of Soviet history. The article explores how the twists and turns in the Soviet experience with cybernetics follow preexisting political dynamics, debate patterns, rituals of discourse, strategies for intellectual defense, alliance forging, institution building, and other variables. By demystifying the seemingly exotic, this article aims to help spark insight into some of the historical contingencies and conditions behind the contemporary information age.
[Bletchey Park's Colossus] may even explain why Stalin, more or less blinded by the atomic lightning over Hiroshima and the autoguided missiles over Peenemuende, excommunicated cybernetics as one of the worst bourgeois deviations.
-Friedrich Kittler, Media Wars
With the first Soviet test of the atomic bomb in 1949, the Cold War conflict between capitalist and socialist slipped into the totalizing nuclear age. Soviet scientists, philosopher-critics, and journalists redoubled their search for real threats, as well as exciting possibilities, in the sphere of science and technology. One such development was cybernetics, whose history deserves brief review. Between 1947 (the year Norbert Wiener coined the term "cybernetics" at a Macy conference in New York) and 1954 (the year after Joseph Stalin died), cybernetics in the Soviet Union was routinely subjected to public ridicule, although Friedrich Kittler's epigraph to this article probably exaggerates that Stalin considered cybernetics one of the "worst" bourgeois deviations. In the decade that followed Stalin's death and his general attack on "bourgeois pseudosciences," Soviet scientists, philosophers, and bureaucrats alike rallied around cybernetics as the science best fit to build the future Communist society; subsequently, the public attitude toward cybernetics underwent a radical transformation, accepting it as a technical science and the means by which to reach toward Marxist-Leninist goals while simultaneously overcoming the mistakes of the Stalinist past. By 1964, the year Wiener died, cybernetics was flourishing in the Soviet Union, although it had by then fallen out of fashion in the Western academy. A short decade later, between...