page_title: Cybernetics in the Soviet Union
section_title: Peak and decline: 1961-1980s
hierarchical_section_title: Cybernetics in the Soviet Union / Peak and decline: 1961-1980s
caption_attribution_description: English: Graph of the number of authors, by year, in the main branches of the Institute of Automation and Remote Control. This Institute was closely associated with Cybernetics in the Soviet Union
context_page_description: Cybernetics in the Soviet Union had its own particular characteristics, as the study of cybernetics interacted with the dominant ideology of the Soviet Union, and its various economic and political reforms: from its unmitigated criticism in the early-1950s, through its legitimisation up to 1961, and its total saturation in the early-1960s, as it attempted to subsume "practically all of Soviet science".
  Initially, from 1950–54, the reception of cybernetics, in the Soviet Union, was exclusively negative. The Soviet Department for Agitation and Propaganda had called for anti-Americanism to be intensified in Soviet media, and in an attempt to fill the Department's quotas, Soviet journalists latched on to cybernetics as an American "reactionary pseudoscience" to denounce and mock. This attack was interpreted as a signal of an official attitude to cybernetics, so, under Joseph Stalin's premiership, cybernetics was inflated into "a full embodiment of imperialist ideology" by Soviet writers.
context_section_description: Berg continued with his campaign for soviet cybernetics into the 1960s as cybernetics entered the soviet mainstream. Berg's council sponsored pro-cybernetic programmes in Soviet media; with 20-minute radio broadcasts, entitled "Cybernetics in Our Lives",  a series of broadcasts on Moscow TV, detailing advances in computer technology, alongside hundreds of lectures before various party members and workers on cybernetics. In 1961, the council produced an official volume proffering cybernetics, entitled Cybernetics—in the Service of Communism.  The work of the council was rewarded when, at the 22nd Party Congress, cybernetics was declared one of the "major tools of the creation of a communist society". Khrushchev declared the development of cybernetics to be an "imperative" in Soviet science. According to Gerovitch, this put cybernetics "in fashion" as "many career-minded scientists began using 'cybernetics' as a buzzword" and the movement swelled with its new membership. The CIA reported that the July 1962 'Conference on the Philosophical Problems of Cybernetics' received "approximately 1000 specialists, mathematicians, philosophers, physicists, economists, psychologists, biologists, engineers, linguists, physicians"  In July 1962, Berg created a plan for the radical restructuring of the Council such that it covered "practically all of Soviet science". This was met with cold reception from many of the researchers of the Council, with one cybernetician complaining, in a letter to Liapunov, that "[t]here are almost no results from the Council. Berg only demands paperwork and strives  for the expansion of the Council." Liapunov, disgruntled with Berg and the non-academic direction of cybernetics, refused to write for Cybernetics—in  the  Service  of Communism and gradually lost his influence in cybernetics. As one memoirist put it, this resignation meant that "the center that had unified cybernetics disappeared, and cybernetics [would] naturally split into numerous branches.” While the old guard of cyberneticians complained, the cybernetics movement, as a whole, was exploding; with the council subsuming 170 projects and 29 institutions by 1962, and 500 projects and 150 institutions by 1967.
  According to Gerovitch, by the 1970s, the "tactical uses of cyberspeak overshadowed the original reformist goals that aspired the first Soviet cyberneticians." The ideas which were once seen as controversial, and huddled under the umbrella organisation of cybernetics, now entered the scientific mainstream, leaving cybernetics as a loose and incoherent ideological patchwork. Some cyberneticians, whose dissident styles had been sheltered by the cybernetics movement, now felt themselves persecuted; cyberneticians such as Valentin Turchin, Alexander Lerner, and Igor Mel'čuk felt the need to immigrate to escape this newfound scientific atmosphere. By the 1980s, cybernetics had lost its cultural relevance, being replaced in Soviet scientific culture with the concepts of 'informatics'.
caption: Number of authors engaged in each discipline of the Institute of Automation and Remote Control, from 1950-69.
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