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CHAPTER 1
BEFORE THE COLLAPSE
Programming Cultures in the Soviet Union
Ksenia Tatarchenko
"We desperately need a programmer." — "I'll talk to the guys — I promise — I know ? few who are unhappy." —"We do not need any programmer — said the hook-nosed. — Programmers — are the sought-after people, and are spoiled, but we need the unspoiled one."
— STRUGATSKY BROTHERS, Monday Begins on Saturday (1964)
In the early 1990s, in a typical middle school located in an industrial neighborhood of the city of Novosibirsk, we had an "informatics" class where we learned about the principles of hardware and programming and could play computer games. The machines were not called "computers" but "EVM" (electronic calculating machines); they had a gray and green interface and were all connected to the main computer controlled by the teacher.
My high school was an experimental school endowed with additional funds, and was where I first experienced a modern computer class with "real" personal computers. The classroom itself often stayed closed behind iron doors and barred windows — during the "wild" 1990s the robbery of school computer classrooms supplied with expensive foreign machines was common. This classroom was closed because the informatics teacher I had met during the admission tests left for Israel; she was greatly missed by older students, who said she was very competent. Eventually, the administration found a replacement and we began to learn how to use a text-editing application. By this time it was generally understood that Word and Excel were what informatics classes should be about. In those days, I was busy discovering French existentialism and Russian semiotics and remember cheating on the Excel assignment.
Among other things, the collapse of the Soviet Union wrecked the national education system and opened the country's frontiers: a calamity turned into an opportunity when I got a chance to study abroad. Moving from Russia to France and then to the US, my own personal trajectory impacted my research subject: the history of Soviet computing from a transnational perspective. Working on my PhD thesis and book manuscript (Tatarchenko 2013), I uncovered in the history of computing itself explanations and connections that shed light on what I experienced in my computer classes as compared to those skills taught to my American friends. In this connection, it is worth pointing out that claims stating the Soviets had missed the "Computer Revolution" were at best misleading and that the relative rarity of personal computers in Soviet homes did not represent the absence of a computer industry or professional programmers. I learned that Western and Eastern IT histories were entangled on many levels and that the Iron Curtain simultaneously isolated and connected these two worlds.
To discern the depth of the transnational connections, we need to consider multiple facets of Soviet IT, including: hardware and software as complex technological artifacts; the emergence of a new mathematical discipline called "computer science" in English and informatika in Russian; a set of localized practices; and machines as emblems of political legitimacy. The Cold War military and space race was the chief driving force behind the miniaturization of electronic components encapsulated by what is termed "Moore's law." The military origins of American networking systems and the parallel Soviet efforts to computerize their economy into a single "big data" network are other well-known cases of contemporary IT systems that had Cold War origins. If electronics and computer network technology were the material embodiments of competition between the East and West, the capitalist and socialist versions of modernity were equally rooted in a techno-utopian imaginary that led to different visions of the "Information Age." Accordingly, the curricula for school computer education reflected two versions of an "information society": the American one was predicated on a proficient instrumental use of the personal computer as a basic commodity and a data-processing device; the Soviet one aimed at inculcating thought habits and programming skills in an effort to enable self-control and self-expression for a new kind of responsible individual.
The collapse of the party state and the ensuing political transformations put an end to the project of creating a "socialist information society." The invasion of global IT products following the opening of the Russian markets during the 1990s dramatically altered the material landscape of computing in the New Russia. Yet a half century's worth of Soviet experience with computing did not just disappear; instead, important continuities exist across the 1991 fault line. In this chapter, I take a synthetic approach to the history of Soviet programming in order to provide context and genealogy explaining the distinctly national dimensions of the contemporary IT landscape. First, I provide an overview of the pioneering stage of Soviet programming efforts, as shaped by early Soviet hardware and cybernetics. Next, I focus on the commodification of programming work and analyze the professionalization efforts led by Soviet programming experts who came to claim that programming was a form of human and machine brotherhood. I then conclude with reflections on the philosophy behind the 1985 educational reform, which introduced compulsory programming classes within a context where the cloning of Western hardware became the norm.
