Cybernetics in the Soviet Union expressed its own particular characteristics, as the study of cybernetics, the transdisciplinary study of circular causal feedback within systems, came into contact with the dominant scientific ideologies of the Soviet Union and the nation's economic and political reforms. As the influence of these factors evolved, so too did Soviet attitudes of cybernetics; from the unmitigated anti-Americanist criticism of cybernetics in the early 1950s, its legitimization after Stalin's death and up to 1961, its total saturation of Soviet academia in the 1960s, and finally its eventual decline through the 1970s and 1980s.
Initially, from 1950 to 1954, the reception of cybernetics by the Soviet Union establishment was exclusively negative. The Soviet Department for Agitation and Propaganda had called for anti-Americanism to be intensified throughout Soviet media, and in an attempt to fill the Department's quotas, Soviet journalists latched on to cybernetics as an American "reactionary pseudoscience" to denounce and mock. These attacks were interpreted as a signal of an official attitude to cybernetics, Soviet writers thus portraying cybernetics as "a full embodiment of imperialist ideology” during Joseph Stalin's premiership,
Upon Stalin's death, the wide-reaching reforms of Nikita Khrushchev's premiership allowed cybernetics to legitimize itself as "a serious, important science", and in 1955, articles on cybernetics were published in the state philosophical organ, Voprosy Filosofii, after a group of Soviet scientists realized the potential of this new science.
Within the formerly suppressive scientific culture of the Soviet Union during the de-Stalinization of Khrushchev's premiership, cybernetics began to serve as an umbrella term for previously maligned areas of Soviet science, such as structural linguistics and genetics. Under the leadership of academician Aksel Berg, the Council of Cybernetics was formed, an umbrella organization dedicated to providing funding for these new lights of Soviet science. By the 1960s, this rapid legitimization thrust cybernetics into intellectual fashion, as "cybernetics" became a buzzword among career-minded scientists. Additionally, Berg's administration left many of the original cyberneticians amongst the organization disgruntled, fostering complaints that he seemed more focused on administrative matters than scientific research by citing Berg's grand plans to expand the council to subsume "practically all of Soviet science". By the 1980s, cybernetics had lost relevance in Soviet scientific culture, as its terminology and political function were succeeded by those of informatics in the Soviet Union and, eventually, post-Soviet states.
Official criticism: 1950–1954
The initial reception of cybernetics in the stifling scientific culture of Soviet state-sanctioned media and academic publication was exclusively negative. Under the plans of the Soviet Department for Agitation and Propaganda, Soviet anti-American propaganda was to be intensified, in order "to show the decay of bourgeois culture and morals" and "debunk the myths of American propaganda" in the wake of the formation of NATO. This imperative put Soviet newspaper editors in a frantic search for topics to criticize, in order to fill these propagandistic quotas.
The first to latch onto cybernetics was science journalist, Boris Agapov, following the post-war American interest in the developments in computer technology. The cover of the January 23, 1950, issue of Time had boasted an anthropomorphic cartoon of a Harvard Mark III under the slogan "Can Man Build a Superman?". On 4 May 1950, Agapov published an article in the Literaturnaya Gazeta entitled "Mark III, a Calculator", ridiculing this American excitement at the "sweet dream" of the military and industrial uses of these new "thinking machines", and criticizing cybernetics originator Norbert Wiener as an example of the "charlatans and obscurantists, whom capitalists substitute for genuine scientists".
Though it was not commissioned by any Soviet authority and never mentioned the science by name, Agapov's article was taken as a signal of an official critical attitude towards cybernetics; editions of Wiener's Cybernetics were removed from library circulation, and several other periodicals followed suit, denouncing cybernetics as a "reactionary pseudoscience". In 1951, , of the Institute of Philosophy, led a public campaign against the philosophy of "semantic idealism", characterizing Wiener, and cybernetics as a whole, as a part of this "reactionary philosophy". In 1952, another more explicitly anti-cybernetic article was published in the Literaturnaya Gazeta, definitively starting the campaign and leading the way for a flurry of popular titles denouncing the topic. At the zenith of this criticism, an article in the October 1953 issue of the state ideological organ, Voprosy Filosofii, was published under the pseudonym "Materialist", entitled "Whom Does Cybernetics Serve?"; it condemned cybernetics as a "misanthropic pseudo-theory" consisting of "mechanicism turning into idealism", pointing to the American military as the "god whom cybernetics served".
During this period, Stalin himself never engaged in this rabid criticism of cybernetics, with the head of the Soviet Department of Sciences, Iurii Zhdanov, recalling that "he never opposed cybernetics" and made every effort "to advance computer technology" in order to give the USSR the technological advantage. Though the scale of this campaign was modest, with only around 10 anti-cybernetic publications being produced, Valery Shilov has argued it constituted a "strict directive to action" from the "central ideological organs", a universal declaration of cybernetics as a bourgeois pseudoscience to be criticized and destroyed.
