How Not to Network a Nation. The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet

26 Chapter 1 returned to lecture at Collège de France. Between 1947 and 1952, a flurry of press coverage and public controversy ...

A Global History of Cybernetics 27 computing pioneer Alan Turing, his Bletchey Park colleague and cryptog- rapher mathematician ...

28 Chapter 1 a central mainframe computer. Beer, working with then finance minister and engineer Fernando Flores, imported and a ...

A Global History of Cybernetics 29 not too far of a stretch. In each of the case studies examined here—War- ren McCulloch’s hete ...

30 Chapter 1 The Stalinist Campaign against Cybernetics: A “Normal” Pseudo-Science Not all was rosy at the start. Amid abundant ...

A Global History of Cybernetics 31 In 1953, an author who wrote under the pseudonym “Materialist” pub- lished the infamous artic ...

32 Chapter 1 personal affront against classical genetics, appeared more or less a “farce” to some philosopher-critics. These sam ...

A Global History of Cybernetics 33 Stalin’s death in March 1953 made possible a watershed shift in public dis- course in favor o ...

34 Chapter 1 under the fist of Stalin than it did under the loose umbrella of cybernet- ics. Under Stalin, Soviet physicists and ...

A Global History of Cybernetics 35 sign of this turnaround came not from Moscow but from a neighbor in the near abroad: in 1954 ...

36 Chapter 1 him. Holed up in the secret military research library, Kitov wrote a draft for the article, after which Lyapunov re ...

A Global History of Cybernetics 37 exclusively on Wiener’s 1948 book (although these early Soviet cybernet- ics made notably les ...

38 Chapter 1 of cybernetics focused on computational systems from the start—a general- ized step away from Wiener’s interests in ...

A Global History of Cybernetics 39 would arise out of the “chaotic conditions of the capitalist market,” and his widely publiciz ...

40 Chapter 1 materialism could only be fully Soviet. With these ritual words, the coau- thors wed cybernetics to Soviet ideology ...

A Global History of Cybernetics 41 genetics).^88 Some Soviet commentators feel that Kolman’s diatribes kept the mathematician An ...

42 Chapter 1 broadened and colored the ambition of cybernetics to match Marxism- Leninism. Sensitive to the many eastern Europea ...

A Global History of Cybernetics 43 Like Kolman, the coauthors Sobolev, Lyapunov, and Kitov also pre- empted the reactions of the ...

44 Chapter 1 over an ally. Perhaps nowhere is this as clear as in the Soviet defense of cybernetics itself, except that in Kolma ...

A Global History of Cybernetics 45 one of the weapons Khrushchev had in mind when he threatened to ‘bury’ the West.”^104 The Cen ...