EXCLUSIVE AND ILLUSIVE: EARLY PROGRAMMERS BETWEEN ENGINEERS AND CYBERNETICIANS
The specificity of Soviet computing history is inextricably linked to key features of the socialist state: its planned economy and the party's ideological guidance. Centralized power and the planned economy did not lead to an absence of inventiveness or competition. On the contrary, from the first days of Soviet digital computing efforts in the late 1940s, the development of Soviet machines was marked by a rivalry between different groups of specialists. Similar to the Anglo-American debates on the "firsts" embroiling the epithets of "digital," "programmable," and "fully operational," a controversy surrounds the status of the "first" Soviet computer. The chief protagonists in the battle for public memory are M-1 and MESM machines (the former built in Moscow, the latter in the suburbs of Kiev), both important less for their performance characteristics than for their influence on the design and training of the workforce involved in two larger, also competing, hardware projects: Strela and BESM. Operational by the mid-1950s, these two computers engendered a new kind of occupation: professional programming.
Western specialists studying Soviet technology during the Cold War era were little concerned by these priority disputes. Instead, they grappled with the issue of technology transfer, asking questions such as: Were the first Soviet computer developments independent of one another? Were the snippets of information in the form of publicity and published overviews really all the Russians had? As the evidence relating to these questions remains partial at best, it seems sensible to turn our attention to the well-known case of the Soviet nuclear bomb project. According to the latest analysis by historian of science and technology Michael Gordin (2009), even such sustained information-collection efforts as were organized by Soviet intelligence under the secret police chief Lavrentiy Beria could not solve the major problem of information fragmentation, management, and trust. In fact, it was the public knowledge about the technical feasibility of the project and various published reports that were most responsible for the astonishing speed of Soviet nuclear efforts. These observations help elucidate the issue of transfer in the case of Soviet digital computing: feasibility was no doubt the most crucial piece of Western knowledge for early Soviet projects.
If the circulation of scientific overviews stimulated the efforts of Soviet engineers and mathematicians interested in calculation problems, the relationship between early Soviet and early Western computer technology was not limited to a unilateral flow of technical information and soon became shaped by an ideological confrontation over technology's place in society. The speed, size, and cost of early computers attracted the attention of the media and fascinated the Western popular imaginary, famously associating computers with "giant brains." However, in Russia what became known as an anticybernetic campaign was founded in a series of publications that appeared in the Soviet press from the spring of 1950 to the winter of 1955. The first publication was a witty analysis of the militarism implied in the anthropomorphic representation of the Harvard Marc III machine on the pages of Time magazine, but later articles attacked a specific enemy: the new American science of cybernetics (Peters 2012).
In his book Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948), the American mathematician Norbert Wiener introduced the term and gave it a vague definition as "scientific study." The interdisciplinary and metascientific ambitions involved in drawing connections between biological and man-made systems, as well as the explicit analogies between machines and human institutions articulated in Wiener's bestseller, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (1950), made cybernetics an inviting ground for ideological contestation. The Soviet publications labeled cybernetics a pseudoscience, a triumph of semantic idealism, and the newest form of mechanical philosophy, all the while stressing its role as a tool of Western militarism. In the wider context of rising geopolitical tensions and Soviet domestic efforts to exert a hold over the creative and scientific intelligentsia (Zhdanovshchina), the anticybernetic campaign was peculiar because unlike the infamous case of Lysenkoism and the antigenetic campaign, it was not directed against any Soviet individuals or institutions. The most direct result of the anticybernetic publications — the withdrawal of Wiener's books from Soviet libraries — did not mean that Soviet experts ignored this new Western development.
The Soviet ideologues were not the only Soviet specialists to observe the military roots and implications of the new calculating technologies and cybernetic notions. Wiener's works were held in closed libraries and several unofficial translations circulated among experts. One reader was a young graduate of the Dzerzhinsky Artillery Academy, Anatoliy Kitov. Employed as a military representative at the special construction bureau — the SKB-245 — and responsible for the design of the Strela computer, Kitov became an early Soviet programming expert and a proselyte of cybernetic ideas among the Soviet military and scientific elites. Reading and being interested in such ideologically suspicious works was not an act of rebellion but a logical step within a belief system that postulated employing Western technology in a battle against capitalism. Working on secret military projects, early Soviet experts fascinated by cybernetics and digital computing were eager to fight against an imagined Western aggressor, but their immediate threats were much closer — the competitors for state funds offering alternative technical solutions.
Created in 1948 under the auspices of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Precise Mechanics and Computational Technology (ITMiVT) had its mission to develop computational technology inscribed in its very name; tellingly, however, computation did not yet imply "electronic" or "digital" but rather "mechanical." This situation changed in 1950, when the mathematician and explosives expert Mikhail Lavrentyev took over the directorship of the new organization. In his memoirs, Lavrentyev (2000, 57–60) detailed his shrewd solutions for dealing with material scarcity by returning to patronage networks, revealing that no tactic was too dirty. Lavrentyev recounts how he accused leaders of the analogue technology projects of machinations with bureaucratic documents (a common Soviet practice at which Lavrentyev excelled) in order to force them out of the institute. Competitors out, old friends in. Returning to the capital from the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, Lavrentyev also transferred his protégé and the designer of the MESM computer, Sergey Lebedev, and his team of engineers from Kiev to Moscow.
