From Network to Patchwork 85
the first call to harness computational power into raising the quality of
economic planning in a 1957 Kommunist article, “Electronic Calculating
Machines: In the Service of the National Economy.”^12 (Both Kartsev and
Matiukhin continued serving in military careers.)
Not long after, from 1958 to 1959, Kitov and Bruk’s proposal began
to bear fruit as Gosplan constructed specialized computational centers
(vyichislite’nyi tsentri) for economic accounting, which were to be under the
control of the Economic Council within the Council of Ministers. Vasily
Nemchinov, a leading Soviet mathematical economist, also championed
the proposal for computer centers around the nation to improve planning.
In January 1959, Kitov sent his first proposal directly to the top of Soviet
power and called on General (then First) Secretary Nikita Khrushchev to
recognize the need to use computers to process economic planning and to
speed economic reforms, and with the letter he included a copy of his pub-
lished book on digital computers.^13 None of these proposals mentioned a
computer network—or its near synonyms (such as base, system, or complex)—
that would be able to command the economy.
Kitov’s first letter to the Central Committee in 1959 proved to be a
success. Although Khrushchev probably never saw the letter, his message
ended up in the hands of Leonid Brezhnev, who replaced Khrushchev as
general secretary in 1964. A trained technologist who had studied metal-
lurgical engineering in eastern Ukraine, Brezhnev approved the proposal
and ordered a government resolution to review and execute Kitov’s recom-
mendations. A commission led by Aksel’ Ivar Berg was created to enact the
Communist Party resolution called “The Speeding and Widening of the
Production of Calculation Machines and Their Application to the National
Economy.” Berg cut a cosmopolitan figure (Berg’s mother was Italian, and
he was a Swedish Finn) in the administrative support of Soviet cybernet-
ics, and he rose through the military ranks to serve on the State Commit-
tee of Defense after World War II with special emphasis on military and
naval matters. Rescued from a sunken submarine near Helsinki in 1918, he
directed radio technology research for the Red Navy, was imprisoned dur-
ing the Great Terror for spying, returned to research during World War II,
and was vice minister of defense in charge of national radar and radio tech-
nology from 1953 and 1957. In this position, Berg provided critical admin-
istrative support to the efforts of many early cyberneticists, including Kitov,
Lyapunov, and others. Appointed to serve as the chair of the Council for
Cybernetics in 1959, Berg, perhaps not unlike Vannevar Bush, exerted an
extensive range of administrative influence over the state of Soviet cyber-
netic science for the next two decades.^14 With Berg’s support, Kitov’s first