160 Chapter 5
Ministry Mutiny
The strategic move that eventually stalemated the OGAS Project did not
come from abroad. It came from within. By the summer of 1970, Glushkov,
Ustinov, and others had mobilized enough support for a fresh review of the
OGAS Project by the highest committees in the land. All signs, except one,
suggested that the timing for an economic network renaissance was finally
right. The Central Statistical Administration (CSA) could no longer delay its
“finalization” review process for the OGAS proposal, which formally ended
in 1966 but had lingered in approval limbo ever since. Simultaneously,
the successful evidence of the local foundations of the EGSVTs (Unified
State Network of Computing Centers) was gaining more and more support,
especially as Party leaders searched for an untried approach to economic
reform in the wake of the faltering Liberman reforms. By the time that
Viktor Glushkov and Nikolai Fedorenko’s partnership drifted into a rivalry
over the wisdom of economic reform by macronetwork (Glushkov’s OGAS)
or micromodeling (Fedorenko’s SOFE, or System of Optimal Functioning
of the Economy), the EGSVTs had become such a promising project that
established rivalries were reigniting over whose administration might best
oversee its development and command the funding streams that came with
it. By early in 1970, Vladimir Starovsky’s Central Statistical Administration
and Vasily Garbuzov’s Ministry of Finance began to jockey for position to
command the administration of the OGAS Project. These two powerful min-
istries began contending not just for the project but against one another in
an effort to limit the competitor from securing massive funding.^1
The most vocal opponent to the OGAS proposal in 1970 was also the
man who officially had been charged with its care and finalization for
the previous seven years. Vladimir Starovsky, the head of the Central Sta-
tistical Administration, “harshly objected to the whole project,” Glushkov
recalled in the late 1960s—out of opposition not to the economic reform
but to the prospect that the Central Statistical Administration would have
to cede control over some element of the governance of his administrative
turf (economic statistics) to future OGAS directors. Starovsky rejected the
remote-access portion of Glushkov’s proposal (a precursor to “cloud com-
puting”). If realized, the OGAS was going to provide access to information
and processing power to any authenticated user anywhere on the network.
Even though the permission hierarchy for authenticated users presumably
could still reaffirm the strong hierarchical structure supporting his admin-
istration, Starovsky opposed what we now recognize as a cloud computing
provision as being politically “unnecessary” because the Central Statistical