Lavrentyev's reliance on his prewar Moscow networks also brought to the ITMiVT the mathematician Lazar' Lusternik, an old companion from the famous Luzitanya, a group of mathematicians formed around Nikolay Luzin in the 1920s, and a colleague at the Central AeroHydrodynamic Institute (TsAGI), the cradle of Soviet aviation during the 1930s. A leading figure in early Soviet programming efforts at the ITMiVT, Lusternik recreated the practices with which he was familiar from his time at the TsAGI: a close cooperation between mathematicians and engineers as well as scientific forms of interaction. In 1950, he organized a seminar on programming where the available literature was read and discussed in a scientific fashion. Lusternik's seminar led to the publication of an influential overview volume: The Solution of Mathematical Tasks on the Automatic Numerical Machines, a collective work, with the subtitle Programming for High-Speed Electronic Calculating Machines (Lusternik et al. 1952). Over three hundred pages long, it covered all aspects of programming, from a brief introduction to digital computers and numerical systems, to detailed examples of programming techniques for a "hypothetical" three-address machine, which was in fact the BESM computer, which was under development. Circulated under conditions of restricted access, this was the book that introduced most early Soviet programmers to their new craft.
While mathematicians in Lusternik's group considered the problem of how to solve mathematical tasks using computers before any operational Soviet machines even existed, the Soviet science administrators began to work on the crucial question of who would operate them. In 1948, the same year as the creation of the ITMiVT, Moscow State University (MGU) created a new chair in computational mathematics. Here, at the most prestigious school in the country, the mathematics department had few volunteers among its student body willing to abandon their aspirations in pure mathematics for the unknown perspectives of machine mathematics. Assigning students to the chair was the typical top-down solution to the problem of who but not the how of turning them into specialists of the new machine computation. The logic behind the curriculum — freed from many of the traditional subject areas in mathematics to make room for classes like "Algebra of Relays" and "Theory of Machines and Mechanisms" — implied that in order to program one needed to understand the mechanisms of machines. After struggling through the eclectic curriculum, the first graduates of the computational mathematics chair were to learn their jobs on the fly.
According to graduates' memoirs, they spent their last year as interns at the ITMiVT learning to code on the BESM computer. The actual experience of interaction with the new machine was immersive: its twinkling lights, sounds, and heat combined with the very size of the installation impressed its operators with a sense of almost mysterious power. But it is the human element of interaction, the shared learning and competition between peers on how best to control the machine, that had a deep impact on one's sense of self: "Programmers were counted on fingers, and joining this tribe filled one with a feeling of exclusivity" (Podlovchenko 2003, 372). This tribe, a small group of pioneers bound by the unique experience of working on the first Soviet machines, would influence Soviet programming for several decades to come. The members of the group would go on to lead software projects, consult for new hardware development, and teach many generations of programmers. Unlike the designers of the first machines, they are not in the spotlight of public memory but act as a less visible network transmitting disciplinary mythologies.
The important events that shaped the professional representation of this core group were closely associated with cybernetics, which had radically changed its status from a tool of imperialism to a mathematical metascience in the service of communism. By the fall of 1955 — when the existence of Soviet computers was first officially announced in conjunction with an international conference in Darmstadt, West Germany — the scientific reputation of cybernetics had already been publicly redeemed through the appearance of a seminal publication (Sobolev, Kitov, and Lyapunov 1955) titled "Osnovnyye cherty Kibernetiki" (The main features of cybernetics) appearing in the key Soviet ideological journal, Voprosy filosofii (Questions of philosophy). The text of the article was drafted by the young colonel Kitov and cosigned by his former teacher from the Dzerzhinsky Artillery Academy, mathematician Aleksey Lyapunov, and Sergei Sobolev, an academician and mathematical prodigy who contributed to the Soviet nuclear bomb project. The article focused on explaining the subject and methods of cybernetics and stressed the legitimate scientific nature of the discipline. According to Slava Gerovitch (2002), the almost decade-long delay in the introduction of cybernetics to the Soviet public had an impact on its very content: unlike the servomechanisms that inspired Norbert Wiener, computers became the machines of reference in the Soviet version of cybernetics, which began to gain popularity in the late 1950s.
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Excerpted from "From Russia with Code"
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