CHAPTER FOUR

CYBERNETICS AS A VEHICLE OF REFORM AND A BANDWAGON

The mathematization of science is a mathematization of life.

Mathematician Sergei Sobolev,The Poetry of Mathematics1

Anybody who met with mathematicians more or less regularlycan easily imagine a catastrophic picture of the world

in which our life and activity are mathematized.

Biologist Nikolai Timofeev-Resovskii,Memoirs2

Aleksei Liapunov, Sergei Sobolev, and Anatolii Kitov—the three authors of the 1955 article, “The Main Features of Cybernetics,” the first Soviet publication speaking positively about cybernetics—made a deliberate attempt to “upgrade” cybernetics to the status of fundamental science. What for Wiener was the principle of feedback, the three authors turned into “the theory of feedback”; basic ideas of digital computing became “the theory of automatic high-speed electronic calculating machines”; and cybernetic models of human thinking were now called the “theory of self-organizing logical processes.”3 Soviet cybernetics transcended the domain of engineering and fashioned itself as a science, a systematic study of the laws of nature. The “nature” that cybernetics studied, however, was of a special kind: it was an “objective” world constituted by information exchanges and control processes. The electrical engineer Igor Poletaev—the author of the first Soviet book on cybernetics, Signal—wrote: “The laws of existence and transformation of information are objective and accessible for study. . . . The determination of these laws, their precise description, and the use of information-processing algorithms, especially control algorithms, together constitute the content of cybernetics.”4 Cybernetics brought with it a new concept of objectivity, related to the epistemological status of computers as “mathematical machines.”

The cybernetic project put forward in the Soviet Union aspired to unify several diverse cybernetic theories elaborated in the West—control theory, information theory, the theory of computing, etc.—in a single overarching conceptual framework, which would serve as the foundation for a general scientific methodology applicable to a wide range of scientific and engineering disciplines. The farther Soviet society departed from Stalinism, the more radical became the cybernetic project. Step by step, Soviet cyberneticians overturned earlier criticisms

1 S.Sobolev, “Poeziia matematiki,” Literaturnaia gazeta (14 December 1961): 1.2 N.V. Timofeev-Resovskii, Vospominaniia (Moscow: Progress/Pangeia, 1995), p. 236.3 S.L. Sobolev, A.I. Kitov, and A.A. Liapunov, “Osnovnye cherty kibernetiki,” Voprosy filosofii, no. 4 (1955): 136.4 I.A. Poletaev, Signal: O nekotorykh poniatiiakh kibernetiki (Moscow: Sovetskoe radio, 1958), p. 23.

in every aspect and put forward the goal of the “cybernetization” of the entire science enterprise—an even more ambitious agenda than that expounded in Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics. In this role, cybernetics proved a rival to dialectical materialism—the official Soviet philosophy of science. In the post-Stalinist period, the watchdog role of Soviet philosophers in scientific controversies was undermined, and cybernetics played a prominent role in discrediting dogmatic philosophy. As soon as cybernetics was legitimized, however, it acquired some of the key features of the dominant philosophical discourse—the claim of universal applicability, the claim of objectivity, and the claim of political significance. Cybernetics defeated official philosophy and now claimed its place as a general methodology of science.

Soviet cybernetics enveloped a broad range of disciplines—from mathematics to biology to physiology to linguistics to economics to legal studies—claiming the validity of a unified cybernetic approach in each of these fields. This approach itself, however, had an internal problem—it was based on an eclectic assembly of mathematical, logical, and computing methods, which lacked unity. The conglomerate of disciplines brought under the cybernetic umbrella was unified at best by the Wittgensteinian “family resemblance.” A general cybernetic approach was yet to be created, and this became a goal of the Soviet cybernetics project. This evolving project, rather than any particular finished theory, is examined below. While some of the theories from the cybernetic family developed rather successfully, the overall cybernetics project had a very different fate.

The Computer as a Paragon of Objectivity

Computing in the Soviet Union emerged as a branch of mathematics: computers were called “mathematical machines,” software was termed “mathematical support,” the first articles on computing were published in mathematical journals, the first courses were taught at mathematics departments, and among the first Soviet institutions created specifically for large-scale computer-based calculations was an organization named the Division of Applied Mathematics of the Mathematical Institute.5 Computer algorithms were written in the language of mathematical formalisms and were expected to be on the same level of rigor. The objectivity of mathematical inference was now associated with computer calculations. Seen as a “mathematical machine” rather than a merely technical device, the computer became a symbol of incorruptibility, an honest agent that would never tell a lie.

Many scientists and engineers extolled the computer as a paragon of objectivity. The computer set an example for man to follow. In 1958, Poletaev wrote in his Signal: “working with computers nurtures in man precise and rigorous thinking and the ability to critically

5 On the history of Soviet computing, see Heather Campbell, Organization of Research, Development and Production in the Soviet Computer Industry, report R-1617-PR (Santa Monica: The Rand Corporation, December 1976); Gregory D. Crowe, and Seymour E. Goodman, “S.A. Lebedev and the Birth of Soviet Computing,” Annals of the History of Computing 16:1 (Spring 1994): 4-24; Andrei P. Ershov and Mikhail R. Shura-Bura, “The Early Development of Programming in the USSR,” trans. Ken Kennedy, in N. Metropolis, J. Howlett, and Gian-Carlo Rota, eds., A History of Computing in the Twentieth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1980), pp. 137-96; B.N. Malinovskii, Istoriia vychislitel’noi tekhniki v litsakh (Kiev: Kit, 1995); George Rudins, “Soviet Computers: A Historical Survey,” Soviet Cybernetics Review 4:1 (January 1970): 6-44; George M. Weinberger, comp. and ed., Soviet Cybernetic Technology, 2 vols. (Lanham, University Press of America, 1985).

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evaluate his own decisions and actions. One can hardly object to this kind of moral education.”6 On another occasion, he argued:7

One cannot communicate with a [computing] machine by hints, half-words, or reticent expressions. The machine does not tolerate contradictions, even inner and hidden ones. The machine does not comprehend vague and fuzzy concepts. When working with the machine, one has to think things through to the very end, without errors and without blunders. The machine forces man to be honest, precise, rigorous, and ready to accept the truth, however unexpected and bitter it might be. Gradually, this becomes a school of thinking and behavior.

The image of an objective, truth-telling computer became a vehicle for the emerging cybernetic discourse. Cyberneticians argued that the very fact of computer implementation of a scientific model would make research more rigorous and objective. In a typical statement, the prominent Soviet physiologist Nikolai Bernstein wrote in the early 1960s:8

In human thinking, there is always certain unconscious arbitrariness, and as a result, an author’s ardent belief may prompt him to take the desired for real. But a model presented as a program for digital computer or as an electronic analog device would not yield to any attempts to persuade it or to make it change its mind with regard to something incompatible with its structure. The model works strictly in accordance with the objective laws of nature and the equally firmly established laws of mathematics. For this reason, the model serves as a demanding and unyielding criterion for determining whether a given conception adequately reflects its prototype

Mathematician Aleksei Liapunov regarded the possibility of constructing a computer model as the criterion of scientific truth. The question whether and how such a model could be built was, in his view, the subject of cybernetics. Cybernetics thus paved the road to the truth:9

The criterion of whether the functioning of some control system is known must be the possibility of modeling this system in a universal computing machine, i.e., in a control system the functioning of which is completely formalized. . . . The basic method of cybernetics is the algorithmic description of the functioning of control systems.

The cybernetic criterion of scientific objectivity was overtly put forward as non-ideological, non-class-oriented, non-Party-minded, and non-philosophical. In sharp contrast to the academic discourse of the recent past, cyberneticians sought the foundation of objectivity in the rigor of mathematical formulas and computer algorithms. Liapunov argued that necessary 6 Poletaev, Signal, p. 383.7 I.A. Poletaev, “Chelovek v mire budushchego,” in Tochnye metody v issledovaniiakh kul’tury i iskusstva: Materialy k simpoziumu, part I (Moscow, 1971), p. 109.8 Quoted in V.V. Parin et al., eds., Problemy kibernetiki: Nekotorye itogi i problemy filosofsko-metodologicheskikh issledovanii (Moscow: Znanie, 1969), p. 124 (emphasis original).9 A.A. Liapunov, “O nekotorykh obshchikh voprosakh kibernetiki,” [1958] in Idem, Problemy teoreticheskoi i prikladnoi kibernetiki, ed. S.L. Sobolev (Moscow: Nauka, 1980), pp. 56-57 (emphasis original).

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conditions for the objectivity of scientific knowledge were “quantitative methods, precise language, and precise concepts for representing knowledge.”10 The precise language of cybernetics was to replace the vague and manipulative language of ideological discourse in those fields where mathematics so far had not reached. The new concept of scientific objectivity associated with mathematics and computing lay at the core of Soviet cybernetics. Cybernetics had a special mission—to bring objectivity to the entire family of the natural and social sciences.

The Project for the “Cybernetization” of Science

One of the main theoretical underpinnings of cybernetics was the analogy between the computer and the human nervous system. Both were seen as information-processing devices functioning according to similar rules. The analogy went both ways: from physiology toward technology (in the case of applying biological knowledge to build efficient devices) and from technology toward physiology (when technical terms and mathematical formalisms were employed to describe the functioning of an organism). In the United States, Norbert Wiener’s original eclectic synthesis of diverse scientific and engineering concepts in his Cybernetics (1948) did not hold together: various threads of the cybernetic quilt—computing, control engineering, information theory, operations research, and game theory—soon parted their ways. Soviet cyberneticians, on the contrary, regarded cybernetics as a potential basis for the grand unification of human knowledge. One science journalist summarized such views in a vivid image: “Cybernetics is probably the only possible instrument for reassembling the falling apart temple of science.”11

Soviet authors regarded cybernetics as an “exact science,”12 which, if applied to a given field of inquiry, would be capable of transforming that field into a rigorous research discipline. “The spread of cybernetic methods to ever wider domains makes it possible to speak of the trend toward the cybernetization of modern science,” they wrote.13 This trend called for representing the subject of every discipline in a unified, “formalized and functional” way and eventually facilitated a synthesis of the sciences.14 In this sense, Soviet cybernetics was not a settled discipline, but rather an ambitious project of radical transformation of the entire science enterprise along the path of formalization and computer modeling.

