The year 1962 proved to be a tumultuous one for the world. Khrushchev’s
grasp on the reigns of the Soviet state began to slip in the face of mounting
criticism, and Kennedy’s Bay of Pigs invasion metastasized into the Cuban
missile crisis, probably the closest the world has yet come to a nuclear world
war.^1 Behind the scenes to these potentially cataclysmic situations, a small
team of Soviet cyberneticists who were located in Kiev and Moscow were
committed to building “electronic socialism” under the guise of the All-
State Automated System, or OGAS. The OGAS Project was the Soviet Union’s
attempt to build a national computer network project that would network
the command economy, automate and optimize the immense coordination
problems besetting that economy, and thereby speed the grand socialist
experiment toward a prosperous and stable Communist future.
The All-State Automated System Project took its first breath with the
delivery of a sealed envelope into the hand of Nikita Khrushchev in the late
fall of 1962. The letter to the general secretary was written by young scien-
tists from the Komsomol Spotlight (Komsomol’skii prozhektor), who noted
what they perceived to be the catastrophic backwardness of information
technology in the USSR compared to the United States and called for the
immediate acceleration and adoption of computing technology into eco-
nomic planning. The letter made an impression on the public, in the form
of an official Izvestiya newspaper article titled “Information Technology in
the National Economy,” and on members of the Politburo, the governing
committee of the Soviet state, which reportedly spent nearly thirty-five
minutes of a forty-five-minute session discussing the consequences of their
fifteen-page letter. Several months later, on May 21, 1963, following the
proposals discussed in the previous chapter, the Politburo with the backing
of all relevant ministers advanced a Communist Party resolution calling for
the same and authorizing the first economic reform carried out by auto-
mated computer network (later known as the OGAS). This chapter discusses
4 Staging the OGAS, 1962 to
Chapter 4