82 Chapter 3
cyberneticist, Anatoly Ivanovich Kitov (1920–2005). The son of a White
army (Menshevik) officer who escaped persecution after the 1917 Russian
revolution by moving from Moscow to central Asia and then to the city of
Kyibishev (now Samara, Russia) on the Volga River, Anatoly Kitov grew up
between two world wars. A star student in mathematics who rose rapidly
through the military academy, Kitov served as a young officer on the front
in World War II (where he, like other human “computers,” computed bal-
listic tables), before launching a distinguished military career that suddenly
shifted to civilian research for reasons described below (figure 3.1).
In 1953, Aksel’ Berg, then deputy minister of defense in charge of radar
and future dean of Soviet cybernetics, asked Kitov to prepare a report on
the state of computing in the West.^1 Kitov’s optimistic report resulted in the
creation of three large computational facilities—the Computation Center
1 (which Kitov directed until 1959), the Navy Computation Center, and
the Air Force Computation Center.^2 Kitov’s optimistic review of comput-
ing in the West stemmed from his 1952 discovery of a copy of Norbert
Wiener’s Cybernetics that had been removed from general circulation (due
to the ongoing anti-American campaign against cybernetics) and stored in
a top-secret military research library. As noted above, in 1955, Kitov coau-
thored (with Lyapunov and Sobolev, two highly regarded Soviet mathema-
ticians) the first Soviet article to attempt to rehabilitate cybernetics from
Figure 3.1
Anatoly Kitov. Courtesy of Vladimir Kitov.