Soviet cybernetics emerged as a “trading zone” (to use Peter Galison’s term), where specialists from mathematics, computer engineering, and physiology could meet and trade their theories, methods, hypotheses, etc.15 Gradually the nomenclature of the traded goods expanded to include theories and concepts from sociology, economics, linguistics, psychology, and many other fields. As a mediating language, in the role of a pidgin or creole, cyberneticians used what

10 A.A. Liapunov, “O roli matematiki v sovremennoi chelovecheskoi kul’ture,” [1968] in Idem., Problemy teoreticheskoi i prikladnoi kibernetiki, p. 297.11 Irina Radunskaia, Aksel’ Berg—chelovek XX veka (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1971), p. 365.12 V.V. Parin, “Primenenie kibernetiki v biologii i meditsine,” in A.M. Kuzin, ed., Biologicheskie aspekty kibernetiki (Moscow: AN SSSR, 1962), p. 22.13 Ibidem, (emphasis original).14 Ibidem.15 In his recent study of the subcultures of instrumentation, experiment, and theory within the larger culture of microphysics, Galison calls a “trading zone” the area where, despite the vast differences in their symbolic and cultural systems, different groups can collaborate. See Peter L. Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1997), esp. ch. 9.

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they called a “technical-mathematical-biological-psychological scientific language.”16 This cybernetic language—or cyberspeak—combined terms from computing (algorithm), control engineering (control, feedback), communications engineering (information, signal), physiology (adaptation, homeostasis, reflex), psychology (behavior, learning, memory), and other disciplines.

The mediating role of cybernetics is reflected, for example, in the chart drawn by one of the leading Leningrad cyberneticians Leonid Kraizmer (see Figure 4.1).17 Cybernetics occupies the center of his chart and ties all the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities together. As a tribute to the traditional role of dialectical materialism, philosophy is reigning over this kingdom of sciences, but one cannot help noticing that cybernetics is the only field which is not subordinate to philosophy. “Cybernetics,” Kraizmer writes, “embraces all sciences—not entirely, but only in the part related to control processes.”18

Liapunov envisioned a similar role for cybernetics—at the heart of the tree of knowledge (see Figure 4.2). In his hierarchy of sciences, Liapunov, known for his aversion to the official philosophical discourse, skipped philosophy altogether and placed logic and mathematics on top. Cybernetics, along with physics and statistics, again occupied the central position on the chart; its function was to serve as a basis for the natural sciences, engineering, and the humanities.

Together with his colleague at the Division of Applied Mathematics Sergei Iablonskii, Liapunov summarized the project for the “cybernetization” of science in a huge human-size table, which included twelve methods of cybernetic analysis (determining information exchanges, deciphering information code, determining the functions and elements of the control system, etc.) each applied to eight fields of study (economics, computer programming, hardware design, production control, linguistics, genetics, evolutionary biology, and physiology).19 Liapunov carried this table with him to numerous lectures in diverse scientific, engineering, and public audiences. Biologists and linguists, economists and computer scientists—all found a cell for themselves in this grand design. In 1956-57, Liapunov and his associates delivered over one hundred lectures on cybernetics in various academic institutions.20 The cybernetics movement spread over a wide range of disciplines and became a large-scale phenomenon far beyond the original set of man-machine analogies and mathematical techniques.

Taken as a general scientific methodology, cybernetics directly challenged some of the postulates of the official dialectical materialist philosophy of science; in particular, cybernetics undermined the rigid divisions between scientific disciplines. Such divisions, which separated various “levels of the motion of matter” from one another, were canonized by dogmatic Soviet philosophers on the basis of Marx and Engels’s “authoritative” remarks about the nineteenth-century science. During the Stalin era, such divisions served to invalidate the use of mathematical methods in the social sciences and the life sciences and to claim the special status for the “social historical laws” and “biological laws,” which did not have to comply with either logical or mathematical standards. The “cybernetization” of science gave mathematics a mandate to penetrate the sciences without restraint. Mathematician Andrei Markov expressed this view very clearly:21

16 Parin et al., eds., Problemy kibernetiki, p. 40.17 Figures are included after this chapter.18 L.P. Kraizmer, Kibernetika (Leningrad: Ekonomika, 1977), p. 17.19 See A.A. Liapunov and S.V. Iablonskii, “Teoreticheskie problemy kibernetiki,” [1963] in Liapunov, Problemy teoreticheskoi i prikladnoi kibernetiki, pp. 71-88.20 “Nauka li kibernetika?” Znanie—sila, no. 3 (1957): 48.

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One must not subdivide science into separate specialties with impenetrable fences, claiming that physicists should do [only] physics, mathematicians—mathematics, and biologists—biology. I think this trend is totally wrong and harmful. Science in essence is one, and all our classifications of the sciences are conventional . . . Nature is one, and the sciences in essence comprise a single entity.

From a cybernetic perspective, mathematics, not philosophy, had the right to set examples for the sciences to follow. The law scholar Vladimir Kudriavtsev, for example, explained the tasks of a cybernetic approach to legal studies as follows: “It is our aspiration that justice, humanism, inevitability, truth and other legal concepts [would be] based on indisputable data and [be] therefore as exact as the concepts of mathematics, physics, and chemistry.”22

Having rejected the dominant role of philosophy in academic discourse, Soviet scientists put forward cybernetics as a substitute. They rejected the dogmatic version of dialectical materialism but accepted the premise that some kind of a universal philosophy of science, a general scientific methodology, or a meta-science was needed. Soviet cybernetics was constructed specifically to play this role.

The Scientific Council on Cybernetics

In January 1959, the presidium of the Academy of Sciences appointed a commission of twenty members to examine the prospects of cybernetic research.23 The commission was given two weeks to complete its work. Academician Aksel’ Berg was appointed chairman of the commission.

Berg’s personality made a decisive impact on the future of Soviet cybernetics.24 Aksel’ Ivanovich Berg (1893-1979) was born in Orenburg in a prominent noble family; his father was a retired general of the Tsarist army. Berg served in the Imperial Navy and fought in World War I. After the Russian Revolution, he served in the Red Navy as a submarine commander. In 1925, he graduated from the Department of Electrical Engineering of the Navy Academy in Leningrad, specializing in radio engineering. In the 1920s, Berg taught radio engineering in various Leningrad institutions; in 1927-32, he served as head of the section of communication and navigation of the Scientific Technical Committee of the Navy Administration of the Red Army. In 1932, he was appointed head of the Naval Scientific Research Institute of Communication. In December 1937, however, on the wave of the Great Terror, Berg was arrested on trumped-up

21 A.A. Markov, “Ob otnoshenii fizicheskikh zakonov k biologicheskim,” in G.M. Frank and A.M. Kuzin, eds., O sushchnosti zhizni (Moscow: Nauka, 1964), p. 169.22 Quoted in V. Pekelis, Cybernetic Medley, trans. Oleg Sapunov (Moscow: Mir, 1986), p. 186.23 Eight members of the commission were drawn from the Engineering Division of the Academy, six from the Division of Physics and Mathematics, two from the Division of Biology and Medicine, and two from the Division of Economics; see A.I. Berg, “Osnovnye voprosy kibernetiki,” [1959] in Idem, Izbrannye trudy, vol. II (Moscow: Energiia, 1964), p. 35.24 On Berg, see I.V. Brenev and A.P. Epifanova, comps., Aksel’ Ivanovich Berg: Materialy k biobibliografii (Moscow: Nauka, 1965); D.A. Pospelov, “Aksel’ Ivanovich Berg (K stoletiiu so dnia rozhdeniia),” Izvestiia AN SSSR: Tekhnicheskaia kibernetika, no. 5 (1993): 4-7; Radunskaia, Aksel’ Berg; I.A. Riabinin et al., Akademik Aksel’ Ivanovich Berg (K stoletiiu so dnia rozhdeniia) (Moscow: Gosudarstvennyi Politekhnicheskii muzei, 1993); and V.I. Siforov, ed., Put’ v bol’shuiu nauku: akademik Aksel’ Berg (Moscow: Nauka, 1988).

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charges and put into prison. In May 1940, all charges were dismissed and he was released. During World War II, he played a key role in the development of Soviet radar. In 1943, he was appointed deputy chairman of the State Defense Committee Council on Radar and deputy People’s Commissar of Electrical Industry of the USSR. In 1944, Berg joined the Communist Party. In 1946, he was elected full member of the Academy of Sciences and soon became member of the bureau of the Engineering Division of the Academy. In 1953, he was appointed deputy minister of defense in charge of radioelectronics; in 1957, however, after a severe heart attack, he had to resign for health reasons. He retired in the rank of Engineer Admiral. In 1957-60, he served as consultant to the Ministry of Defense; in 1958-59, he headed the Scientific Technical Council of the State Planning Committee on complex mechanization and automation of production.

Berg applied to the cause of cybernetics the same energy and organizational skills that had served him well during the war. He mobilized a large group of experts to write a fundamental report on the state of cybernetics for the Academy commission he headed. As a result, it took three months, instead of two weeks, to complete the commission’s work. Finally, on April 10, 1959, the presidium of the Academy of Sciences heard his report.25 Berg argued that numerous institutions conducting cybernetic research were scattered over vast geographical areas and divided by bureaucratic barriers; he stressed the need for a central organ that would coordinate this research in the entire Soviet Union. Answering questions, he drew a gloomy picture of the current situation, which could hardly be tolerated:26

There is not a single production control machine working now in the Soviet Union. . . . Electronic machines do not control a single production process anywhere [in the Soviet Union], but they will in the next few years. . . . After a number of institutions were united under a single Special Committee headed by Kalmykov, proper organization of work still has not been achieved. There is no proper contact between [the computer plant in] Penza, [the computer plant in Erevan headed by] Mergelian, and our Moscow institutions, even on specific questions.

The Presidium resolved to establish the Scientific Council on Cybernetics and proposed Berg as chairman. Berg admitted that he was no expert on cybernetics:27

I have no idea how I got into the chairman’s seat. A.A. Liapunov came and told me that they asked me to be chairman. Nevertheless I think that a prominent mathematician like Keldysh or someone else should be the head. Although I have worked a lot in this field, it is not necessary that I should became the head. I am not quite fit for this: I do not know everything; I would simply say that I do not know enough and cannot do this as a specialist would. I do not say this out of modesty; this is really so.

