Why the Soviet Internet Failed
it is the 1960s and the Soviet economy is stagnating amidst A desperate need for reform a crazy idea a single Nationwide computer network that autonomously gathered and crunched data from all the country's factories and commanded them to produce as needed the Soviet internet was meant to be the nervous system for an entire nation and Usher in a new tech-led future but that Vision never got off the ground why did the Soviets turn away from this potential reform in this video we're going to look at ogas the Soviet internet that never was I would like to start off by talking a bit about sources when I work on an asianometry video I try to stay neutral on a particular topic this can be pretty challenging in this politically divisive and complicated world in my experience the most practical way to do this is to read as many sources as you can coming from a wide range of perspectives Left Right foreign domestic it does not mean you have to accept and believe everything you read but it helps keep yourself grounded now with that I'd like to introduce a new website and app that I've been integrating into the workflow as well as the sponsor of this video are friends at Ground news the ground news platform pulls together 50 000 media sources from around the world and across the political spectrum and organizes related articles in one place so you can compare coverage so when you come across a news story you're not sure about you can copy paste the link into the search tab to see how that news item is being covered around the world I am particularly interested in the stories marked as high factuality but I really appreciate the chance to easily see the same thing written from different perspectives you can follow topics as well right now I'm following the interest rates topic since recently I've been particularly interested in what Rising interest rates are doing to actual people on the ground go to ground.new slash asianometry and try for yourself try it with an open mind build your media literacy discern between opinions and facts and see things from a different perspective thanks to ground news for sponsoring the channel I want to give a huge shout out to the book how not to network a nation the uneasy history of the Soviet internet by Benjamin Peters an associate professor at the University of Tulsa if you want additional information then I highly recommend this book which I greatly enjoyed for much of its history the Soviet Union ran a command economy the state owns everything however Soviet citizens can own individual items just don't call it private economic activity is coordinated and carried out not through a free market process but rather directives quotas and commands how this works in practice was that there were three Soviet state entities ghost plan gosnab and ghost Bank ghostbank handles accounting and Records transactions it isn't so important in this context first we have the state Planning Commission or ghost plan they write up the five-year plans and Define the economic inputs including prices after ghost plan sets the plan the state commission for materials and equipment supplier go snob implements it procuring and supplying producer Goods for the factories in its early years the command economy grew faster than almost any other country in the world its technology and social achievements especially those relating to Military and Aerospace garnered much praise but behind the scenes the central planning system frequently struggled to properly assign quotas redistribute outputs and so on there was immense paperwork distorted incentives and frequent miscommunications many quotas especially those outside of the military sphere were only met thanks to a network of pushers these were fixer-type power centers who worked behind the scenes to get things done with formal channels too often clogged up the actual negotiations happened informally in hallways trains and summer homes attempts at reform only thickened the bureaucracy and made things worse it is 1953 and Stalin is dead his passing from apparent brain hemorrhage signaled a turbulent New Era for the Soviet Union and its ailing economy after a brief power struggle Nikita Khrushchev became leader his Reign from 1953 to 1964 saw a series of reforms one of those reforms was the normalization and Adoption of cybernetics at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party in 1956 the one where Khrushchev famously gave his secret speech criticizing Stalin's Cult of Personality he also gave a far less controversial speech praising cybernetics calling it one of the major tools of the creation of a communist Society Khrushchev encouraged the development of computer science and the automation of Industry originated by Norbert weiner in the United States cybernetics had been banned during Stalin's Reign due to assertions that information was a substance of its own as well as for drawing analogies between the neuron in the brain and the electric signals inside a computer such an analogy encroached on established Russian theories of psychology khrushchev's reversal however allowed cybernetics to thrive and from there it grew to Encompass a variety of Sciences Soviet cybernetics became a project to introduce mathematical methods to the life and social sciences this gave it an aura of Truth and objectivity and the Soviets got caught up in that aura in my video about East German semiconductors I talked about The Wishful Thinking in the minds of gdr leadership about the economic role of semiconductors the Soviets eventually fell under a similar technological spell they saw computers as unlocking a universal method of problem solving can such Powers be applied to the nation's then ailing economy in 1958 news arrived in the Soviet Union of a major undertaking by the Americans the semi-automatic ground environment or Sage was a groundbreaking air defense system it coordinated raw radar data from many different radar sites to create a single unified image of America's airspace after the Soviets exploded their first atomic bomb the United States started developing Sage to detect potential Soviet Atomic bombers flying over the North Pole powered by what was then the largest computer ever built Sage cost 8 billion dollars more than the Manhattan Project and served as the backbone of the American air defense system sages development and its then classified capabilities greatly alarmed Soviet military planners in response the Soviets decided to have three institutes independently built three centralized computer networks focusing on air defense missile defense and space surveillance the