48 Chapter 1
Nonetheless, the runaway institutional success of cybernetics in the
Soviet Union also meant that, by the time Leonid Brezhnev came to power
in 1964, Soviet cybernetics could not help but slouch toward the intel-
lectual mainstream.^121 It had to: its territory had grown so large it could
not help but take up the middle of the road. The institutional growth of
cybernetics outran the intellectual legs supporting it: the failure of cyber-
netics to cohere intellectually actually rested on the runaway growth of
the discipline institutionally. Sloughing reformist ambitions to the side,
by the 1970s, kibernetika signaled little more than a common interest in
computer modeling that held together a loose patchwork of institutions,
disciplines, fields, and topics. By the 1980s, the term cybernetics marked a
nearly empty signifier for all the plural things to which the adjective could
be attached. By the rise of Gorbachev in 1984, Soviet cybernetics had suc-
cessfully accompanied and slowly integrated into a host of parallel develop-
ments. The inheritor field “informatics,” the parallel revolution in military
affairs, the scientific-technical revolution, and the first three generations of
computer hardware (vacuum tubes, transistors, and integrated circuits) had
rolled forward under the fading banner of Soviet cybernetics.^122
Conclusion: Wiener in Moscow
This brief history of early Soviet cybernetics ends where it began, with Nor-
bert Wiener and the foreign founding of cybernetics. In the early 1960s,
travel restrictions for Americans in the Soviet Union began to slacken, and
a trickle of chaperoned scientific and cultural exchanges began to flow
between the two superpowers. Early among this generation of guests was
Wiener, then an aging omnibus professor at MIT. In June 1960, Soviet offi-
cials warmly welcomed this American founder of cybernetics for a several-
week visit to Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Kiev (figure 1.1.) After his arrival,
Wiener, whose translated books were popular (albeit in edited form) in the
Soviet Union, was paid royalties in cheap caviar and champagne (which
apparently sat untouched in his basement) and gave invited lectures at
prestigious institutes in those three cities.^123 For Wiener, it was a chance
to issue a stirring warning against societies that would adopt cybernetics
without the fundamental ability to correct themselves, decrying that “sci-
ence must be free from the narrow restraints of political ideology.” For his
Soviet hosts, the visit allowed the cybernetic knowledge base to go about
the regular ideological work of welcoming and canonizing a socialist saint
in public memory of Soviet society and technology.^124 The effect among his
colleagues in the Soviet Union and in Cambridge was electric. Reflecting on