25 This report was published as Berg, “Osnovnye voprosy kibernetiki.”26 Stenogramma zasedaniia prezidiuma Akademii nauk SSSR, April 10, 1959; the Russian Academy of Sciences Archive (Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Akademii Nauk [ARAN]), f. 2, op. 3a, d. 236, l. 16.27 Ibid., l. 20.

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President of the Academy Aleksandr Nesmeianov replied: “Judging by the state of cybernetics, there are no people around who would know everything, for even the boundaries [of this field] are not clear. I think we should confirm the leadership of the Council as is, and later work will tell.”28 Berg was appointed chairman, and Aleksei Liapunov and Aleksandr Kharkevich his deputies.

Liapunov was the main force behind the idea of organizing the Council. It was he who dragged Berg out of quiet retirement and asked him to chair the Council, hoping to capitalize on Berg’s influence to the advantage of the new field. On April 9, 1959, on the eve of his report to the Academy presidium, Berg wrote to Liapunov: “Dear Aleksei Andreevich! Please review the text of my report for tomorrow’s session of the presidium and make any corrections.”29 Liapunov himself at that time was not yet elected to the Academy and possessed neither administrative power, nor corresponding skills. Under the shield of Berg’s authority, Liapunov hoped to be able to implement his program of the “cybernetization” of Soviet science.

Berg, with his strong connections and considerable influence in the government and among the military, was a very powerful advocate of cybernetics. His style happily combined the gallantry of the Russian nobility, the iron fist of the Soviet military, and a naïve belief in the bright Communist future. Berg perceived himself as a spokesman for progress; his publications were packed with expressions like “the new scientific and technological opportunities,” “a new science,” “progressive scientists,” “the reevaluation of values,” “the rejection of obsolete doctrines,” and “the path of progress.” For him, it was the new and “young” science of cybernetics that embodied this progressive spirit. Berg pushed cybernetics forward with the thrust of an icebreaker. His worst enemies were “skeptics, dogmatists, and conservatives,” “backward people.”30 During one of his frequent television appearances, Berg passionately exclaimed that conservatives, those who interfere with scientific progress, should be “publicly executed by a firing squad in Red Square.”31 In his unpublished remarks at one of the sessions of his Council, Berg expressed his position in unequivocal terms:32

When the computer enters our home . . . there will be no need to call a doctor; the machine will tell you what to do. Students will not have to go some place and listen to hideous lectures of old pensioners, who know nothing; programs will be optimized and you will have connection with a machine, which will come to your home, as water and light did . . . If someone does not believe it, let him commit suicide. This is the future and we will fight for it and we will weed out anybody who would interfere.

At the April 1959 session of the Academy presidium, one of the presidium members advised Berg to propagate cybernetic ideas more widely. Berg remarked that there was no forum for that, since there was not a single periodical cybernetic publication in the country. “Do this in the popular press for now,” was the answer. “Very well,” replied Berg and took this advice very seriously. The propaganda of cybernetics became one of the main activities of Berg’s Council. The 1961 report of the Council listed such accomplishments as twelve 20-minute broadcasts on 28 Ibidem.29 Berg to Liapunov, April 9, 1959; Natal’ia Liapunova’s archive (emphasis original).30 G.G. Vorob’ev, “A.I. Berg i sotsial’naia kibernetika,” in Siforov, ed., Put’ v bol’shuiu nauku, p. 227.31 Quoted in B.V. Gnedenko, “Otstaivaia issledovatel’skii poisk,” in Siforov, ed., Put’ v bol’shuiu nauku, p. 147.32 Stenogramma Iubileinoi sessii Nauchnogo Soveta po kompleksnoi probleme “Kibernetika,” December 12, 1967; ARAN, f. 1807, op. 1, d. 134, ll. 210-11.

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the Moscow radio under the title, “Cybernetics in Our Lives”; a series of programs on the Moscow TV channel entitled, “Faster than Thought”; the preparation of another series, “Cybernetics in Biology and Medicine”; over two hundred lectures were given before various “collectives of workers, clerks, students, engineers, scientists, managers, and the personnel of the Central Committee of the Communist Party.”33

The Council was also active in publishing cybernetic works of Soviet and foreign authors, organizing conferences and workshops, disseminating information about works in progress, etc.34 Within the Council, Berg organized a number of sections along disciplinary lines; each section was responsible for nationwide cybernetic research in the corresponding field. Originally, eight sections were created: mathematics, engineering, economics, mathematical machines (i.e., computers), biology, linguistics, reliability theory, and a “special section” (presumably, military research).35 The number of sections grew very fast; soon the sections of philosophy and psychology were added, the section of transportation problems split off the economics section, etc. By 1967, the number of sections reached fifteen:36

1. Mathematical problems of cybernetics;2. General and mathematical problems of information theory;3. Information-measuring systems;4. Engineering cybernetics;5. Reliability theory;6. Application of cybernetics in power systems;7. Application of cybernetics in transportation;8. Biological and medical cybernetics;9. Bionics;10. Application of cybernetics and computer technology in chemistry;11. Philosophical problems of cybernetics;12. Psychology and cybernetics;13. Semiotics;14. Economic cybernetics;15. Cybernetics and law.

Initially, the Council had a very small secretarial staff and focused on coordination rather than original research. The staff was slowly growing; new staff members were usually appointed as academic secretaries of the Council sections and took responsibility for the corresponding field.37 The academic secretaries collected prospective research plans from various institutions, compiled a joint nationwide annual plan of cybernetic research and distributed its copies to the 33 “Otchet o deiatel’nosti Soveta po kibernetike za period s marta po oktiabr’ 1961 goda,” 1961; ARAN, f. 1807, op. 1, d. 4, l. 20.34 S.I. Samoilenko, “A.I. Berg i razvitie kibernetiki v Sovetskom Soiuze,” in V.I. Siforov, ed., Put’ v bol’shuiu nauku: akademik Aksel’ Berg (Moscow: Nauka, 1988), p. 139-40.35 Protokol No. 1 zasedaniia Nauchnogo Soveta po kibernetike pri Prezidiume Akademii nauk SSSR, June 26, 1959; ARAN, f. 1807, op. 1, d. 1, l. 1.36 A.I. Berg, “Ot redaktora,” in Idem, ed., Kibernetiku—na sluzhbu kommunizmu, vol. 5 (Moscow: Energiia, 1967), pp. 8-9.37 By April 1963, the staff of the Council numbered 21; see “Otchet o nauchno-issledovatel’skoi rabote Soveta za 1962 g.,” April 1963; ARAN, f. 1807, op. 1, d. 10, l. 57. By 1967, the Council had 26 staff members, including 15 researchers; see S.S. Maschan, “V Nauchnom sovete po kompleksnoi probleme ‘Kibernetika’,” in Siforov, ed., Put’ v bol’shuiu nauku, p. 211.

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Academy leadership, governmental agencies, and the institutions themselves. This practice both fostered the exchange of information among institutions involved in cybernetic research and gave high visibility to cybernetics.

In the 1966 annual report, the Council’s nationwide coordination activity for the previous few years was summarized in the following table:38

Year 1962 1963 1964-65 1966

Projects 170 231 374 428

Institutions 29 61 96 133

Agencies 14 19 22 27

In 1962-66, the Council sponsored some 20 major national conferences on various cybernetic topics.39

Historian David Holloway has argued that the interdisciplinary nature of the Council on Cybernetics had promoted the emphasis on cybernetics as a “synthesizing and unifying perspective in natural science.”40 Berg’s activity, however, seemed to emphasize the expansion of cybernetics at the expense of meaningful synthesis. Berg pushed to widen the scope of the Council’s interests; correspondingly, he expanded the concept of cybernetics almost without limit to incorporate ever greater number of disciplines. In July 1962, he proposed to reorganize the Council along the lines of a two-dimensional interdisciplinary matrix. He illustrated this idea in the form of a table with eight rows representing such fundamental fields as philosophy, psychology, mathematics, information theory, computing, reliability theory, physics, and chemistry, and twelve columns representing fields like biology, medicine, neurocybernetics, physiology, management of the national economy, economics, linguistics, law, power industry, production, chemical industry, and transportation.41 The total number of cells in the table amounted to 96, and the Council, according to Berg’s plan, was to coordinate nationwide research in all 96 areas! Members of the bureau of the Council were stunned. Director of the Academy of Sciences Computer Center Anatolii Dorodnitsyn bluntly stated that it was “impossible to implement everything proposed.”42 Mathematician Boris Gnedenko, then deputy chairman of the Council, agreed: “We cannot do everything; we do not have sufficient forces. It is necessary to separate the most important part, i.e., the one that actually relates to cybernetics, and appoint a commission of 10-15 members to hear all serious proposals.”43

A few days after this meeting, Iablonskii wrote to Liapunov, who by that time had already moved to Akademgorodok in Siberia and lost control over the activities of the Council:44

38 “Otchet Soveta po kibernetike za 1966 god”; ARAN, f. 1807, op. 1, d. 93, l. 4.39 Berg, “Ot redaktora,” pp. 6-7.40 David Holloway, “Innovation in Science—the Case of Cybernetics in the Soviet Union,” Science Studies 4 (1974): 329.41 Protokol rasshirennogo zasedaniia biuro Soveta po kibernetike, July 5, 1962; ARAN, f. 1807, op. 1, d. 18, l. 49.42 Ibid., l. 46.43 Ibid., l. 47.44 Iablonskii to Liapunov, July 12, 1962; Natal’ia Liapunova’s archive.

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On the Council. [The situation] got very difficult. There are almost no results from the Council. Berg only demands paperwork and strives for expanding the Council. Recently B.V. [Gnedenko] and I visited Berg. The visit left a sad impression. Even B.V. is now talking of independent activities. Berg demands plans, personal assignments of tasks, and so on, while we insist on formulating central problems and focusing all efforts on their solution. Such issues, in our opinion, must be the following: the organization of the Institute of Mathematical Problems of Cybernetics, the strengthening and expansion of Problems of Cybernetics, and the support of certain research groups. Our opinions sharply diverged. Berg told us to draft plans and all sorts of explanations, and then he would see. In the meantime, the approved [research staff] positions have already disappeared (probably, wasted on some nonsense). We have not gotten a single position for research!

Liapunov, editor of the series Problems of Cybernetics, was struggling to get the authorities’ permission to turn this publication into a regular journal; without Berg’s support, however, he did not succeed. The cybernetic movement spread well beyond Liapunov’s original design and took on a life of its own. No single person was now directing this movement. Various groups began to pull Soviet cybernetics in different directions in accordance with their particular political and research agendas.