Few of these critics had any access to primary sources on cybernetics. Agapov's sources were limited to the January 1950 issue of Time; the institute's criticisms were based on the 1949 volume of ETC: A Review of General Semantics; and, among Soviet articles on cybernetics, only the "Materialist" quoted Wiener's Cybernetics directly. Select sensational quotes of Wiener and speculations based "exclusively on the basis of other [Soviet] books already written on the same or similar subject", were used to characterize Wiener as both an idealist and a mechanicist, criticizing his supposed reduction of scientific and sociological ideas to mere "mechanical model[s]". Wiener's gloomy speculations on the "second industrial revolution" and the "assembly line without human agents" were distorted to brand him as a "technocrat", wishing for "the process of production realized without workers, only with machines controlled by the gigantic brain of the computer" with "no strikes or strike movements, and moreover no revolutionary insurrections". According to Slava Gerovitch, "each critic carried criticism one step further, gradually inflating the significance of cybernetics until it was seen as a full embodiment of imperialist ideology".
Legitimization and rise: 1954–1961
The reformed academic culture of the Soviet Union, after the death of Stalin and reforms of the Khrushchev era, allowed cybernetics to tear down its previous ideological criticisms and redeem itself in the public view. To Soviet scientists, cybernetics emerged as a possible vector of escape from the ideological traps of Stalinism, replacing it with the computational objectivity of cybernetics.
Military computer scientist Anatoly Kitov recalled stumbling onto Cybernetics in the secret library of the Special Construction Bureau and realizing instantly that "cybernetics was not a bourgeois pseudo-science, as official publications considered it at the time, but the opposite—a serious, important science". He joined with the dissident mathematician Alexey Lyapunov, and, in 1952, presented a pro-cybernetic paper to Voprosy Filosofii, which the journal tacitly endorsed, though the Communist Party required that Lyapunov and Kitov present public lectures on cybernetics before its publication, with 121 seminars produced in total from 1954 until 55.
A very different academic, the Soviet philosopher and former ideological watchdog Ernst Kolman, also joined this rehabilitation. In November 1954, Kolman presented a lecture at the Academy of Social Sciences, condemning this stifling of cybernetics to a shocked audience, who had expected a lecture rehearsing previous Stalinist criticisms, and marched down to the office of Voprosy Filosofii to have his lecture published.
The beginning of a Soviet cybernetic movement was therefore first signalled by two articles, published together in the July–August 1955 volume of Voprosy Filosofii: "The Main Features of Cybernetics" by Sergei Sobolev, Alexey Lyapunov, and Anatoly Kitov, and "What is Cybernetics" by Ernst Kolman. According to Benjamin Peters, these "two Soviet articles set the stage for the revolution of cybernetics in the Soviet Union".
The first article—authored by three Soviet military scientists—attempted to present the tenets of cybernetics as a coherent scientific theory, retooling it for Soviet use; they purposely avoided any discussion of philosophy, and presented Wiener as an American anti-capitalist, in order to avoid any politically dangerous confrontation. They asserted cybernetics' main tenets as: information theory, the theory of automatic high-speed electronic calculating machines as a theory of self-organizing logical processes, the theory of automatic control systems (particularly, the theory of feedback).
In contrast, Kolman's defense of cybernetics mirrored the Stalinist criticisms it had endured. Kolman created a spurious historiography of cybernetics (which inevitably found its origins in Soviet science) and corrected the supposed "deviations" of the anti-cybernetic philosophers, employing well-placed quotes from Marxist authorities and philosophical epithets (e.g. "idealist" or "vitalist"), implying cybernetics' opponents fell into the same philosophical errors Marx and Lenin had criticized decades earlier, within their dialectical materialist framework.
In 1955, the Computing Center of the USSR Academy of Sciences was established and began operating in Moscow.Вычислительный центр АН СССР // Советский энциклопедический словарь. редколл., гл. ред. А. М. Прохоров. 4-е изд. М., "Советская энциклопедия", 1986. стр.261
With this, Soviet cybernetics began its journey towards legitimization. Academician Aksel Berg, at the time deputy minister of defense, authored secret reports beleaguering the deficient state of information science in the USSR, pointing towards the suppression of cybernetics as the prime culprit. Party officials allowed a small Soviet delegation to be sent to the First International Congress on Cybernetics in June 1956, and they informed the Party of the extent to which USSR was "lagging behind the developed countries" in computer technology. Unfavorable descriptions of cybernetics were removed from official literature, and in 1958, the first Russian translations of Wiener's Cybernetics and The Human Use of Human Beings were published.