page_title: History of computing in the Soviet Union
section_title: Post-Stalin era
hierarchical_section_title: History of computing in the Soviet Union / History / Post-Stalin era
caption_attribution_description: English: Ural-1 Control Unit
context_page_description: The history of computing in the Soviet Union began during the late 1940s, when the country began to develop MESM at the Kiev Institute of Electrotechnology in Feofaniya. Initial ideological opposition to cybernetics in the Soviet Union in general was overcome during the Khrushchev era, and computer production was officially encouraged.
  By the early 1970s, uncoordinated work by competing government ministries left the Soviet computer industry lacking common standards in peripherals and digital capacity which led to a significant technological lag behind Western producers. The Soviet government decided to abandon the development of original computer designs and encouraged the pirating of Western systems.
  Soviet industry lacked the technology to mass-produce computers with acceptable quality standards, and locally manufactured copies of Western hardware were unreliable. As personal computers spread to industries and offices in the West, the Soviet Union's technological lag increased.
  Nearly all Soviet computer manufacturers ceased operations after the breakup of the Soviet Union.
context_section_description: As in the United States, early computers were intended for scientific and military calculations. Automatic data processing systems made their debut by the mid-1950s with the Minsk and Ural systems, both designed by the Ministry of Radio Technology. The Ministry of Instrument Making also entered the computer field with the ASVT system, which was based on the PDP-8.
  The Strela computer, commissioned in December 1956, performed calculations for Yuri Gagarin's first manned spaceflight. The Strela was designed by Special Design Bureau 245 (SKB-245) of the Ministry of Instrument Making.  Strela chief designer Y. Y. Bazilevsky received the Hero of Socialist Labor title for his work on the project. Setun, an experimental ternary computer, was designed and manufactured in 1959.
  The Khrushchev Thaw relaxed ideological limitations, and by 1961 the government encouraged the construction of computer factories. The Mir-1, Mir-2 and Mir-3 computers were produced at the Kiev Institute of Cybernetics during the 1960s. Victor Glushkov began his work on OGAS, a real-time, decentralised, hierarchical computer network, in the early 1960s, but the project was never completed. Soviet factories began manufacturing transistor computers during the early years of the decade.
  At that time, ALGOL was the most common programming language in Soviet computing centers. ALGOL 60 was used with a number of domestic variants, including ALGAMS, MALGOL and Alpha. ALGOL remained the most popular language for university instruction into the 1970s.
  The MINSK-2 was a solid-state digital computer that went into production in 1962, and the Central Intelligence Agency attempted to obtain a model. The BESM-6, introduced in 1965, performed at about 800 KIPS on the Gibson Mix benchmark—ten times greater than any other serially-produced Soviet computer of the period, and similar in performance to the CDC 3600. From 1968 to 1987, 355 BESM-6 units were produced. With instruction pipelining, memory interleaving and virtual address translation, the BESM-6 was advanced for the era; however, it was less well known at the time than the MESM.
  The Ministry of the Electronics Industry was established in 1965, ending the Ministry of Radio Technology's primacy in computer production. The following year, the Soviet Union signed a cooperation agreement with France to share research in the computing field after the United States prevented France from purchasing a CDC 6600 mainframe. In 1967, the Unified System of Electronic Computers project was launched to create a general-purpose computer with the other Comecon countries.
  Soyuz 7K-L1 was the first Soviet piloted spacecraft with an onboard digital computer, the Argon-11S. Construction of the Argon-11S was completed in 1968 by the Scientific Research Institute of Electronic Machinery. According to Piers Bizony, lack of computing power was a factor in the failure of the Soviet manned lunar program.
caption: Ural-1 control unit
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