Cybernetics as an Umbrella for Unorthodox Research

Lacking the necessary background in mathematics, Berg was willing to include in the domain of cybernetics any study that involved the use of such terms as “control,” “information,” and “communication,” even if their meaning was colloquial rather than strictly mathematical. Scientists and engineers whose ideas were rejected by the establishment often appealed to him and in many cases found complete support. Under the umbrella of cybernetics, unorthodox researchers found a niche for themselves; the Council on Cybernetics funded their conferences, published their papers, and legalized their research plans as part of a unified national plan of cybernetic research. Vasilii Nalimov—one of the leading Soviet specialists in statistics—recalled:45

[Berg,] strictly speaking, was not a scientist. He was, however, a true member of intelligentsia and understood the situation in science and technology, as well as the general political situation, very well. Fate brought him onto the crest of the wave—despite many people’s resentment, he became chairman of the Council on Cybernetics under the presidium of the Academy of Sciences. This honorary position gave him the opportunity to influence scientific developments. Cybernetics in this country at that time acquired the status of a “free movement” aimed against ideological stagnation. Aksel’ Ivanovich proved a brilliant leader of this movement. He has done a lot for the liberation of science.

45 V.V. Nalimov, Kanatokhodets (Moscow: Progress, 1994), p. 247.

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Nalimov’s biography is a vivid illustration of Berg’s support for the outcasts. Nalimov returned to Moscow in early 1955 after spending 18 years in Stalinist prisons and labor camps; he managed to find a job at the All-Union Institute of Scientific and Technical Information. In 1959, with two co-authors, he published the article, “Scientific and Technical Information as a Cybernetic Problem,” where the problem of determining the structure of a chemical compound was formulated as the problem of an automatic search for “chemical information.”46 Soon he moved to the Institute of Rare Metals (Giredmet), which obtained one of the early Soviet digital computers, and started research on statistical analysis of experimental results and planning of chemical experiments. Statistical methods were met with suspicion by traditional chemists, who were accustomed to rigid determinist models. Berg provided substantial support to Nalimov by organizing a “chemical cybernetics” section at his Council and making Nalimov its head (a nominal position without pay, but with some authority).47 In 1961, Berg invited another former GULAG prisoner Elena Markova to fill one of the few full-time positions at the Council and appointed her academic secretary of this section.48 Although on paper Nalimov and Markova were fully “rehabilitated,” in practice former prisoners had great difficulty finding a job. Berg, who himself had suffered an arrest and imprisonment in the late 1930s, often directly or indirectly supported victims of the same machine of Stalinist terror.

In the strictly hierarchical Soviet system of organization of scientific research, the legitimacy of a particular research project was heavily dependent on the political and administrative status of the researcher. Political marginality often went hand in hand with the marginality of unorthodox academic discourse. Loyally following the Party line in big politics, dominant schools of thought in various scientific disciplines shunned innovations coming from the West; and Soviet researchers who pursued these innovations often found themselves on the margins of the academic community. On the other hand, those already on the margins (as former prisoners, dissidents, etc.) were not tied to the dominant discourse by their administrative status and thus could afford pursuing innovative approaches: they had already little to lose. The political marginality and the opposition to the academic establishment were producing one another like a chicken and an egg. Berg’s strategy of fighting dogmatism, embracing marginalized research, and sheltering unorthodox researchers helped turn Soviet cybernetics into a field of gigantic proportions without clearly defined limits.

The Council on Cybernetics served as an institutional “umbrella” for non-Pavlovian physiology (see Chapter 5), structural linguistics (see Chapter 6), optimization models in economics (see Chapter 7), and many other approaches that were suppressed under Stalin and had a great difficulty gaining legitimacy in the eyes of the traditionally minded academic authorities. Under the Council’s aegis, unorthodox researchers could publish their papers,

46 G.E. Vleduts, V.V. Nalimov, and N.I. Staizhkin, “Nauchnaia i tekhnicheskaia informatsiia kak odna iz zadach kibernetiki,” Uspekhi fizicheskikh nauk 69:1 (1959): 13-36. See also G.E. Vleduts, “Kibernetika i khimiia,” in A.I. Berg, ed., Kibernetiku—na sluzhbu kommunizmu, vol. 1 (Moscow and Leningrad: Gosenergoizdat, 1961), pp. 252-62.47 Vasilii Vasil’evich Nalimov, conversation with author, Moscow, 6 July 1996. See also V.V. Nalimov, “Desiat’ let sovmestno s Andreem Nikolaevichem,” in A.N. Shiriaev, ed. Kolmogorov v vospominaniiakh (Moscow: Nauka, 1993), pp. 501-18.48 Elena Vladimirovna Markova, conversation with author, Moscow, 20 July 1996. See also her memoirs about Berg: E.V. Markova, “Akademik Aksel’ Ivanovich Berg : Teoriia nadezhnosti v kiberneticheskom okruzhenii,” Nadezhnost’ i kontrol’ kachestva, no. 7 (1993): 3-14; E.V. Markova, “Zhil sredi nas neobyknovennyi chelovek: akademik A.I. Berg,” in Riabinin et al., Akademik Aksel’ Ivanovich Berg, pp. 26-64.

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convene conferences, and effectively legitimize their research as “application” of cybernetics to the fields of physiology, linguistics, and economics, respectively.

For example, the Council on Cybernetics sponsored two innovative approaches in the field of legal studies, which faced initial resistance in the judicial community.49 One approach was based on a new automatic technique of fingerprint analysis and classification; the other introduced methods of formalization of legal language and logical analysis of the entire body of law in order to eliminate inner contradictions, ambiguities, and repetitions. Traditional jurists were suspicious about the application of mathematical methods in their field and opposed such innovations. The idea of formalization and computer processing of information for solving legal problems was “declared harmful, for it allegedly implied the substitution of class-oriented interpretation of the law by its ‘technologization.’”50 By the late 1950s, when cybernetics was gaining power, the use of mathematics in legal studies was still under suspicion. The advocates of the new approaches decided to jump on the cybernetic bandwagon and translated their innovations into cybernetic language. In 1959, the leading Soviet journal of legal studies, The Soviet State and the Law, however, rejected an article on cybernetics and law and forwarded the manuscript to the editorial office of the journal Problems of Philosophy. The latter sent the manuscript to Berg for review, and he immediately decided to support this new trend. He quickly organized the section entitled “Cybernetics and Law” (later renamed “Legal Cybernetics”) at the Council on Cybernetics and lobbied for further support in various judicial agencies. Articles on “legal cybernetics” soon appeared not only in Problems of Philosophy, but also in The Soviet State and the Law.51 In February 1965, the Council sponsored the First All-Union Coordination Meeting on the Problems of Legal Cybernetics with some 150 participants; in October 1966, Berg used his influence in the government to allocate funds for the first computer center for legal studies. The Council on Cybernetics regularly published in its editions articles on “legal cybernetics.”52

The role of cybernetics as an “umbrella” was particularly prominent in the case of cybernetic defense of genetics. After Trofim Lysenko’s triumph over Soviet geneticists at the July-August 1948 session of the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences (VASKhNIL), Soviet genetics went “underground.” After Stalin’s death in 1953, geneticists began a gradual recovery; soon, however, Khrushchev’s open support for Lysenko again made their position very difficult. Historian Mark Adams has examined various strategies geneticists employed to survive and continue their research:53

Genetics research during this period was “underground” in a number of ways. It lacked official legitimacy: genetics was not taught in Soviet schools or supported in official policy statements—indeed it was often condemned. It hid under protective language: to cognoscenti, such terms as “radio-biology,” “radiation

49 See D.A. Kerimov and L.G. Edzhubov, “Kak voznikla pravovaia kibernetika,” in Siforov, ed. Put’ v bol’shuiu nauku, pp. 234-42.50 Ibid., p. 238.51 See N. Andreev and D. Kerimov, “O vozmozhnosti kibernetiki pri reshenii pravovykh problem,” Voprosy filosofii, no. 7 (1960); D.A. Kerimov, “Kibernetika i pravo,” Sovetskoe gosudarstvo i pravo, no. 11 (1962).52 See N.D. Andreev and D.A. Kerimov, “Vozmozhnosti ispol’zovaniia kiberneticheskoi tekhniki pri reshenii nekotorykh pravovykh problem,” in A.I. Berg, ed., Kibernetiku—na sluzhbu kommunizmu, vol. 1 (Moscow and Leningrad: Gosenergoizdat, 1961), pp. 234-41; O.A. Gavrilov et al., “Kibernetika i pravo,” in A.I. Berg, ed., Kibernetiku—na sluzhbu kommunizmu, vol. 5 (Moscow: Energiia, 1967), pp. 406-19.53 Mark B. Adams, “Biology After Stalin,” Survey 23:1 (Winter 1977-78): 55.

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bio-physics,” and “physico-chemical biology” functioned as a kind of protective mimicry, serving as euphemisms for both orthodox genetics and molecular biology. Finally, it developed in a series of institutional settings under the aegis of the physical sciences, carefully isolated administratively from the influence and control of Lysenko’s supporters.

Having been forced out of the Biological Sciences Division of the Academy by the Lysenko supporters, geneticists found institutional niches in the Physical and Mathematical Sciences Division and the Chemical Sciences Division. Cybernetics similarly provided such a niche.

Since the early 1940s, when he was involved in a controversy with Lysenkoites over the validity of statistical analysis in the interpretation of genetic experiments,54 Aleksei Liapunov had developed a long-term friendship with leading Soviet geneticists. In the late 1940s, he organized a kruzhok, a home study group, for his two school-age daughters Elena and Natal’ia, who were interested in biology, and taught them the fundamentals of genetics. In 1954, when both daughters became students of the Biology Department of Moscow University, they were among the few students there familiar with classical genetics. The meetings of Liapunov’s kruzhok continued and turned into an informal course in the theory of probabilities and statistics (such courses were not available to biology students at the university) and “formal” genetics for Liapunov’s daughters and their student friends. Risking his position as a Party member and a researcher at a closed institution working on classified projects, Liapunov often invited persecuted geneticists to give guest lectures and transmit their “forbidden knowledge.” At that time, they were virtually isolated from the scientific community and seized such an opportunity to communicate with the younger generation. Such prominent biologists as Dubinin, Romashov, Sakharov, Timofeev-Resovskii, Zavadovskii, and Zhebrak spoke at the meetings of Liapunov’s kruzhok. In the summer of 1955, Liapunov visited his daughters during their practical training in Chashnikovo. Sitting around a campfire, students sang anti-Lysenkoist chastushki, poignant satiric songs, ridiculing Lysenko’s critique of “Mendelism” and “formal” genetics. The performance concluded with the mocking “hymn of Morganists” to the tune of the popular song “Katiusha”:55

Hey, my song, Mendelist’s song,You fly to Lysenko’s farmsAnd bring to this marvelous giant of thoughtOur formal regards.Let him learn how genes work,What chromosomes’ design is,Let him save potato stock,And Mendel will save science.

