Benjamin Peters the Dissolution of the Soviet Union Left Behind Vast

Book Reviews 119

Benjamin Peters How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet (Cambridge, ma: The mit Press, 2016), 312 pp. $38.00 (hb), isbn 9780262034180.

The dissolution of the Soviet Union left behind vast stores of material relat- ing to projects, plans and political infighting that had been studiously hidden from the West. Over the past two decades, academics have mined these rich, but often arcane, resources and brought the edited highlights of the internal structures that ran the Soviet system to a new, and eager, audience. There have been many remarkable testaments of struggle, with the individual brilliance of leading figures in heroic counterpoint to the Byzantine, obstructive com- plexities of committees or competing campaigns, and this intriguing text by Benjamin Peters continues this illustrious tradition. Little is known of the Soviet contribution to the Internet, which is unsur- prising given the inherently polarized nature of international politics during the Cold War and the opacity in which Soviet experts developed their own approach to networked technologies. Using archives gleaned from an eclectic range of sources, both from the former Soviet Union and Western collections including that of the Central Intelligence Agency, the author, an Assistant Pro- fessor at the University of Tulsa, draws a vivid picture of the uneven fortunes of computer network developments during the last three decades of Soviet rule. The goal of building a national electronic infrastructure for exerting economic control was an attractive one for the ussr in the 1960s and 1970s. Local centers and industries gained some immediate benefit from the introduction of linear programming models and other electronic decision support systems, but the target of a fully networked economic base across the nation proved tauntingly elusive, with far more than merely technical difficulties being encountered. Peters characterizes the ogas project, probably the most complete attempt to introduce civilian computer networks in the Soviet era, as a potential means of delivering “Electronic Socialism,” which reinforced the appeal of control in a planned economy. An acronym for Obshchegosudarstvennaia avtomatizirovan- naia sistema (All-State Automated System for the Gathering and Processing of Information for the Accounting, Planning, and Governance of the ussr National Economy), the ogas project was developed by computer scientist Viktor Glushkov beginning in 1962. Glushkov spent twenty five years trying to mobilize support for his network from his Institute of Cybernetics in Kiev, which created a rich set of cultural resources, including a model constitution, a passport, and cartoons depicting the land of “Cybertonia.” Peters reproduces

120 Book Reviews these images and descriptions and chronicles their utopian spirit in demon- strating the need for engineers in all times to express their creativity. However, the project was never realized. Perhaps inevitably, the proposed network and information processing infrastructure was itself complex, multi-tiered and rigidly directed, almost the antithesis of the deliberately flexible, self-healing, packet-switched networks that were under development in the West at the time. The deployment in the United States in 1969 of the arpanet, the commercial Internet’s effective precursor, appears to have signed the death warrant for this inflexible information infrastructure, and the Soviet Union never reached the level of network- integrated economic governance it sought. The idea behind ogas was to use real-time processing to connect economic inputs and outputs, rendering the planned economy both functional and adaptive. What we know is that the failure was not caused by a scarcity of personal computers, because ogas was meant to link factory mainframes. Nor was it ideology: cybernetics, as Peters readably recounts, was well suited to Soviet ideological preferences in materialism and planning. ogas was lost in a sea of committees, personal conflicts, vested interests and glacially paced bureaucracy. In some ways then, Peters’ book is less a tale of the technology developed in the Soviet Union than a tale about the structure of the centralized bureaucracy that managed to nearly bankrupt the entity. Perhaps predictably, ogas’s demise was death by a thousand paper cuts. Documents were misfiled, meetings were missed, and the military and the statistical ministries disagreed about who should benefit. Inevitably, although this network was never functionally realized, this story of how it came to be guides the reader into bigger questions and analysis such as: What if it worked? Where would we be today? Would the Internet as we know today be as overwhelming? The book’s constant “zooming in” on specific issues, most notably the people and politics of what would become some of the infrastructure in the Soviet Union and “zooming out” to look at the big picture, seem particularly convincing. In the end, Peters argues persuasively that the same fundamental forces that contributed to the failure of the Soviet Union are alive and kicking in con- temporary digital environments. In today’s Russia for instance, a series of zeal- ous laws have been recently adopted to tighten the authorities’ grip on the “Russian segment” of the Internet, thus annihilating both the potential of the local digital economy (which is nonetheless impressive in its creativity and success stories such as social networks and search engines), and the free flow of information and online data. One of the last “open windows” for political

the soviet and post-soviet review 45 (2018) 109-128