Кибернетика (Cybernetics) was considered a pseudoscience in USSR for a long time. That set USSR back so much that it would never catch up. I think thats an important lesson to remember re: politicians influencing scientific research to match their narrative.
This comment just recites the popular myth which makes zero sense, especially in the context of the video in OP, which is about a soviet computer.
Cybernetics has nothing to do with computing or computers at all; it was a very opinionated attempt at explaining natural and social phenomena in terms of some narrow snippets of control theory. Nothing from that media panic "set USSR back" in computing; the control theory was being used in engineering (case in point: R-7 with a SOTA control system), computers were being developed (BESM-6 was introduced long after the moral panic caused by Wiener's book ended), etc.
The real cause was the engineering tradition (and planned economy which led to twisted economic incentives). Soviet engineering school has been influenced by the German one for half a century, and was really slow at picking up computer science and software engineering as separate disciplines; both were mostly seen as some unimportant subset of applied math. It wasn't some ideological bullshit, just genuine inertia. By the time US programmers had a strong software development culture, Soviet programming culture was stuck at the pure math level. Just read any Soviet textbook or programming manual from that era and you will see the difference immediately. Hardware development has been following suit, struggling not just from the lack of the expertise in high purity chemistry (traditionally weak point of Soviet physics and engineering) and semiconductors, but also from the lack of direction set by the software development and economic incentives. That's why the Soviets decided to copy IBM - and the computer in OP is an IBM PC clone. Not because of the cybernetics (the panic was unrelated and died long before that decision) or any other reason.
>that it would never catch up
Hardware, sure. The software development eventually started to catch up around mid-80s, when the Soviet computing craze has started with first personal computers that were more or less accessible to the population.
As somebody who grew up as a person and as a programmer in 80s, the problem wasn't purity of the math or the chemicals. The problem was an extremely crappy level of manufacturing quality in everything and lacking facilities in quantity of available technology. I was lucky to grow up in a big city, have educated parents and study in one of the best schools in the country. So I had access to a variety of hardware and software and technology (domestic and imported). Most people however barely had access to programmable calculators, and the only way to actually get access to a PC-level computer would be either work in one of the places where it deemed necessary or build one by yourself (not that the parts would be easily accessible too, you may have to go to a special marketplace, etc.).
Same thing was with information materials - Soviet ones were badly made, severely outdated and rarely available without some kind of special access (you had to know people). I had to translate things from foreign materials (yes, I was lucky to know the right people to gain access to some foreign computer journals), bring books from other neighboring countries (e.g. Bulgaria), etc. As I said, I was lucky - most of my age peers were at best told what the computer is and how one would program it on a whiteboard, if at all.
So yes, by the 80s the Lysenkoist wars were in the past, and actually computers were thought as a way to solve the inadequacies of socialist planning (by then amply evident to all smart people, who were furiously searching for ways to prop up the collapsing system). But general weaknesses of economy, scientific culture, engineering culture, consumer goods manufacturing and in general overall decay of nearly everything (that very soon led to the collapse of the system) ensured that Soviet computer industry was constantly way behind and reduced to badly copying old Western samples, both in the high and consumer ends. It wasn't some one "panic" event that set the Soviets back - it was the inevitable consequence of the overall societal model, and could not have been avoided.
That said, once the USSR collapsed and people could access the world's technology and information freely, people from ex-Soviet countries caught up pretty quickly on the software, indeed - there are a lot of excellent programmers there, though many of them are "from there" already.
Yes thanks, I was a kid in the 80s and almost forgot how bad it was. Having a technology prototyped in some research institute indeed means nothing if you can't produce it without the product immediately falling apart in consumers' hands (in the best case).
Still, by the second half of 80s home computers were more or less available. IIRC a BK-0010 or Mikrosha were around 500-600 rubles, about three monthly salaries of a senior engineer, a lot of people had them, including my family and my uncles/grandparents. And there was a substantial "ecosystem" of a sort around them. Regarding the PCs and workstations, my grandfather, a mechanical engineer (not related to computers in any way), looked for the 1840 in particular (he had some ideas that never worked out) and was able to get it at home by finding the right people, for 1/3 the official price. Which was a lot.
I'd still argue that Lysenkoism can't be compared to the cybernetics panic. The former was an actual attempt to bend the science, the latter was more or less a nothingburger caused by some party cogs freaking out at the suggestion that a PID loop can explain (or Engels forbid, control) the politics. Although they seem to think otherwise in Czechia: apparently that moral panic rippled through the entire Eastern Bloc, and for example forced Antonin Svoboda [1] to leave the country.