Liapunov’s anti-Lysenkoist activity included, however, actions much more serious than chastushki. In October 1955, Presidium of the Party Central Committee received a letter from 94 Soviet scientists (including 70 biologists), which severely criticized Lysenko.56 The letter was

54 See Julii J. Kerkis and Aleksei A. Liapounoff, “Segregation in Hybrids,” Comptes Rendus (Doklady) de l’Académie des Sciences de l’URSS 31:1 (1941): 47-50.55 N.A. Liapunova and N.N. Vorontsov, “Delo sester Liapunovykh,” Znanie—sila, no. 8 (1998): 43.

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signed, in particular, by such influential physicists as Kapitsa, Landau, Sakharov, Tamm, Artsimovich, and Zeldovich. The letter read:57

The grave consequences of T.D. Lysenko’s monopoly in science have not been eliminated, and as the result, Soviet biology and agricultural science in general are falling far behind world science. . . .

Material losses that our country suffered as the result of Lysenko’s activity are so great that they cannot be adequately measured. . . .

For many years, Lysenko’s false theoretical principles have been portrayed as a new step in the development of a dialectical materialist understanding of biological phenomena. In reality, Lysenko’s views make up an amazing mixture of mechanism, idealism, and plain ignorance.

In February 1956, an addendum to this letter with additional 203 signatures arrived (184 from biologists).58 Among the signers were prominent mathematicians Keldysh, Sobolev, and Pavel Aleksandrov. These two appeals became collectively known as the “letter of three hundred [signers].” Liapunov actively collected signatures for the addendum.59 The signatures were divided into two categories: biologists and non-biologists. Using his broad contacts among mathematicians and biologists, Liapunov attracted scores of supporters from both communities. In the heat of the moment, Liapunov did not notice that he signed the letter twice—the first time among biologists, the second time among non-biologists.60 Party authorities also missed this fact. One signature, however, was already enough to get the signer into trouble.

The Science Department of the Party Central Committee saw the “letter of three hundred” as a sign of outrageous insubordination. The Department head Vladimir Kirillin reported to the Central Committee:61

The existence of a collective letter from scientists on the issues of biology indicates the extremely weak control by the presidiums of the Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Medical Sciences, the Ministry of Higher Education, and the Ministry of Agriculture over criticism and self-criticism in biological institutions and journals. The exchange of opinion among scientists on important and controversial issues of biology is not properly organized and takes a spontaneous character.

Lysenko’s supporters took their counter-measures and had their criticism “properly organized.” The anti-Lysenko letter was discussed at a party meeting at the Biology Department

56 The original of this letter can be found in the Center for Preservation of Contemporary Documentation (Tsentr Khraneniia Sovremennoi Dokumentatsii [TsKhSD]), f. 5, op. 17, d. 515, ll. 110-131ob.57 “Iz pis’ma 297 sovetskikh uchenykh (‘pis’mo trekhsot’) v Prezidium TsK KPSS o sostoianii biologichekoi nauki v SSSR,” [May-October 1955] in A.F. Kiselev and E.M. Shchagin, eds., Khrestomatiia po otechestvennoi istorii (1946-1995) (Moscow: VLADOS, 1996), pp. 458, 460. See the full text of the letter in Pravda (27 January 1989).58 See TsKhSD, f. 5, op. 17, d. 515, ll. 267-77.59 Natal’ia Liapunova’s archive contains various draft letters to the Party Central Committee, including an early draft signed only by Liapunov and Sobolev.60 See TsKhSD, f. 5, op. 17, d. 515, ll. 270, 277.61 Kirillin to the Central Committee, February 8, 1956; TsKhSD, f. 5, op. 17, d. 515, l. 108.

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of Moscow University in December 1955. The secretary of the Party bureau of the Department professor Dobrovolskii unequivocally denounced the letter:62

Many probably already know that some faculty members put their signatures under a collective letter to the Party Central Committee (the letter seems to have originated from the Academy of Sciences), in which the activity of academician Lysenko was condemned. No one is banned from appealing to the Central Committee on any issue. [Nevertheless,] participation in collective letters of this sort, which bypass public and Party organizations, is absolutely unacceptable. We must harshly condemn such methods, which have nothing to do with open scientific discussions aimed at the rise of science and new [scientific] achievements!

The meeting’s resolution censured the “method of clandestine collection of signatures among the faculty . . . as a method of scientific discussion which is inappropriate for Soviet scientists.”63

At the same meeting, the active Lysenkoite professor Dvoriankin in his speech denounced kruzhki (home study groups) of “young Morganists,” which emerged among students who studied genetics.64 Another Lysenkoite, professor Chumak was more specific and named one of such kruzhki: “Students gather at professor Liapunov’s home . . . they have talks about Lysenko, about his behavior, and so on.”65 The issue of chastushki was also brought up. Party member Sofronov told his comrades: “During practical training, [students] sang chastushki around a campfire; these chastushki discredited Lysenko and the Michurinist approach [in biology].”66

Liapunov’s active involvement in collecting signatures for anti-Lysenko letter to the Party Central Committee may have prompted the persecution of his daughters. On February 14, 1956, just a few days after the addendum with Liapunov’s signature reached the Central Committee, the Party bureau of the Biology Department heard the information of the Party secretary Dobrovolskii about this letter. At the same meeting, the bureau discussed the problem of Liapunov’s kruzhok and decided to make this affair the focus of a discussion of “ideological work” in the Department.67 The Party authorities tried to provoke the expulsion of Liapunov’s daughters from the Komsomol, which most certainly would have led to their expulsion from the university, but failed. Elena and Natal’ia got off relatively easily—with just a severe formal reprimand for their “superficial approach to science, which found expression in the uncritical attitude toward ideas expressed at home kruzhok meetings, and for the loss of Komsomol vigilance.”68

In the meantime, Liapunov began translating the problem of heredity—the key issue over which Soviet geneticists clashed with Lysenkoites—into the language of cybernetics. At the All-

62 Protokol partiinogo sobraniia biologo-pochvennogo fakul’teta MGU, December 22, 1955; the Central Archive of Social Movements of Moscow (Tsentral’nyi Arkhiv Obshchestvennykh Dvizhenii goroda Moskvy [TsAODM]), f. 478, op. 5, d. 51, l. 132.63 Ibid., l. 122.64 Ibid., l. 109.65 Ibid., l. 115.66 Ibidem.67 Protokol zasedaniia partiinogo biuro biologo-pochvennogo fakul’teta MGU, February 14, 1956; TsAODM, f. 478, op. 5, d. 73, l. 29.68 Liapunova and Vorontsov, “Delo sester Liapunovykh,” p. 46.

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Union Conference on Philosophical Problems of Natural Science in October 1958, Liapunov and Sergei Sobolev presented a paper, in which the two mathematicians claimed:69

On close examination, it turns out that what is transmitted from the parents to their offspring by inheritance is hereditary information. The task of genetics is to study the structure and methods of material coding of this information and the forms of its expression in a new organism in the process of individual development.

In saying this, Liapunov and Sobolev safely brought genetics under the umbrella of information theory and cybernetics: “A living organism develops out of certain embryonic cells in which somewhere lies information received from the parents’ organisms. This is not physics, this is not physiology; this is the science of the transmission of information.”70

Liapunov and Sobolev argued that classical genetics stood in full accord with cybernetics, while Lysenko’s theory failed the cybernetic test:71

The thesis . . . that predominantly favorable traits are transmitted by inheritance requires, to be firmly established, the existence of a flow of hereditary information from the organisms of the offspring to the organisms of the parents. The existence of such a flow, however, seem quite problematic. . . .

In the same way, the claim of the inheritance of acquired traits is equivalent to the assertion that there exists a flow of information coming into embryonic cells about the structure of the organism as a whole or its separate organs. . . . The fact is that the flow of hereditary information, traveling from an organism as a whole to its embryonic cells, lies unknown . . . On the other hand, the data of classical genetics fully correspond to the ideas advanced in cybernetics.

Even earlier, Liapunov often expressed similar views in his public lectures on cybernetics, and Lysenkoites quickly recognized the cybernetic threat. On February 28, 1956, at a meeting of the Party bureau of the Biology Department of Moscow University, professor Studitskii alerted his comrades to the enemy’s attempts to “bring mathematics into Mendel’s rules [of genetics], to involve cybernetics and other research tools employed abroad”; he warned that cybernetics was an “alien ideology” causing “unhealthy incidents.”72 Professor Dvoriankin followed the suit: “Where did they [students] get the idea that cybernetics provided a new interpretation of the laws of heredity? . . . They got it from those biologists who did not agree with the decisions of the August [1948] session [of VASKhNIL; i.e., from the opponents of Lysenko].”73 Another speaker, Serenkov, spiced his speech with a deep-felt emotion: “I don’t

69 S.L. Sobolev and A.A. Liapunov, “Kibernetika i estestvoznanie,” in P.N. Fedoseev, ed., Filosofskie problemy sovremennogo estestvoznaniia: Trudy Vsesoiuznogo soveshchaniia po filosofskim voprosam estestvoznaniia (Moscow: AN SSSR, 1959), pp. 251-52 (emphasis added).70 S.L. Sobolev, “Vystuplenie na soveshchanii,” in Fedoseev, ed., Filosofskie problemy, p. 266.71 Sobolev and Liapunov, “Kibernetika i estestvoznanie,” p. 252.72 Stenogramma rasshirennogo zasedaniia partiinogo biuro biologo-pochvennogo fakul’teta MGU, February 28, 1956, TsAODM, f. 478, op. 5, d. 73, l. 52. Studitskii was the author of a vituperative anti-genetics attack—the article, “Fly-lovers, Man-haters.”73 Ibid., l. 68.

