How Not to Network a Nation. The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet

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32 Chapter 1


personal affront against classical genetics, appeared more or less a “farce”
to some philosopher-critics. These same philosopher-critics, according to
information theorist Ilia Novik, “berated cybernetics with certain ... indif-
ference and even fatigue.” In the late 1940s and early 1950s, as cybernetics
was sweeping the United States, France, the United Kingdom, Chile, and
other countries with the enthralling possibilities of self-organizing human-
machine ensembles and predictive negative feedback loops, “cybernetics”
in the Soviet Union had, to crib Novik’s phrase, “emerged as a normal
pseudo-science.”^55
The anti-American Soviet campaign against cybernetics was only one
among a range of operations that were meant to repress the Soviet knowl-
edge base, including but not limited to Stalinist science. A few other exam-
ples include the rise of Trofim Lysenko in Soviet biology, whose program
on the heritability of acquired characteristics ousted the study of Men-
deleev and classical genetics; the condemnation of Linus Pauling’s struc-
tural resonance theory by Soviet chemists in 1951; the banning of Soviet
Lev Vygotsky’s work, now recognized as a foundation of cultural-historical
psychology; the forestalling of structural linguistics pioneered by Ferdi-
nand Saussure, Nikolai Trubetzkoi, and Roman Jakobson; and the excoria-
tion of Albert Einstein’s theories of general and special relativity, quantum
mechanics, and Werner Heisenberg’s principles of indeterminacy as distor-
tions and corruptions of the true (that is, Marxist) objective and material
nature of the universe.^56 In light of these and other examples, the public
campaigns against cybernetics strike the contemporary observer as far from
masterfully orchestrated or even normal in their regularity. The ground
warfare of ideological critique was messy, full of ritual elements, political
posturing, and routine debates. Not only did the enterprise of Soviet cyber-
netics prove to be diverse, but the anticybernetic campaigns that preceded
it varied richly.
There was nothing particularly anticybernetic about the early anticy-
bernetic campaigns. Rather, the early opposition to the science appears
overwhelmingly anti-American in motivation. In the decade that followed,
Soviet cybernetics transformed into an apparent harbinger of social reform
and later into a normal Soviet science. Even the Soviet ideological resis-
tance to cybernetics appears normal from the beginning.


The Post-Stalinist Rehabilitation of Cybernetics, 1954 to 1959


Natural Science will in time incorporate into itself the science of man, just as the
science of man will incorporate into itself natural science: there will be one science.
—Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

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