Staging the OGAS, 1962 to 1969 139
features frequently in Nemchinov’s official explanation of CEMI’s research
tasks, such as “the wide application of cybernetics, electronic calculating
machines and the regulating devices in production processes of industry,
construction industry and transport, in scientific research, in the planning
and project construction of calculations, in the sphere of accounting and
management.”^57
In a letter dated November 17, 1961, a month after the Twenty-sec-
ond Congress of the Communist Party, Nemchinov named four institute
research directives that were dedicated to the network vision laid out in
Kitov’s 1959 letter and Glushkov’s subsequent formulation of the OGAS:
- The development of a unified system of planned economic information to im-
prove planned information and documentation companies, including work on the
application of modern calculating machines; - The development of algorithms for planned calculations based on a unified sys-
tem of information; - Dynamic modeling for developing the national economy; and
- Mathematical work for constructing a unified, centralized national economic
plan, which would develop “the communist form of self-government of the produc-
tion units, the optimal composition of general governmental interests, every com-
pany, and every worker.”^58
These quotations came from his earlier discussion of Lenin-Marxist rhet-
oric for economic planning. By wedding the cybernetic and Marxist-Lenin-
ist rhetoric of self-governing economies, Nemchinov sought to propose
“economic cybernetics” and its plausibly nonsocialist “dynamic models of
balancing capital investment” in the ideologically most acceptable light.^59
CEMI—in Nemchinov and his superiors’ original vision—was set to become
a powerhouse intellectual engine for driving a cybernetic vision of the net-
worked national economy.
In late 1962, after receiving preliminary confirmation that CEMI would
be established, Nemchinov, then age sixty-eight, grew too sick to continue
his work and transferred the directorship of the Institute to the young acade-
mician Nikolai Fedorenko. Nemchinov died November 5, 1964, at the age of
seventy. Had Nemchniov not grown ill, it is likely he, not Nikolai Fedorenko,
would have emerged as Glushkov’s first and strongest ally in Moscow.
Fedorenko and Glushkov: A Partnership Pulled Apart
In the beginning, Nikolai Prokof’evich Fedorenko proved a valuable col-
league, confidante, and foil for establishing Glushkov’s OGAS Project (fig-
ure 4.14). In 1962 and 1963, both cyberneticists were appointed the first