History of computing in the Soviet Union
[2] Initial ideological opposition to cybernetics in the Soviet Union was overcome by a Khrushchev era policy that encouraged computer production.
[4][5] The Soviet government decided to abandon development of original computer designs and encouraged cloning of existing Western systems (e.g. the 1801 CPU series was scrapped in favor of the PDP-11 ISA by the early 1980s).
[4] Soviet industry was unable to mass-produce computers to acceptable quality standards[6] and locally manufactured copies of Western hardware were unreliable.
[4] A universally programmable electronic computer was created by a team of scientists directed by Sergey Lebedev at the Kiev Institute of Electrotechnology in Feofaniya.
The computer, known as MESM (Russian: МЭСМ; Малая Электронно-Счетная Машина, Small Electronic Calculating Machine), became operational in 1950.
[4] Victor Glushkov began his work on OGAS, a real-time, decentralised, hierarchical computer network, in the early 1960s, but the project was never completed.
[29] The Soviets realized the strategic implications of semiconductors already in the late 1950s, and new facilities were set up to manufacture them in cities like Leningrad and Riga.
[30] Soviet scientists took advantage of student exchange agreements with the US to study the technology, attending lectures by pioneers of the field such as William Shockley.
[30] Joel Barr, an American-born Soviet spy who had previously infiltrated US-based technology companies, successfully lobbied Khrushchev to build a new city devoted to the production of semiconductors.
[31] As a local semiconductor industry began to develop in the 1960s, Soviet scientists were increasingly ordered to copy Western designs (such as the Texas Instruments SN-51) without any changes.
[31] In hindsight, the approach was poorly suited to the fast-evolving world of chip manufacturing, which continued to change according to Moore's Law.
[31] By the early 1970s, the lack of common standards in peripherals and digital capacity led to a significant technological lag behind Western producers.
[33] Users were expected to maintain and repair their own hardware; local modifications made it difficult (or impossible) to share software, even between similar machines.
The plan discussed producing in larger quantities the integrated circuit-based Ryad, but BESM remained the most common model, with ASVT still rare.
[38] The telephone system was barely adequate for voice communication, and a Western researcher deemed it unlikely that it could be significantly improved before the end of the 20th century.
[4] As personal computers spread to offices and industries in the United States and most Western countries, the Soviet Union failed to keep up.
[48] In 1978, three employees of the Moscow Institute of Electronic Machine Building built a computer prototype based on the new KR580IK80 microprocessor and named it Micro-80.
[49] American intelligence agencies, having learned about Soviet piracy efforts, placed bugs in copied software which caused later, catastrophic failures in industrial systems.
[64] The Tekhnika cooperative, created by Artyom Tarasov, managed to sell its own software to state agencies including Gossnab.
[71] Human-rights groups in the West pressured the Soviet government to grant exit visas to all computer experts who wanted to emigrate.
[77] By early 1991, the Soviet Union was on the verge of collapse; procurement orders were cancelled en masse, and half-finished products from computer plants were discarded as the breakdown of the centralized supply system made it impossible to complete them.
[84][85] Since computers were considered strategic goods by the United States, their sale by Western countries was generally not allowed without special permission.
[39] As a result of the CoCom embargo, companies from Western Bloc countries could not export computers to the Soviet Union (or service them) without a special license.
[86] Even when sales were not forbidden by CoCom policies, the US government might still ask Western European countries to refrain from exporting computers because of foreign-policy matters, such as protesting the arrest of Soviet dissidents.
[88] Soviet computer software and hardware designs were often on par with Western ones, but the country's persistent inability to improve manufacturing quality meant that it could not make practical use of theoretical advances.
[90] The decision to abandon original development in the early 1970s, rather than closing the gap with Western technology, is seen as another factor causing the Soviet computer industry to fall further behind.
[56] The software industry followed a similar path, with Soviet programmers moving their focus to duplicating Western operating systems (including DOS/360 and CP/M).
[43] Software was not shared as commonly or easily as in the West, leaving Soviet scientific users highly dependent on the applications available at their institutions.
[95] Robert W. Strayer attributed this failure to the shortcomings of the Soviet command economy, where monopolistic ministries closely controlled the activities of factories and companies.
[97] Soviet academia still made notable contributions to computer science, such as Leonid Khachiyan's paper, "Polynomial Algorithms in Linear Programming".
