Cybernetics in the Soviet Union
Under the leadership of academician Aksel Berg, the Council of Cybernetics was formed, an umbrella organization dedicated to providing funding for these new lights of Soviet science.
Cybernetics clearly reflects one of the basic features of the bourgeois worldview—its inhumanity, striving to transform workers into an extension of the machine, into a tool of production, and an instrument of war.
At the same time, for cybernetics an imperialistic utopia is characteristic—replacing living, thinking man, fighting for his interests, by a machine, both in industry and in war.
The initial reception of cybernetics in the stifling scientific culture of Soviet state-sanctioned media and academic publication was exclusively negative.
[3] This imperative put Soviet newspaper editors in a frantic search for topics to criticize, in order to fill these propagandistic quotas.
[4][5] The first to latch onto Cybernetics was science journalist, Boris Agapov, following the post-war American interest in the developments in computer technology.
The cover of the January 23, 1950, issue of Time had boasted an anthropomorphic cartoon of a Harvard Mark III under the slogan "Can Man Build a Superman?".
On 4 May 1950, Agapov published an article in the Literaturnaya Gazeta entitled "Mark III, a Calculator", ridiculing this American excitement at the "sweet dream" of the military and industrial uses of these new "thinking machines", and criticizing cybernetics originator Norbert Wiener as an example of the "charlatans and obscurantists, whom capitalists substitute for genuine scientists".
In 1952, another more explicitly anti-cybernetic article was published in the Literaturnaya Gazeta, definitively starting the campaign and leading the way for a flurry of popular titles denouncing the topic.
[5][9][10] At the zenith of this criticism, an article in the October 1953 issue of the state ideological organ, Voprosy Filosofii, was published under the pseudonym "Materialist", entitled "Whom Does Cybernetics Serve?
Academician Aksel Berg, at the time deputy minister of defense, authored secret reports beleaguering the deficient state of information science in the USSR, pointing towards the suppression of cybernetics as the prime culprit.
On 10 April 1959, Berg sent a report edited by Lyapunov to a presidium of the Academy of Sciences, recommending the establishment of an organization dedicated to advancing cybernetics.
The presidium determined that the Council on Cybernetics would be formed, with Berg as the chairman (due to his strong administrative connections) and Lyapunov his deputy.
[45] The work of the council was rewarded when, at the 22nd Party Congress, cybernetics was declared one of the "major tools of the creation of a communist society".
[48] American intelligence apparently bought into the hype, though it confused institutional enthusiasm with Soviet government policy.
[49] In July 1962, Berg created a plan for the radical restructuring of the Council such that it covered "practically all of Soviet science".
[51] According to Gerovitch, "by the early 1970s, the cybernetics movement [...] no longer challenged the orthodoxy; instead, tactical uses of cyberspeak overshadowed the original reformist goals that aspired the first Soviet cyberneticians.
[42] Some cyberneticians, whose dissident styles had been sheltered by the cybernetics movement, now felt persecuted, and some, such as Valentin Turchin, Alexander Lerner, and Igor Mel'čuk emigrated to escape this newfound scientific atmosphere.
