184 Chapter 5
Here Kitov faults not the top leadership of the country but the insti-
tutional logic of administrators in the middle levels of ministries. Kitov’s
complaint holds that middle managers habitually reaffirmed the status quo
(as is also the case in many large organizations) and that the dynamics
within such conservative institutions were paradoxically nonsystematic. As
countless Soviet officials have observed: “Having different ministries is like
having different governments,” and the battle between civilian ministries
often flares into nothing less than internecine civil war.^55
The paralyzing competition between these dynamic, unregulated min-
istries constrained the possibilities of both systematic institutional growth
and purposeful reform. Interministry cost-sharing and cooperation rarely
happened. Whenever high-ranking Soviet administrators wanted to pro-
mote a major project (such as a national network), the primary avenue
for action available to them, as Garbuzov’s counterproposal anecdotally
indicates, was to create an entirely new institute within preexisting admin-
istrative silos. Thus, the attempt to create a supervisory institute for a par-
ticular sphere of responsibility (such as finance, statistics, or the OGAS)
created intractable points of competition between those institutes. Instead
of easing the conflict among administrative standards, every new umbrella
institution introduced a new competitor and exacerbated the power skir-
mishes. The attempt to create a hierarchical bureaucracy to resolve conflicts
of administrative interest often generated more, not fewer, opportunities
for infighting among neighboring bureaucracies. So the chasm between
military and civilian administrations was perhaps not entirely insurmount-
able: while the military kept the country ready for war with the enemy,
the civilian bureaucracy was already at war with itself. Unable to receive
the same preferential state treatment as the military, the Soviet economic
bureaucracy militarized itself against itself.
The uneven economy of those administrative silos often pivoted around
surprisingly few well-placed administrators and veto points. Consider, for
example, that the tenures of the chair of the Council on Cybernetics Aksel’
Berg and the mathematician Mstislav Keldysh, president of the Academy
of Sciences of the Soviet Union (1961–1975), coincided with the rapid
growth of Soviet cybernetic academic preoccupation in the 1950s and 1960s.
Together, Keldysh and Berg personally facilitated the creation of all four
main institutes featured previously, including the Computation Center 1
that Kitov directed following his optimistic report about the future of com-
puting technology in 1953, the Institute of Cybernetics in Kiev under the
directorship of Viktor Glushkov (1962), the Central Economic-Mathematical
Institute in Moscow under the directorship of Nikolai Fedorenko (1963), and