The Undoing of the OGAS, 1970 to 1989 173
to introduce networked computing into social and economic planning
would break against well-organized centralized resistance from the military
and broad-based and haphazard resistance from anyone in a position to
benefit from the status quo. Because the OGAS threatened to reorganize
the social and economic spheres of life into the kind of rational planned
system that the command economy imagined itself to be in principle, it
threatened the very practice of Soviet economic life: networked comput-
ing, in Hoffmann’s analysis, “creates more choice and accountability and
threatens firmly established formal and informal bases of power through-
out the entrenched bureaucracies.”^29 These two threads of analysis met in
the friction between a formal centralized hierarchy and an informal, decen-
tralized heterarchy. Both the military powers and the decentralized network
proposed by Glushkov were clearly hierarchical in operation. But the actual
workings of Soviet economic and social power were neither hierarchical nor
market. They were heterarchical, dynamic, and continuously reconstituted
in the interwoven political networks of social relations in the economic
bureaucracy facilitated by the Communist Party.
When asked why he thought that the OGAS did not take, Glushkov
responded with a comment that distinguishes military (space and atomic)
programs from the civilian administration:
S. P. Korolev (“the chief designer” of the Soviet space program) and I. V. Kurchatov
(the father of the Soviet atomic bomb) had a guardian on their side in the Politburo,
and they could approach him and immediately resolve any question. Our trouble
was that we had no one, and our questions were even more complicated because
they involved politics and any mistake could have tragic consequences. For that
reason, a connection with any of the members of the Politburo was that much more
important.^30
Aleksandr Stavchikov, historical secretary of the Central Economic-
Mathematical Institute (CEMI), also commented on why the EGSVTs did
not develop successfully. According to his unpublished notes and personal
interviews, Stavchikov retroactively faults “the romanticism” of the insti-
tute for the “globality” of its early network designs, observing in hindsight
how Glushkov, Fedorenko, and others agreed early in the 1960s that any
attempt to plan the national economy in its entirety would have to be done
at the national level: “Certainly, an attempt to plan the national economy
of such a huge country on the foundation of one hugely proportioned
economic-mathematical model,” Stavchikov admits, “would be doomed to
failure from the start.”^31
As for why the network was designed hierarchically, Stavchikov inti-
mated that the cyberneticists had no better choice. The reasoning for the