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From Cold War Cybernetics to the US-China AI Supremacy Race
My researcher, G Michael Rapp, is starting a new column on my Substack today, where he takes deep dives into history, politics, and technology that you might not know. —Ryan
Soviet Bureaucracy Kills the Soviet Internet
It’s October 01, 1970, in Moscow.
A group of Soviet bureaucrats, party ideologues, politicians, and a cybernetician gather in Stalin’s old red-carpeted Kremlin office. No one realizes they’re standing at a crucial juncture in world and Soviet history. They’re meeting to discuss a nationwide computer network—known in English as the All-State Automated System, or OGAS for short. It looks to the project’s chief architect, Viktor Glushkov, as if this meeting might be the meeting that decides the fate of OGAS, once and for all. However, moments before the meeting officially starts, Glushkov is told by a Politburo ally and supporter, Kirillin, that things have changed. Glushkov sits quietly, nervous, wondering what has changed.
The meeting starts without two key Politburo members, Brezhnev and Kosygin, both of whom are away from Moscow. Brezhnev is in Azerbaijan, celebrating fifty years of Soviet rule, and Kosygin is in Egypt following the death of Gamal Abdel Nasser. While it is hard to say if the meeting would have produced the necessary support for OGAS with Brezhnev and/or Kosygin there, there is no doubt that Glushkov saw this as the nails in the project’s coffin. What comes next? He asks himself. What happens to OGAS?
The meeting proceeds as planned, but something has indeed changed. Glushkov feels the winds of change from his seat.