IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2016 - 11

Book Review
Loren Graham

How Not to Network a Nation
How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet.
By Benjamin Peters. M.I.T. Press, 2016, 312 pages.

enjamin Peters' How
Not to Network a
Nation is a well-informed and significant analysis of an
event in the history of information
systems that is little known in the
West. In the 1960s and 1970s, the
Soviet Union made an enormous
effort to create an economy based
upon a unified network of information systems. The dream was that
what humans alone could not do -
handle a complex economy from
central offices in Moscow - a system
of computers linked together and
controlled centrally could do. Cybernetics would allow the Marxist
dream of a planned economy to be
realized after all. Cybernetics would
rescue the Soviet Union, and, in the
process, communism itself.
This effort failed. Peters wants to
explain why. In his opinion, the reason for the dramatic failure was institutional barriers and resistance. He
shows very clearly how "entrenched
bureaucratic corruption and conflicts
of interest" dashed the dreams of
cyberneticists like Viktor Glushkov. He
even goes so far as to say - comparing
the Soviet effort to the American Arpanet - that "capitalists behaved like
socialists while the socialists behaved
like capitalists." When Glushkov says
that socialists behaved like capitalists,

he seems to be saying that conflicts of
interest are (or "should be") uniquely
capitalist, an observation that some
people would dispute.
Peters has researched his topic
thoroughly. Not only has he read
the relevant sources, but he has
also conducted interviews in Russia with people who still remember, and often participated in, the
events he describes. As a result, he
has written a valuable book that will
undoubtedly stand for many years
as the best work on this important
but underappreciated effort.
Standing behind this impressive research, however, is a large
unanswered question. Could it have
been otherwise - could cybernetics
have saved the Soviet dream? Peters
seems to think that it could have. In
fact, he considers the Soviet effort "a
path not taken" as if this path was,
in fact, realistic. I prefer an alternative answer to the question Peters so
aptly poses, but we will never know
who is correct, since we are now discussing a counterfactual situation. In
my opinion, institutional rivalry in the
Soviet Union was not an unfortunate
barrier to communication systems
that could have been eliminated, but
an inherent feature of the system. In
capitalist societies, people fight over
money. In socialist ones, people fight
over prestige and influence, often
using institutions in that struggle.
In both cases, barriers to rationality and, yes, justice, arise, although

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2016.2592718
Date of publication: 7 September 2016

september 2016

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IEEE Technology and Society Magazine

the barriers are somewhat different.
The nature of those barriers in the
Soviet Union was that a centralized
system in which all institutions cheerfully cooperated was not possible.
People are too ambitious not to compete with their neighbors, even if that
competition is based only on prestige
and influence, not wealth. The barriers in capitalist society, based on the
struggle for money, are also grievous,
but the record is that the capitalist
economy can continue on the basis
of competition without much institutional cooperation. Thus both types
of society have their own defects,
but the Soviet problem was a mortal
threat to the whole system, while the
capitalist defect merely is a disease
that has so far been chronic, not fatal.
Socialist societies need cooperation
to a much greater degree than capitalist ones. The historical record is that
capitalist economies stagger on, with
their inherent inequality and injustice,
while the most prominent socialist
one expired because the barriers that
arose were fatal to the system itself.

Author Information
Loren Graham is Professor Emeritus
of the History of Science at M.I.T.,
Cambridge, MA, and currently a
research associate at the Davis Center
for Russian and Eurasian Studies at
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.
His most recent book is Lysenko's
Ghost: Epigenetics and Russia (2016).
Email: LRG@MIT.EDU.

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