50 Chapter 1
without a founder, and because founders precede identities, all foundations
must be laid by what must appear post fact as foreigners.
Wiener’s renown in the former Soviet territories has outlasted his mem-
ory in the English-speaking world. When Aksel’ Berg became chair of the
Council on Cybernetics in 1959, he made sure that among the first support-
ing works translated were Wiener’s. Over fifty years later, nearly all of Wie-
ner’s major works have since been translated into Russian and retain their
relative popularity, long after his legacy has faded in the English-speaking
world, except recently among historians of science.^127 Wiener’s 1948 Cyber-
netics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine was trans-
lated into Russian in 1958 and reissued in 1968 and again in 1983, one more
printing than in English. In 1958, his Human Use of Human Beings: Cyber-
netics and Society was abridged and translated as Kibernetika i obscheshtvo
(Cybernetics and Society). Based on the lectures he gave while visiting Mos-
cow, he published a 1962 article “Science and Society” in the preeminent
journal Problemy Philosophii (Problems of Philosophy). His autobiographies
Ex-Prodigy (1953) and I Am a Mathematician (1956) were translated in 1967.
And his final collection of lectures, God and Golem, Inc.: A Comment on Cer-
tain Points in Which Cybernetics Impinges on Religion (1964), was translated as
Tvorets i robot (Creator and Robot) in 1966 and reissued in 2003.
As a testament to the staying power of Wiener as an iconic foreign founder
figure, Wiener’s semiautobiographical novel The Tempter was translated in
1972, eight years after his death. His short piece of fiction, “The Brain,”
which is hard to find in English, was translated in 1988. And his 1951 article
“Homeostasis in the Individual and Society” appeared in Russian in 1992,
just after the turbulent collapse of Soviet society. Bookstores in Moscow con-
tinue to offer new editions of Wiener’s works to this day. His oeuvre has also
migrated online unevenly: all aforementioned works in Russian are freely
available for download online, compared to only one work in English, God
and Golem, Inc. Given all this, it may not be a stretch to assert that, with the
visit of an American founder of cybernetics, the son of Leo Wiener, an émigré
from Byelostock and founder of Slavic studies in America, Norbert Wiener
was christened no less than a Soviet prophet returning home.^128
Yet if Wiener were a prophet, he would be the kind whose stinging
calls to repentance went ignored both at home and abroad. He pressed for
removing ideology from science just as the political winds, in the early
1960s, were shifting toward ideological reconsolidation and recentraliza-
tion under Brezhnev. The case of Wiener in Moscow is interesting, then,
not merely for biographical or historiographical reasons but also as a syn-
ecdoche for the larger Soviet experience with cybernetics. The cybernetic