air defense network was called system a khrusha famously boasted in 1962 that its prototype Network can quote unquote hit a fly in outer space it connected two Soviet supercomputers and M40 and M50 built in 1958 and 1959. this military effort opened people's eyes to the potential that Network computers might have for the Soviet civilian population in 1958 one of the Soviet Union's early Pioneers in cybernetics Anatoli kittov proposed the first effort to network the nation a war hero who suffered Serious injury on the front lines he studied math and physics in between firing anti-aircraft shells into the sky after the war cutoff became a rocket scientist he then came across Norbert Weiner's book reading it he concluded that cybernetics was not a Bourgeois pseudoscience but rather a tool with high potential for the Soviet Union he thus authored the Soviet Union's first significant positive article about cybernetics approved for wide publication the main features of cybernetics later he founded and headed one of the country's first Computing centers in 1956 he wrote a book which talks about how computers can help model and regulate the Soviet economy this basic proposal basically pointing out that computers can replace the tabulating machines that the Soviets already had for counting up economic data gained acceptance in January 1959 Qatar wrote to the Communist Party Central Committee about this concept this first letter called on Khrushchev to speed the Soviet economy's adoption of the computer especially for economic planning he attached a copy of his 1956 book this first letter probably also proposed uniting several of these economic planning computer centers into one big Network called the unified State network of computing centers Usha probably did not see this letter but it reached the right voices within the government and they supported all of his proposals except for the computer center Network they adopted a resolution called the speeding and widening of the production of calculation machines and their application to the National economy buoyed by these successes kitoff decided to push his aspirations a little further in the Autumn of 1959 he sent another letter in which he proposed the idea of installing large computers at local factories and government agencies then you can link these computers together these automated systems of management or Asus in Russian are reminiscent of local area networks and computer-aided manufacturer kitoff's dreams went beyond the local level ultimately he proposed a future quote-unquote unified automated management system that would serve the entire nation both military and civilian he called it an economic automatic management system or easu this system would be run using computer centers filled with powerful military computers buried deep underground for protection the center will be accessible through terminals civilians can use those terminals to send data and use processing power kitov saw this as a way to maximize the command economy's advantages of centralization it would also result in immense Financial savings for the country replacing the Soviet bureaucracy's previous tasks of carrying out production in addition to this bureaucracy threatening idea kitoff's letter also criticized several leaders within the ministry of defense for their slow speed in computer adoption as you might guess this red letter as it is so-called never made it to Khrushchev instead it reached the military which did not appreciate qatar's criticisms as well as his suggestion of sharing its technology with mere civilians as kitoff recalls in a later interview the Army will never occupy itself with fulfilling any tasks concerned with the national economy a show trial was held in which kitoff lost his job Communist Party membership and his military honors I suppose you might even say that he got canceled kitoff was not executed I mean this wasn't the Stalin days so he spent the rest of his days advocating for a networked Soviet future 's fall temporarily stemmed networking's tied in the Soviet Union but people kept tinkering with the concept over in the west qatar's idea of having computing power available to everyone caught on companies like GE had a computer time sharing service and American Airlines and IBM worked together to build saber a private Network for travel reservations in 1962 Soviet cyberneticist Alexander karkevich proposed a national unified Communications Network that he described as like a railway Network for storing and sending messages another prominent such individual was Victor michalovich glushkov then the head of the Kiev Institute of cybernetics he sought to create the aforementioned Asus that kitoff detailed in his first 1959 letter hired Qatar as a consultant for this new project and their kids even married one another in late 1962 glushkov sent a letter to Khrushchev discussing the growing technology Gap with the west and calling for the acceleration of Soviet computerization concerned as always with this Gap in 1963 the Soviet leadership approved Research into the idea of economic reform through the use of these automated computer networks or Asus like I mentioned the Asus allowed mainframe computers to receive information about the industrial processes going on inside a factory like I said this sounds a lot like local network Factory automation throughout the early 1960s glushkov and his team studied how a system might automatically measure receive and process information in a factory in 1963 they visited many real factories throughout the Soviet Union there were some interesting successes for instance they managed to have a computer system in Kiev control a steel smelting Factory in one Ukrainian City nearly 300 miles away as well as a carbonization process in another city 400 miles away but glushkov wasn't just interested in Factory Automation and data management he wanted to do more here and thus emerged ogas ogas is a shortened abbreviation of all state automated system for the management of the economy in Russian this in turn stands for All State automated system for the Gathering and processing of information for the accounting planning and governance of the national economy USSR has originally conceived in the early 1960s ogas was ambitious he was structured as a hierarchy with three tiers the first tier would be some 20 000 computer Terminals and Asus the second tier has 100 to 200 mid-level Regional planning decision systems and finally the third tier rolls up to a central planner in Moscow even envisioned the computerization of currencies and money flows his initial proposals for gogas included a