No single actor could either make or undo the OGAS (All-State Automated
System) Project. The hidden networks governing the Soviet state were far
too complex and heterarchical to have had any single cause. (Most multiac-
tor networks involve complexities that are impossible to express in linear
form.) This chapter briefly outlines and analyzes the slow struggle over the
political execution of the OGAS Project in the 1970s and its aftermath in
the 1980s. The prolonged struggle and decline at the hands of various forces
helps to reveal the complex heterarchical forces that governed the Soviet
state and attempted to carry out economic and technological reforms. The
commentary that follows speaks by analogy to modern observers who are
concerned with attempts to reform complex political economic systems
and also reflects on how attempts to create formal computer networks are
sometimes thwarted by hidden social networks.
In this chapter, I chart the institutional apex, plateauing, and decline of
the most ambitious attempt to provide the Soviet nation with its own form
of networked socialism. The chapter begins by rehearsing the 1970 Polit-
buro review of the OGAS proposal, the ministerial defiance and contingent
institutional interests that extinguished its approval at the last minute, and
the subsequent dozen years (1970–1982) of attempts by Glushkov and his
team to revitalize state and then public interest in a networked socialist
economy. The chapter then takes a detour through an unlikely case study
before becoming reflecting on the central theme the military-civilian divide
that separates hierarchical and heterarchical institutions in the Soviet
Union. This case study examines how militarized strategic thinking—in the
hands of one of the great Soviet chess masters—materialized into a stillborn
attempt to plan the nation’s political and economic strategies with early
Soviet computer chess.
5 The Undoing of the OGAS, 1970 to
Chapter 5