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even want to talk about Liapunov’s kruzhok, so utterly disgusting it is; the whole direction of this kruzhok shows that it is totally alien to our Soviet reality. This [kruzhok] is aimed at educating our young people in a certain spirit, which is not the spirit of Marxism-Leninism . . . If we want to educate our young people correctly, then we must keep them away from the education they receive in Liapunov’s kruzhok.”74

Lysenkoites soon took the Liapunov daughters affair to yet higher levels of Party authority. On February 29, 1956, the Party Committee of Moscow University discussed the state of “ideological work” at the Biology Department. Professor Zauzolkov—chairman of the commission appointed by the Committee to investigate the situation in the Biology Department—denounced Liapunov’s kruzhok as having a “clearly Weissmanist and Morganist direction.”75 He hinted that “many hidden enemies take advantage of the students’ striving for knowledge and propagate Morganism.”76 Professor Dvoriankin, who never missed an opportunity to castigate Morganists, pointed to the harmful influence of cyberneticians: “Through the interest in cybernetics (which should be developed further and interpreted correctly), the interest in the wrong theory of randomness emerges. They put forward the theory of random mutations. They claim that the laws of inheritance of acquired traits is not proved in experiment. They claim that Morganist genetics has achievements.”77 Another speaker, Isaev, seconded him: “It is typical of Morganism to think of nature as a chaotic assembly of random events. . . . Do we really need, comrades, to prove how groundless are all these speculations of the cyberneticians in the spirit of Morganism? Science is the enemy of chance. That’s what Marxism teaches us.”78

Liapunov was present at the meeting and attempted to turn the discussion to scientific issues and away from speculations about Marxism:79

I will start with scientific issues. One cannot detach ideological issues from scientific ones, and many of the ideological issues discussed here have scientific origins. . . . To claim a chaotic assembly of random events is one thing; to use methods of the theory of probability is quite another. . . . I am absolutely convinced that to use statistical methods in biology is not a sin; on the contrary, the use of such methods is a powerful means to improve our biological knowledge.

“How about the Marxist method?” asked someone. “One does not exclude the other,” replied Liapunov, “and the mathematical methods are an inherent part of the Marxist materialist methodology. . . . Dialectical materialism and Marxist philosophy do not throw away or exclude technical methods of study adopted in natural science, and vice versa.”80 Professor Kuperman disagreed on this particular point. “We will use the method of dialectical materialism in the first turn,” she said, “and only in the second turn, if necessary, will we use mathematics.”81

The Party committee of Moscow University condemned Liapunov’s “grave mistake” of organizing a kruzhok without the authorities’ permission but could not prosecute him. Luckily

74 Ibid., l. 106.75 Stenogramma zasedaniia partiinogo komiteta MGU, February 29, 1956, TsAODM, f. 478, op. 4, d. 44, l. 143.76 Ibid., l. 148.77 Ibid., ll. 172-73.78 Ibid., ll. 177-78.79 Ibid., ll. 201a, 205-06.80 Ibid., ll. 214-15.81 Ibid., l. 233.

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for him, he worked at the university only part-time and was officially assigned to the Party organization at his main place of work, the Division of Applied Mathematics of the Mathematical Institute; his affair was therefore outside the authority of University communists. The Party committee of Moscow University reluctantly relegated the prosecution of Liapunov to the communists of the Division of Applied Mathematics.82

As soon as the Council on Cybernetics was established, Liapunov organized the biological section of the Council and became its head. In the series Problems of Cybernetics, which he edited, Liapunov opened a regular rubric, “Control Processes in Living Organisms,” and published works on genetics, which could not be accepted in biological journals controlled by Lysenkoites. For example, Liapunov actively helped his close friend, the leading specialist in radiation biology Nikolai Timofeev-Resovskii, who had just returned from Stalinist camps and exile and was shunned by the biological establishment. The first scholarly article Timofeev-Resovskii (in collaboration with geneticist Raisa Berg83) wrote after his return was turned down by cautious editors of biological journals; Liapunov, however, published that article in the fifth volume of Problems of Cybernetics.84 Having injected a few cybernetic terms in their article, the authors wrote: “Genotype is a control system that determines the ontogenesis of living organisms and at the same time it is a code of hereditary information, which is transmitted from generation to generation.”85 Raisa Berg later recalled: “Cybernetics, biochemistry, biophysics, mathematical methods in biology, systems theory—all of that was now possible, and the languages of these sciences became the Aesopian language of genetics. A ‘unit of hereditary information’ sounded less anti-Lysenkoist than a ‘gene.’”86 In 1958, with the support of the rector of Leningrad University mathematician Aleksandr Aleksandrov, she organized an interdepartmental cybernetics seminar, which was devoted largely to the topic, “Cybernetics and Genetics.”87

Liapunov’s activity in propagating genetics on the pages of Problems of Cybernetics could not help attracting the attention of the concerned Lysenkoites. In January 1962, the State Publishing House of Physical and Mathematical Literature forwarded to the Council on Cybernetics a twenty-page anonymous review of biological articles in Problems of Cybernetics. The reviewer charged that cyberneticians interpreted the notion of information too broadly and illegitimately extended this notion to biology:88

The volumes of Problems of Cybernetics became a “mouthpiece of anti-Michurinism.” . . . As an example of “information,” [cyberneticians] point to the influence of the environment on the organism of animals and humans. If so, then the technical meaning of the term “information” in cybernetics is lost. . . . The attempts to view any communication as [the transmission of] information can

82 The Party bureau at Liapunov’s main place of work—the Division of Applied Mathematics—discussed his affair only in September 1956, when things had already calmed down. The director of the Division, academician Mstislav Keldysh, who had himself signed the anti-Lysenkoist “letter of three hundred,” stated that “we have no evidence to suggest that comrade Liapunov abandoned the materialist position in biology,” and the bureau let Liapunov go free without any formal reprimand. See Protokol zasedaniia partiinogo biuro Otdeleniia prikladnoi matematiki, September 27, 1956; TsAODM, f. 8033, op. 1, d. 3, l. 63.83 Raisa Berg is the daughter of academician Lev Berg; she is not related to Aksel’ Berg.84 Raissa L. Berg, Acquired Traits: Memoirs of a Geneticist from the Soviet Union, trans. David Lowe (New York: Viking, 1988), p. 305.85 R.L. Berg and N.V. Timofeev-Resovskii, “O putiakh evoliutsii genotipa,” Problemy kibernetiki 5 (1961): 183.86 Berg, Acquired Traits, p. 220.87 Ibidem.88 Quoted in Radunskaia, Aksel’ Berg, pp. 292-98.

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only be interpreted as the intentional or unintentional ambition to substitute dialectical materialism with cybernetics. . . . If a hierarchy of control exists [in nature], then the question inevitably arises: Who is the chief controller? This can only be a force that does not depend on anyone or anything, in other words, a god. . . . Thus, in accordance with the logic of any idealist trend [in philosophy], the conception of “controllers” of life phenomena leads to popery.

The reviewer proposed to remove Liapunov from the editorship, prohibit publication of biological articles in Problems of Cybernetics, and submit such articles instead to biological journals (controlled by Lysenkoites). Such serious charges frightened the director of the Publishing House and he intended to close the rubric “Control Processes in Living Organisms” for a while, until the matter was resolved.89

Aksel’ Berg, well acquainted with the rules of Soviet bureaucracy, took effective counter-measures. He made several dozen copies of the review and sent them to the most influential supporters of cybernetics and the authors of the criticized articles. Members of the Academy biologists Vladimir Engelgardt, Ivan Knuniants, and Vladimir Sukachev, mathematicians Andrei Kolmogorov, Mikhail Lavrentev, and Sergei Sobolev, physicist Igor Tamm, economist Vasilii Nemchinov and many others forcefully defended the position of Problems of Cybernetics; in total, some 40 responses were received. Raisa Berg, who was among the accused authors, wrote:90

It is practice that has proved the applicability and the expediency of the application of cybernetic ideas in biology. . . . The modeling of biological phenomena has great significance for technology . . . [The reviewer] talks with contempt about the cybernetic language in which the authors of the reviewed articles speak. This contempt is unjustified. One of the goals of Problems of Cybernetics is to establish contact among specialists from different fields, which is helped by the elaboration of a common language. The use of cybernetic terms in various fields has also an epistemological significance, for it stresses the similarities between phenomena from the most remote domains.

On the basis of these responses, the Council on Cybernetics prepared a detailed rebuttal.91 Aksel’ Berg appealed to the Party Central Committee and the presidium of the Academy of Sciences, and obtained the permission to call a session of the Biological Division of the Academy. The session was convened in Moscow in April 1962. Speaking at the session, academician Vasilii Parin—a full member of the Academy of Medical Sciences and the head of the medical section of the Council on Cybernetics—declared that “we have to work hard to prepare a large-scale introduction of cybernetics in biology, to redirect our thinking toward the cybernetic examination of biological issues.”92 The broad range of topics discussed—from the “processing of information by the brain” to “self-regulation of processes in cells”—indicated that a cybernetic approach in biology was decidedly legitimized. At this session, the cyberneticians met

89 Rybkin to Berg, January 10, 1962; Natal’ia Liapunova’s archive.90 R. Berg, “Otvet na Zamechaniia o stat’iakh po obshchei biologii v sbornike ‘Problemy kibernetiki’,” 1962; Natal’ia Liapunova’s archive.91 “O trudnostiakh izzhitiia posledstvii kul’ta lichnosti v biologicheskoi nauke”; Natal’ia Liapunova’s archive.92 Parin, “Primenenie kibernetiki,” p. 32.

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no open opposition from the Lysenkoites. It was hardly coincidental that just a few days after the conference ended, at the Party Central Committee’s Plenary Session on Agriculture, Trofim Lysenko asked to be relieved of his duties as president of VASKhNIL for reasons of ill health.93 Cyberneticians’ victory was far from complete: the Biological Division of the Academy remained under the control of Lysenkoites. In their own fields, however, cyberneticians, mathematicians, computer scientists, physicists, and chemists could now safely shelter non-Lysenkoist biological research.

