A Global History of Cybernetics 41
genetics).^88 Some Soviet commentators feel that Kolman’s diatribes kept
the mathematician Andrei Kolmogorov in the 1940s from beating Wie-
ner—the two are often compared as intellectual peers—to formalizing the
link between biology and mathematics. Kolman was sensitive to political
attacks and had a genuine interest in the history of science and a knowl-
edge of four or five languages. A formidable opponent, he was sometimes
known among his detractors and victims as the “dark angel.”^89
Despite such a body count, Kolman’s role as self-elected guardian of
cybernetics was not the first time he had deviated from an ideologically
orthodox line of philosophy. He had spent time in a Stalinist labor camp
after World War II for straying from the party line in his interpretation of
Marxism. Just before he died in 1982, he published the book We Should
Not Have Lived That Way, in which he reflected on his own past transgres-
sions: “In my time I evaluated many things, including the most important
facts, extremely incorrectly. Sincerely deluded, I was nourished by illusions
which later deceived me, but at that time I struggled for their realization,
sacrificing everyone.”^90 This context makes Kolman’s defense of cybernet-
ics more surprising: why would an embittered former mathematician with
a track record of decimating pseudo-scientific mathematical theories come
to the defense of cybernetics in 1953? Was his role as the first ideologue to
defend Soviet cybernetics an act of penitence or another cardinal sin?
Kolman began his eleven-page promotional history by outlining over a
century of international cybernetics, beginning with the French mathema-
tician, physicist, and philosopher André-Marie Ampère in 1843 and moving
to “Russian and Soviet scientists, [such as] Chernishwev, Shorin, Andropov,
Kulebakin, and others.”^91 Kolman called Wiener “one of the most visible
American mathematicians and professor of mathematics at Columbia Uni-
versity” and the one who “definitively” formalized cybernetics “as a scien-
tific sphere,” in a veritable shout of praise for the time.^92 In fact, Wiener
had been appointed at MIT, not Columbia, since 1919, but Kolman may
have introduced the mistake on purpose: Columbia University stood out
to Soviet observers among American universities at the time for its Russian
studies center, the Harriman Institute, which had been a favorite target
of McCarthy, so by connecting Wiener to Columbia, not MIT, perhaps he
softened his image in the eyes of Kolman’s peer philosopher-critics.^93 In any
case, Wiener occupies the sixth through the ninth paragraphs of Kolman’s
ideological support piece, which signals a second witness of Wiener’s adop-
tion into the vanguard of Soviet cybernetic historiography.
Having set up Wiener as the foreign founder of Soviet cybernetics in the
article, Kolman promptly invented a Soviet prehistory to the science that