152 Chapter 4
network. But a great portion of the design choice to model the OGAS after
the formal command economy follows from political necessity. Consider
this contradiction of political practice. To implement a fully decentralized
reform to the economy, top political support needed to be secured to imple-
ment the reform systematically. The full decentralizing reform first had to
be implemented with centralized systematic approval of the top. To gain
the support of those top central authorities, the reform design had to con-
form to the publicly approved and ideologically acceptable principles of
the current economic organization, which means that the OGAS design
had to map onto the pyramid structure of economic planning in principle.
So far, there is no contradiction because the short story of the tumultuous
history of Soviet economic reforms is effectively one of top leaders who
variously attempt to reaffirm their own hierarchical control, no matter how
decentralized.
The contradiction lies in the practical need for the reform in the first
place. The need for decentralized economic reforms follows from the fact
that, as discussed, the command economy in practice never functioned in a
strictly centralized manner. OGAS supporters sought to transform the econ-
omy into a decentralized hierarchy, but the economy, whose leaders publicly
defended their positions in a centralized hierarchy, never behaved as a strict
hierarchy because those leaders and their supporting personnel benefitted
by the informal economy of favors and heterarchical connections. Many
of those in the economic bureaucracy resisted the OGAS because although
it purported to support the formal power structure that legitimated their
positions, it also threatened to strip their institutions of the thing that jus-
tified their existence—the need to manage the command economy in the
first place. The OGAS, if effective, would strip those positions of what made
them informally beneficial to hold—the potential for corruption and per-
sonal gain and power. The organizational dissonance coursing throughout
the command economy both motivated the reform and caused this initial
frustration. With no other choice but to appeal to the top, the OGAS Proj-
ect was stranded by the potential adopters of its decentralized design (the
CSA in the late 1960s and other institutional entanglements in the 1970s
and 1980s) because the project sought to resolve the conflicts of interest in
the command economy that kept its own bureaucracy from resembling in
practice the pyramid of political power that it had to appeal to.^84
OGAS did not meet its end at the hands of stalled feasibility reports by
the Central Statistical Administration between 1964 and 1969, however.
During these years, Glushkov, among others, built considerable politi-
cal support for developing the technical network of the EGSVTs. The late