>you had to know people
It was a motto of living in USSR, it applied to... everything, basically.
The inevitability of the USSR collapse was certainly framed that way by pro-western ideologues, but my understanding is that it was the result of conscious reforms and more often than not, blunders, taken on Gorbachev and his cadre of supporters.
I once read an interesting idea that communism could have worked if implemented with modern information technology. Or at least the supermarkets wouldn't have been empty.
That's what they tried to do in the 70s, essentially. Even with the modern computing power, it wouldn't work for multiple reasons, but they certainly gave it a good try, and given the caliber of the people involved (Glushkov, Kolmogorov, etc.) the lack of talent wasn't the problem. The impossibility of the solution likely was.
The first institute tasked with creating computers was set up in 1948, the same year the word "cybernetics" appeared. The USSR had nothing against computer science, and the initial progress in that area was not that bad (given the post-war scarcity). The USSR mainly had issues with some of the more philosophical parts of Norbert Wiener's books.
The USSR failed in its usual manner: the progress was great only while it required just individual brilliance, or something that could be constructed by small teams.
So the USSR had pretty decent discrete-logic computers, including truly innovative stuff like Setun' that was based on ternary logic. And then the USSR predictably started losing ground, once the world moved to integrated circuits.
> Stalin himself never engaged in this rabid criticism of cybernetics, with the head of the Soviet Department of Sciences, Iurii Zhdanov, recalling that "he never opposed cybernetics" and made every effort "to advance computer technology" in order to give the USSR the technological advantage.
It was complicated [1]. Stalin didn't care for the idea. After he died, some took interest in it. Some of those people stepped on the toes of the military. It came back in fits and spurts.
I was interested in the early USSR computing some time ago (well, almost 20 years ago, I'm feeling old). Back then, I tried to find the original sources for the supposed Stalin's disdain for computers.
I could not find much in favor or against it. I would say that Stalin really did not care much, in the sense that he was not concerned about computers either way. He had way too much stuff on his plate anyway: executing medical doctors, trying to claw back power from WWII military leaders, that sort of stuff.
The USSR also started serious computation research in 1948, including construction of a fully programmable computer ("MESM - Small Electronic Calculating Device") that was finished in 1950. It actually fit the USSR ideology quite well, the economy was supposed to be centrally planned and computing devices obviously are helpful in creating plans.
So my opinion: there was no real persecution of the early computer science in the USSR. And it's not the reason the USSR eventually fell behind.
The _networking_ was an entirely different story. The USSR government instinctively was against making communication across hierarchical structures easier.
That's strange, because from what I've read, "cybernetics" as a scientific discipline was much more influential in the USSR than it ever was in western countries. The term is now almost exclusively associated with (digital) computers, but originally it was more about feedback loops in analog systems, and its theories were applied to centralised economic planning. But maybe it wasn't taken seriously by the leadership, is that what you mean?
Cybernetics did eventually become a hot fashion in the USSR. There is a good history of this, Slava Gerovitch's From Newspeak to Cyberspeak: A History of Soviet Cybernetics (2002).
That came later, when Soviet mathematicians envisioned that the computers could provide a solution to the fundamental calculation problems of socialism. Soviets had very strong mathematicians, and they knew that planning as envisioned by the socialist ideology is impossible using manual calculations, however they thought algorithmic planning could provide a huge edge there. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OGAS - this was a Soviet Internet plus AI optimizer plus data lake plus everything else. It fizzled out, though, for a couple of reasons - first, it was not clear that it can actually do any of it, and second, The Party kinda felt uneasy with algorithms controlling everything - if the General Secretary says one thing, and the computer says another - who's in charge here?! And once you allow The Party to mess with it, it loses the whole point - it's garbage in, garbage out.
My father, born 1955, an ex-bulgarian air-defence, have been telling me the same for a while now... That for long time the communist regime spoke against cybernetics, as supposedly it would've take over people's jobs, and that was against the ideology.
Yes. So far back. Under the influence of the opposition, they only managed to complete such feats as building the fastest mainframe in Europe in 1952, and gave the designer of the computer that crunched the math behind the first crewed spaceflight the highest award possible, The Hero of Socialist Labour.
The was during the most intense period of “anti-cybernetic” sentiment.
The biggest negative factor affecting Russian computer science was the fact that the US has been at economic war with them for essentially the last century. There has almost never been a time when Russia didn’t have heavy sanctions against is.
For example, when Toshiba sold CNC machines to Russia in 1987, the US threatened to ban their access to the US market entirely.
