Civilian computer networking in the Soviet Union first developed among
cyberneticists who applied their science to a unique environment—the
command economy. By examining the work of economic cyberneticists—a
field found only in the territories of the former Soviet Union—we can begin
to understand the significance of the internal economic crisis to Soviet sci-
entists and civilians and the ways in which Soviet scientists, administrators,
and policymakers in 1959 to 1963 viewed the command economy itself as
a complex cybernetic organization. In this light, the same terms were used
both by key Soviet network entrepreneurs to envision the first national
networks as well as by the critics who condemned those projects. By review-
ing the organizational theories and practices that characterize the Soviet
state socialist economies, this analysis explores and begins to complicate
the divide between the private markets and the public states that underlie
conventional conceptions of the cold war.^1
The command economy contained in its operations the cybernetic seeds
and complex sources of its own undoing—nonlinear command and con-
trol, informal competition, vertical bargaining, and what I am calling heter-
archical networks of administrative conflict. In this chapter, I develop these
observations through a series of examples that outline the basic operations
of the command economy in theory and in practice, the various schools
of thought concerning economic reform (especially around the transition
from Nikita Khrushchev to Leonid Brezhnev in 1963), and the political
tensions that economic cybernetics tried to square itself with in an attempt
to reform (often with long-distance networks) the structural contradictions
underlying the practices of the command economy. These contradictions
slowed efforts at technocratic economic reform and also ensured the endur-
ing appeal of nonlinear cybernetic systems thinking.
The term command economy originated from the German Befehlswirtschaft,
which was used to describe the Nazis’ centralized economy and socialist
Economic Cybernetics and Its LimitsChapter 2