Staging the OGAS, 1962 to 1969 147
rather a series of serious administrative, institutional, personal, political,
policy, and social problems.
Management Missteps: “Supervision” and the Separation of the OGAS
and the EGSVTs
In 1962, after Keldysh advised Glushkov to submit the OGAS proposal to
the heads of the Communist Party without the moneyless payment sys-
tem, Glushkov, backed by Fedorenko and others, submitted his original
OGAS proposal for a chain of reviews by a number of Soviet government
agencies. As a result, a commission was formed to review his proposal,
which received preliminary approval, and in 1963, it arrived at the desk of
the Party Central Committee and the Council of Ministers. At this point,
Glushkov, Fedorenko, the chair of the Central Statistical Administration V.
N. Starovsky, the first deputy minister of communication A. I. Sergeichuk,
the vice minister of finance, and others gathered together as a commission
to discuss and review the proposal and several thousand pages of associ-
ated materials. For months in 1963, the commission met and discussed
the details of Glushkov’s proposal, and each member tried to object to and
reject specific measures in it. Despite the proposal’s considerable political
support to this point, including review by the Politburo and the Central
Committee, the result was support for a technical computer network but
not economic reform. For a period of time, the shell of the OGAS Proj-
ect was approved for “finalization” at the hands of the Central Statistical
Administration, and the heart of the OGAS economic reform was post-
poned until future review.
Thus, a technical network project—the EGSVTs—was born, and the auto-
mated management of the OGAS was put on hold. The technical network
was deemed the Unified State Network of Computing Centers (EGSVTs, for
edinnay gosudarstvennaya set’ vyicheslitel’nikh tsentrov), and in response, the
committees issued a joint decree titled “On Improving the Supervision of
Work on the Introduction of Computer Technology and Automated Man-
agement Systems into the National Economy.”^76
The presence of the word supervision in the decree title here is telling. The
government agreed to improve the supervision of the automated manage-
ment of the economy, not management itself, which the top Soviet leaders
recognized must be left to the distinctly not automated human bureau-
cracy of state employees and planners. In particular, the officials charged
with approving the OGAS stumbled over Glushkov’s distinction between
a system that would make executive commands, which they feared, and