Staging the OGAS, 1962 to 1969 157
they encountered. Against the bold vision of a networked electronic social-
ist future, a tangle of historical episodes frustrated the realization of that
vision. This chapter has offered a look at the institutional landscape and
alliances that formed and then dissolved between Nikolai Fedorenko’s Cen-
tral Economic-Mathematical Institute and Glushkov’s Institute of Cyber-
netics, their heydays as the leaders of economic cybernetics and networked
cybernetic reform through the late 1960s, the informal work culture of the
Kiev-based cyberneticists in the 1960s, and early bureaucratic barriers that
slowed the advance of the OGAS Project in the Soviet military. Neither
the Ministry of Defense nor the liberal economists wanted to collaborate
and support the OGAS Project, perhaps because the country had endured
four turbulent years, from 1962 to 1966. In that time the Soviet Union
had agreed to pursue computer-aided economic reforms, come to the brink
of nuclear disaster in Cuba, forced out and replaced its general secretary,
founded and funded leading economic cybernetic institutes devoted to
building a national network plan, foregone approving the original pro-
posal to introduce liberal profit reforms, and continued to fund the leading
economic-mathematical research institute in Moscow as it reoriented itself
away from its original network resolution to focus instead on less risky local
optimization and modeling problems. Topsy-turvy institutional behavior
in civilian matters was the rule, not the exception.