moneyless system of receipts over the network this idea was probably included in order to appeal to Khrushchev himself who might have appreciated the Marxist ideal of a money-free society but party leaders advise him to drop it which he did in the early 1960s glushkov's Institute of Soviet cybernetics were young and idealistic like their peers over in the west they envisioned a Utopia enabled by technology the vision driving their ogas project was to have a single computer network rationally and automatically plan optimize and produce the country's National economy as dictated by the Party Center each Soviet bureaucrat would have his work days and weeks planned out the computer would produce detailed lists of their duties the timetable the chain of responsibility and even the order in how their documents should be arranged to me it brings to mind of a nervous system think of the Soviet Union's factories and workers as like the human body unable to move well together because a poor two-way information transmission with the brain Soviet leadership ogas sought to serve as the nervous system connecting the two with it the brain can move the body in unison and with ease coordinating output without concern about bureaucratic inefficiencies such a system would have been the Soviet Counterpoint to the Western capitalist view of a self-regulating market economy computers would gather historical information and use that to rationally inform forecasts and production the single biggest reason why this version of ogas first presented in 1964 never developed has planned was cost this original Vision with its three tiers and thousands of computer centers would have taken 30 years to pull off and cause a stupefying total of 160 billion rubles or about 1.4 trillion USD in 2016 dollars proponents argued that the cost savings would have paid off this investment regardless that is more than both the Soviet space and atomic bomb programs combined second the technology was not quite there the computers in the Soviet military had World leading capabilities for instance computer networks with Nationwide coverage and messaging switching but civilian computer technology in the Soviet Union lagged far behind the military and has previously demonstrated the military was very unwilling to transfer any of that over to civilians even if they did those computers were too specialized and custom to be useful third and finally various players also objected to the idea that they might be replaced by or have their work dictated to Via a computer this included both Communist Party bureaucrats and ghost plan and Industrial managers people in the central statistical Administration in particular recognize that the computers quote-unquote objective collection of data would restrain their own power to control the flow of information within the country worse yet gliskov's plans were all or nothing if it was not delivered in whole then none of its benefits can be realized it would have required a complete Reformation of the country's management system a revolution 1964 the year of gushkov's first proposal also saw new change in the country Khrushchev lost power and was replaced by Leonid Brezhnev Brezhnev eventually reversed many of his predecessors economic reforms but the directive for an economic restructuring via computer remained on the agendas thanks to high-level backing from power Brokers like Premier Alexei kosigan ghost plan and the central statistical Administration thoroughly rejected the Project's utopian Vision they went back and forth on what the project would eventually be eager to control its resources to further their own power in the end if ogas was to be implemented by the Soviet government it had to eventually conform to the Soviet way of doing things the old gas of imagination can never happen but what about something closer to reality then in 1969 came widespread news of arpanet the network we most closely associate has been the predecessor of today's internet arpanet going online caught the Soviet leadership by surprise that competitive factor helped move the ogas project forward with the arpanet news in mind glushkov changed what ogas was to do this new iteration had ogas has a universal information Bank accumulating and moving information between various National agencies so rather than running and controlling the entire economy like a human nervous system this new ogas would only organize and control the flows of data like a system of canals controlling the flow of water running between a country's reservoirs he argued that such a management system would make the Soviet Union more efficient at a momentous meeting on October 1st 1970 glushkov presented his new ogas to the politburo in a dramatic meeting for a brief moment it seemed like a Soviet internet could have happened several higher-ups in the poet Bureau spoke positively about the project hardliners like Mikhail Sis love did not say anything against the project which was another good sign Soviet leaders kosigan and Brezhnev were not present off on other business but the former managed to convey his support through deputies but the Ministry of Finance vaseli garbazov interceded recognizing that this new ogas could command immense political gravity and potentially erode his ministry's power he dismissed ogas as a silly project good enough only to make hens lay more eggs he then proposed a far more conservative counter proposal dialing back the ambitious ogas plan which won over the politburo in the end the full ogas proposal was neither fully accepted nor rejected the worst type of existence throughout the 1970s several Asus would be built in individual factories how many is hard to tell One Source says that about a hundred were built between 1971 and 1985. other sources contend
that the Soviet Union built thousands of Asus however many there were networking them would be impossible they were built haphazardly and without thought to any standards the Nationwide United Network of Asus in the way glushkov envisioned never happened the proximate cause for why the Soviet internet failed was bureaucratic infighting various leaders and power centers throughout the country objected to its capabilities and hijacked it for their own needs but the real reason why klushkov's Soviet internet could never take off was that it challenged how the Soviet Union ran things you cannot separate an invention from its place and that place was just a couple decades away from implosion all right everyone that's it for tonight thanks for watching subscribe to the Channel Sign up for the newsletter and I'll see you guys next time
2023-04-17 21:43