The Fate of the Institute of Cybernetics Project

Led by Liapunov, cyberneticians tried to create institutional forms which would accommodate not only computing research, but also “cybernetic biology,” “cybernetic linguistics,” and other branches of the cybernetic tree. As a result of Liapunov’s efforts, the Division of Applied Mathematics created a department of cybernetics; by 1960, this department numbered 22 researchers.94 Liapunov, however, considered this support totally insufficient. At a Party meeting at the Division in November 1961, he said:95

Work in the field of cybernetics in our country is not organized. There is no Institute of Cybernetics in Moscow. . . . Most work is being done haphazardly and with great shortage of funds. Especially funds for experimental work are lacking. . . . The Cybernetics Department is an alien body within the Division. It is simply impossible to conduct research on a full scale. . . . Twenty people for this entire field is a very small number. . . . There is no graduate program in cybernetics. The training of specialists is chaotic. In such conditions, it is very difficult to develop cybernetic research; we need help.

In Liapunov’s view, the organization of a separate Institute of Cybernetics was needed to provide funds, training, and equipment for full-scale cybernetic research.

In 1960-61, Liapunov and his colleagues drafted a number of documents outlining the contours of the proposed institute. One of such documents read:96

Since cybernetics has emerged on the basis of the interaction among different disciplines (mathematics, radioelectronics, logic, biology, linguistics, economics, etc.), it can successfully develop at the present time only in a unified academic body, which would unite representatives of all relevant disciplines. Such a body alone can provide necessary conditions for complex research of the appropriate scale and breadth. In many foreign countries, including socialist ones, specialized institutes for the elaboration of cybernetic problems have already been created. . . .

93 Pravda (16 April 1962).94 B.I. Finikov, “O rabote partiinoi gruppy otdelov kibernetiki i programmirovaniia,” February 11, 1960, TsAODM, f. 8033, op. 1, d. 7, l. 128.95 Protokol partiinogo sobraniia Otdeleniia prikladnoi matematiki, November 30, 1961, TsAODM, f. 8033, op. 1, d. 8, l. 195.96 “Predlozheniia po sozdaniiu Instituta kibernetiki Akademii nauk SSSR,” in Pospelov and Fet, eds. and comps., Ocherki istorii informatiki, p. 168.

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The Council on Cybernetics of the USSR Academy of Sciences believes that it is necessary to create within the Division of Physical and Mathematical Sciences an Institute of Cybernetics, which would conduct fundamental cybernetics research and development all the way up to its practical implementation.

Liapunov planned to organize the Institute of Cybernetics on the basis of a number of existing groups of cybernetics enthusiasts scattered over many institutions inside and outside the Academy: the Department of Cybernetics at the Division of Applied Mathematics; the laboratory of vision at the Institute of Biophysics; the sector of structural linguistics at the Institute of the Russian Language; the sector of structural linguistics at the Institute of Slavic Studies; the sector of structural and applied linguistics at the Institute of Linguistics; the machine translation group at the Institute of Precise Mechanics and Computer Technology (ITMVT); a group from the laboratory of electrodynamics at the All-Union Institute of Scientific and Technical Information; a department (head V.D. Iudin) from the Scientific Research Institute No. 5; and a group (head S.M. Shvartin) from the Scientific Research Institute No. 27 (a.k.a. Military unit No. 01168).97 Liapunov argued that the Institute “should not be too large; even with all positions filled, there should not be more than 300-350 full-time researchers.”98 Liapunov and his colleague Igor Poletaev proposed an unorthodox administrative hierarchy for the Institute, which would include—besides the conventional “triangle” of director, executive director and the academic council—an entirely new organ: a council of project leaders. This council de facto would have played the leading role in directing the affairs of the Institute.99

Liapunov drafted a proposal for the Institute’s research agenda. He envisioned an institution that would explore theoretical issues related to (1) the “effectiveness of the use of computers in national economy”; (2) mathematical foundations of cybernetics; (3) mathematical linguistics; (4) production management and control; and (5) the study of “control systems in living nature.”100 Liapunov proposed the following organizational structure for the Institute (the names of the proposed division heads and leading researchers are given in parentheses):101

97 A.A. Liapunov, “Soobrazheniia po sostavu Instituta kibernetiki”; ARAN, f. 1875, sdatochnaia op. 2, d. 196, no. 2718; see also no. 2722.98 Ibid., no. 2718.99 I.A. Poletaev, “Otzyv na proekt tematiki Instituta kibernetiki (A.A. Liapunova),” [June 29, 1961] in D.A. Pospelov and Ia.I. Fet, eds. and comps., Ocherki istorii informatiki v Rossii (Novosibirsk: OIGGM SO RAN, 1998), pp. 173-78.100 A.A. Liapunov, “Ob’iasnitel’naia zapiska k tematike rabot Instituta kibernetiki,” n.d.; ARAN, f. 1875, sdatochnaia op. 2, d. 196, no. 2708.101 “Struktura Instituta kibernetiki AN SSSR,” in Pospelov and Fet, eds. and comps., Ocherki istorii informatiki, p. 179 (emphasis added).

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1. Department of Logic and Cybernetics (Markov):a) sector of the theory of control systems (Iablonskii);b) sector of mathematical logic (Shanin);c) sector of the theory of programming (Ianov, Glivenko, Krinitskii).

2. Department of Statistics and Cybernetics (Gnedenko):a) sector of information theory (Dobrushin, Khurgin, Vitushkin);b) sector of the theory of stochastic processes (Iaglom);c) sector of queuing theory (Gnedenko).

3. Department of Semiotics (Ivanov):a) sector of machine translation (Uspenskii, Melchuk);b) sector of mathematical linguistics (Vleduts);c) sector of informational logical languages (Bochvar);d) sector of specialized languages of science (Kaluzhnin).

4. Department of Economics and Cybernetics (Liusternik):a) sector of economic control systems;b) sector of game theory (Vorob’ev);c) sector of economic planning (Rubinshtein).

5. Department of Biology and Cybernetics (Liapunov):a) sector of physiology of the central nervous system and analyzers (Niuberg);b) sector of biological control systems (Malinovskii, Efroimson);c) sector of self-learning models (Kulagina).

6. Department of Computer Experiments (Kitov):a) sector of computer operation;b) sector of computer modeling;c) sector of computer programming (Krinitskii).

Independent activities of various groups of cyberneticians in different fields led to a number of administrative decisions aimed at the institutionalization of cybernetics research on a smaller scale. In 1960, decisions were made to organize the Center for Machine Translation, the Institute of Semiotics, and the Laboratory for the Application of Mathematical Methods in Economics. Liapunov and his colleagues suggested bringing all these smaller institutions under one roof of the Institute of Cybernetics; they reasoned that portraying the establishment of the Institute as an implementation of several already made administrative decisions would make it easier to pass. Mathematician Andrei Markov, who had agreed to serve as director of the Institute of Semiotics, was persuaded to accept a seemingly higher and more prestigious post as the director of a joint Institute that would include both cybernetics and semiotics studies. In June 1960, leading cyberneticians and specialists in semiotics had a meeting, where they decided to join forces and debated mostly the name of the joint institute. Markov decided that cybernetics was a broader term, which included semiotics, and settled on the name “Institute of Cybernetics.”102

In November 1960, the bureau of the Division of Physical and Mathematical Sciences of the Academy of Sciences decided to move forward with establishing the Institute of Cybernetics and created a commission headed by Markov, which drafted a resolution for the presidium of the

102 “Protokol soveshchaniia po organizatsii v sostave Otdeleniia fiziko-matematicheskikh nauk AN SSSR instituta s kiberneticheskoi tematikoi, June 25, 1960,” in Pospelov and Fet, eds. and comps., Ocherki istorii informatiki, pp. 164-67.

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Academy.103 The change of the Academy leadership and the subsequent reorganization caused some delay. Finally, on July 17, 1961, the newly elected president of the Academy Mstislav Keldysh held a meeting on the prospects of the development of cybernetics in the Academy. At this meeting, Aksel’ Berg again raised the issue of organizing a full-fledged cybernetics institute or institutes in the Academy. “One should not be content with the existence of a merely consultative organ without any rights, without staff, without money, and without office space,” he argued, referring to the Council on Cybernetics. “I am speaking of creating a group of institutes, which would study scientific problems crucially important for medicine, economics, biology, and industry. Comrades from the State Planning Committee and the Central Committee support this idea.”104

The bureaucratic machine of the Academy, however, moved very slowly and cautiously. Finding a building for the new institute posed a formidable problem. Khrushchev’s policy of decentralizing science and the ban on the construction of new buildings for academic institutions in Moscow created a very difficult situation. When discussing possible locations for the institute, Aksel’ Berg even suggested the sturdy building of the Butyrskaia prison, which he knew well from serving time there during his imprisonment in the late 1930s.105 Eventually, in September 1961, the presidium of the Academy of Sciences included the construction of a building for the Institute of Cybernetics in Noginsk—a small remote town in the Moscow region—in the Academy construction plans for 1963-65.106 This was, however, too little too late. Having lost any hope for the organization of the Institute in Moscow any time soon, Liapunov moved to the newly built Akademgorodok in Siberia, where excellent living and working conditions were created for him and his staff. Without Liapunov’s driving force, the movement for the organization of the Institute soon lost its steam. The Institute of Cybernetics in Moscow did not materialize.107 Instead, the Council on Cybernetics acquired the formal status of an academic institute, without any expansion of its staff.108

Among Soviet cyberneticians different explanations circulated for the failure of the attempts to establish the Institute of Cybernetics in Moscow. Nalimov wrote in his memoirs that academician Kolmogorov was set against this idea.109 Linguist Vyacheslav Ivanov cited the disagreement between Liapunov and Markov over the research agenda of the would-be institute as the main cause.110 According to mathematician Vladimir Uspenskii, “various scientific and semi-scientific, academic and semi-academic groups” could not come to an agreement over the

103 N.M. Nagornyi, “Andrei Andreevich Markov (K 90-letiiu so dnia rozhdeniia),” Izvestiia AN SSSR: Tekhnicheskaia kibernetika, no. 5 (1993): 14.104 Quoted in S.I. Samoilenko, “A.I. Berg i razvitie kibernetiki v Sovetskom Soiuze,” in Siforov, ed., Put’ v bol’shuiu nauku, pp. 138-39.105 Viach.Vs. Ivanov, “Goluboi zver’ (Vospominaniia),” Zvezda, no. 3 (1995): 167.106 In October 1961, the academic secretary of the Academy Division of Physical and Mathematical Sciences reguested from Liapunov the name of the person responsible for the construction; see Skibko to Liapunov, October 18, 1961; ARAN, f. 1875. This was the last document in Liapunov’s papers that concerned the Institute of Cybernetics project.107 Only as late as 1983 the Institute of the Problems of Cybernetics was created in Moscow; it had a narrow scope of research in computing.108 Samoilenko, “A.I. Berg,” pp. 140-41.109 Nalimov, “Desiat’ let,” p. 509. Another memoirist recalled that Kolmogorov spoke in favor of the idea to organize the Institute of Cybernetics; see Viach.Vs. Ivanov, “Akademik A.I. Berg i razvitie rabot po strukturnoi lingvistike i semiotike v SSSR,” in Siforov, ed., Put’ v bol’shuiu nauku, p. 176110 Ivanov, “Akademik A.I. Berg,” p. 176.

