34 Chapter 1
under the fist of Stalin than it did under the loose umbrella of cybernet-
ics. Under Stalin, Soviet physicists and chemists pioneered work for which
chemist Nikolai Semyonov, physicist Igor Tamm, economist Leonid Kan-
to rovich, and physicist Pyotr Kapitza received Nobel Prizes decades later.
Other Soviet scientists—including Igor Kurchatov, Lev Landau, Yakov Fren-
kel, and Andrei Sakharov, and other world-renowned figures—also devel-
oped atomic and thermonuclear bombs, a lynchpin in Stalin’s rapid and
forceful industrialization of the remnants of the Russian empire from a
backwater country into a global super power in the period of a few decades.
Many Soviet scientists successfully employed dialectical materialism as a
genuine source of inspiration, not a forced ideology, in their scientific work.
The reality that the health of science depended more on funding than it did
on freedom also sobers reflection on the contemporary state of science and
public attitudes about it.^61
Soviet cybernetics arrived at a time that was well suited for leveraging
a post-Stalinist revision of scientific Marxist objectivity. It introduced its
mind-machine analogies in a light that was friendly to Ivan Pavlov’s cel-
ebrated notion of “conditioned reflexes” in psychology, which were based
on the reflex-response analogy of a telephone electrical switchboard, the
reactions of which depended on the programmable configuration of wires.
Both Pavlov and, two generations later, cyberneticists worldwide imagined
the mind as neural networks and electronic processors, a seminal metaphor
for what philosopher Pierre Dupuy dubbed the “mechanization of mind”
powering the subsequent rise of cognitive science.^62
Soviet cybernetics also found the support of several world-famous math-
ematicians, which was a field in which the Soviets were internationally
recognized. Figures including Andrei Kolmogorov, Sergei Sobolev, Aleksei
Lyapunov, and Andrei Markov Jr., came together, despite significant differ-
ences, to form an early core of Soviet cybernetic mathematicians who were
committed to advancing this new metamathematical science as a single
science for Soviet thought. And just as cybernetics was mobilizing its intel-
lectual defenses, it also found institutional fortification in the creation of
Akademgorodok, a new “scientific township at Novosibirsk” in Siberia. Cre-
ated in the spring of 1957, this city of science (formally part of the city of
Novosibirsk) proved a refuge of privilege and relative intellectual freedom
for over 65,000 Soviet scientists, including Aleksei Lyapunov, a pioneering
cyberneticist.^63
Before the Soviet scientific mainstream could adopt cybernetics, the
attendant scholarly communities had to be prepared for an about-face in
the official Soviet attitude toward an American-born discipline. The first