In the late 1950s and early 1960s, economic cybernetics—with its nonlinear
mathematical mindset—appeared to be a near-perfect approach for mod-
eling and reforming the economy’s heterarchical coordination problems.
(Cyberneticists were at home in the underlying observer-effect problems:
the act of looking at a system changes the system.) Between 1959 and 1982,
Soviet cyberneticists advanced a half dozen ambitious and creative plans
to network their nation, including four overlapping attempts to digitize
the command economy. Most of those proposals arose between 1959 and
1962 before they languished or merged with associated projects with more
momentum, like the OGAS Project described in chapters 4 and 5.
This chapter reviews the three earliest Soviet network ambitions—Ana-
toly Kitov’s EASU (Economic Automatic Management System), Aleksandr
Kharkevich’s ESS (Unified Communication System), and N. I. Kovalev’s
rational system of economic control between 1959 and 1962—in the con-
text of the larger institutional struggles to secure support for their network
projects. Some attention also is paid to the network projects that developed
as civilian computer networks elsewhere and to the ways that the Soviet
experience varies from the American ARPANET and Chilean Cybersyn proj-
ects. Through a discussion of leading Soviet network proposals to reform
the command economy in the last few years of Khrushchev’s reign (1959–
1962), this chapter examines, details, and complicates the hypothesis that
the administrative dynamics of a strong civilian-military separation help
explain the stillbirth of their historic efforts.
Anatoly Kitov and EASU: The First Soviet Cyberneticist and His
Civilian-Use Military Network
The first person to propose a large-scale computer network for civilian
use anywhere, as far as I can tell, appears to have been the first Soviet
From Network to PatchworkChapter 3