The Undoing of the OGAS, 1970 to 1989 171
the bluntest critic of computerized communication in the USSR”), it took
a particularly acute form. Again, recall that after the Central Committee
heard that the ARPANET had gone online and effectively granted Glush-
kov a blank check, the secretary of the Central Committee asked Glushkov
to “write down in detail what has to be done,” said A. P. Kirilenko, “and
we will create a commission.” Glushkov’s response is reminiscent of Baran
before he withdrew his network project from consideration by the U.S. mil-
itary. Both insisted that, whatever else happened, their network projects
not be handed over to the available administrative entities.”^23
In over a dozen interviews that I conducted with scientists who were
associated or familiar with the OGAS Project, they unanimously complained
that bureaucratic infighting was the primary obstacle to their project. There
was something dreadfully wrong with the bureaucratic administration of
the national economy and the handling of the OGAS Project. But Glush-
kov’s critique looks beyond the bureaucrats themselves. Given a Weberian
understanding of bureaucrats as depoliticized professionals, many people
who held positions in the command economy and state were not rational
bureaucrats at all. They affected an “iron cage” of bureaucratic petrification
when convenient and waged war with other local deities. The problem does
not belong to all modern bureaucracy. Some bureaucracies do not result in
this kind of incessant, internecine Hellenistic competition among the gods.
Some administrations, including Soviet military ones, have successfully
managed to fund, develop, and launch megaprojects, and most large-scale
modern institutions are administered by functional bureaucracies.^24 Where
lay the difference?
Glushkov believed that a successful bureaucratic system could be
reformed and improved with information technological upgrades, but only
with commensurate social and economic reforms. In other words, tech-
nical reforms to administrative systems without behavioral changes were
condemned to fall into a kind of double-bind: no minister could manage a
complex economy by paper, and yet no one with control over the papers
at hand would agree to switch to a “paperless” virtual economy, which
Glushkov had championed in the 1970s. Because the “chief content” of the
computing revolution was no less than a cybernetic fusion of information-
processing people and their machinery (in other words, “the appearance of
an essentially new man-machine technology for processing information”),
the success of any technical system reform would depend on social and
organizational changes: “Since the circular flow of information is the basis
for the functioning of any organization, [the information revolution] must
be viewed primarily as a revolution in organization and management.”^25