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future Institute of Cybernetics.111 The multiplicity of views on cybernetics was indeed pulling the cybernetics community apart. The original intention to conceptualize cybernetics as a maximally broad field backfired: cybernetics was stretched over so many different fields to serve agendas so diverse that reaching a consensus proved impossible.

“What is Cybernetics?”

The more people jumped on the cybernetics bandwagon, the less certain it was where that wagon was going. Cyberneticians, who aspired to make other scientific disciplines more objective by “cybernetizing” them, could not agree on the content of their own discipline, cybernetics. In fact, there was a major disagreement over the question whether cybernetics could be called a scientific discipline at all. In his 1958 entry on cybernetics in The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, academician Kolmogorov stated that cybernetics was a “scientific trend,” rather than a separate discipline.112 In 1962, when the cybernetics movement was at its height, academician Parin criticized the previously “widespread misunderstanding, when cybernetics [had been] regarded as just a new method of study, a new approach based on some already known disciplines.” Parin insisted that cybernetics was “an autonomous scientific discipline with its own theoretical foundations and specific methods.”113 Liapunov and Sobolev confessed that the diversity of definitions of cybernetics made the impression of a “great discord dominating in cybernetics”; nevertheless, if one paid attention not to the “formal definitions, but to the concrete content” of research, they argued, cybernetics could be seen as a “sufficiently unified scientific discipline.”114 Academician Aksel’ Berg also admitted that there was no single and universally accepted definition of cybernetics but insisted that scientists could do just fine without it. “This is the concern of philosophers,” he wrote. “In mathematics and logic, it would suffice if in our practice we were able to operate with such concepts as life, time, space, information, and many others, and also measure some of them and express them in quantitative terms.”115 Cybernetics, which was supposed to bring formal rigor and exact reasoning to other sciences, was itself conspicuously lacking a formal definition and relied on the intuition of cyberneticians. The cyberneticians, however, often had very different intuitive notions about the content and the boundaries of cybernetics.

Berg defined cybernetics very broadly; in his view, cybernetics aspired “to study all control processes in living nature, production, and human society, i.e. to embrace practically all human activity.”116 Liapunov also gradually moved toward a broader concept of cybernetics: while his 1955 article with Sobolev and Kitov described cybernetics as a unity of three theories (information theory; the theory of computers as self-organizing processes, similar to human

111 V.A. Uspenskii, “Serebrianyi vek strukturnoi, prikladnoi i matematicheskoi lingvistiki v SSSR i V.Iu. Rozentsveig: Kak eto nachinalos’ (zametki ochevidtsa),” Wiener Slawistischer Almanach, Sbd. 33: Festschrift für V.Ju. Rozencvejg (1992): 147.112 A.N. Kolmogorov, “Kibernetika,” in Bol’shaia Sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 2nd ed., vol. 51 (1958), p. 149.113 Parin, “Primenenie kibernetiki,” p. 22.114 Sobolev and Liapunov, “Kibernetika i estestvoznanie,” p. 237.115 A.I. Berg, “Nauka velichaishikh vozmozhnostei,” [1962] in Idem, Izbrannye trudy, vol. II (Moscow: Energiia, 1964), p. 142.116 A.I. Berg, “Kibernetiku—na sluzhbu kommunizmu (Vvedenie),” p. 11.

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thinking; and the theory of automatic control systems, including the nervous system),117 his 1958 article with Sobolev spoke of four different definitions, rather than parts, of cybernetics:118

1. Cybernetics is a science studying control systems and control processes with mathematical methods.

2. Cybernetics is a science studying the processes of governance and control in machines, living organisms, and human society.

3. Cybernetics is a science studying the processes of transmission, processing, and storing information.

4. Cybernetics is a science studying the methods of creating, transforming, and explicating the structure of algorithms that describe actual control processes.

Revising this article the next year, Liapunov and Sobolev eliminated the second definition, which incidentally was the closest to Norbert Wiener’s original definition of cybernetics as a science of “control and communication in the animal and the machine.”119 Liapunov and Sobolev defined information as the “totality of messages that can be communicated in the processes of control”120 and then generalized this concept to include not only the transmission of information (which was the subject of information theory in Claude Shannon’s original formulation121), but also “information processing.” Control, information processing, and (computer) algorithms were integrated in a unified picture: “The algorithm of information processing in a given control process is the totality of all elementary acts of information processing and the logical conditions to be checked.”122 Liapunov and Sobolev thus detached the concepts of control and information from their origins in control engineering and communications theory and placed them in the context of a very general mathematical theory of algorithms.

Liapunov’s former student mathematician Sergei Iablonskii, who specialized in algebraic logic, proposed to translate the entire problematic of cybernetics into the language of his logical theory; his own field would thus become the pivot of cybernetics. Liapunov and Iablonskii put forward the concept of the “control system,” which they defined as any object that can be described by its elements, their state (“memory,” or “information”), the structure of their interactions (“scheme”), and its “function” (the process by which the “memory” and “scheme” change over time).123 From a purely mathematical point of view, this “control system” was nothing more than a finite automation. Instead of elaborating a more sophisticated mathematical model for the complex processes of control and communication, Soviet cyberneticians simplified their interpretation of these processes to make them fit a simple mathematical model.

In Wiener’s interpretation, control was always directed at improving organization; for Liapunov and Iablonskii, control was a much looser concept, which included any type of causal

117 S.L. Sobolev, A.I. Kitov, and A.A. Liapunov, “Osnovnye cherty kibernetiki,” Voprosy filosofii, no. 4 (1955): 136.118 S.L. Sobolev and A.A. Liapunov, “Kibernetika i estestvoznanie,” Voprosy filosofii, no. 5 (1958): 127.119 S.L. Sobolev and A.A. Liapunov, “Kibernetika i estestvoznanie,” in Fedoseev, ed., Filosofskie problemy, p. 237. For Wiener’s original formulation, see Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1961).120 Sobolev and Liapunov, “Kibernetika i estestvoznanie,” in Fedoseev, ed., Filosofskie problemy, p. 239.121 See Claude E. Shannon and Warren Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication (Urbana, IL: The University of Illinois Press, 1949).122 Sobolev and Liapunov, “Kibernetika i estestvoznanie,” in Fedoseev, ed., Filosofskie problemy, p. 239.123 Liapunov and Iablonskii, “Teoreticheskie problemy kibernetiki,” p. 72.

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relations, not just those leading to a higher degree of organization.124 Liapunov and Iablonskii realized that their notion of the control system was much broader than Wiener’s and admitted that “among control systems may appear certain objects in which there is no control in the usual sense.”125 According to Iablonskii, among control systems were “systems that actually perform control (like neural tissue, [computer] programs, etc.), systems that are controlled (like computers, economic systems, etc.), and systems that are not related to control in the usual sense (like chemical molecules or chess games).”126 He considered such an interpretation of the control system “convenient.”

Mathematician Andrei Markov similarly proposed to define cybernetics broadly as a “general science of causal networks.”127 He simply equated information with a causal relation: A can be said to contain information about B if A causes B (meaning causality in a probabilistic sense). For Markov, the human nervous system, the species, the biological population, and the individual organism were all examples of causal networks.

Physiologist Nikolai Bernstein also expressed the ambition to revise and expand the content of Western cybernetics:128

We shall treat the term “cybernetics” not as the doctrine of Wiener, Shannon, and Ashby, but rather as a new branch of science, engendered in our times under the pressure of necessity, whose study is associated with the general problems of control theory, information theory, and communications theory.

Other authors objected to such attempts at generalization of cybernetic concepts. Poletaev criticized the approaches of Liapunov and Markov, arguing that it was “illegitimate” to apply the terms “control” and “information” indiscriminately to all interactions between the parts of a given system and to call all systems with such interactions “control systems,” since this would mean describing a system with terms pertinent exclusively to its (mathematical) model.129 “As the result,“ he wrote, “the specificity of the cybernetic problematic completely disappears, and cybernetics turns into an ‘all-encompassing science of sciences,’ which is against its true nature.”130

Each of the Soviet mathematicians most actively participating in the cybernetics movement—Kolmogorov, Markov, Liapunov, and Iablonskii—had his own favorite mathematical theory and attempted to make it the foundation for cybernetics. Iablonskii, as we have seen, specialized in algebraic logic and formalized any “control system” as a discrete logical scheme. Liapunov’s mathematical specialty was descriptive set theory and, in each of the fields to which he applied his version of cybernetics, e.g., in biology and linguistics, he looked 124 Liapunov postulated that one object exercised control over another if “a signal from the first object causes changes in the behavior of the second object,” (A.A. Liapunov, “Mesto kibernetiki sredi drugikh nauk i ee zadachi,” [1971] in Idem, Problemy teoreticheskoi i prikladnoi kibernetiki, p. 319).125 Liapunov and Iablonskii, “Teoreticheskie problemy kibernetiki,” p. 71.126 S.V. Iablonskii, “Teoriia upravliaiushchikh sistem,” 1962; ARAN, f. 1807, op. 1, d. 19, l. 19.127 A.A. Markov, “Chto takoe kibernetika?” in A.I. Berg et al., eds., Kibernetika. Myshlenie. Zhizn’ (Moscow: Mysl’, 1964), p. 49.128 N.A. Bernshtein, “Methods for Developing Physiology as Related to the Problems of Cybernetics,” [1962] in Michael Cole and Irving Maltzman, eds., A Handbook of Contemporary Soviet Psychology, trans. Rosa Glickman et al. (New York: Basic Books, 1969), p. 442.129 I.A. Poletaev, “O matematicheskom modelirovanii,” Problemy kibernetiki 27 (1973): 147.130 I.A. Poletaev, “K opredeleniiu poniatiia ‘informatsiia’,” in A.A. Liapunov, ed., Issledovaniia po kibernetike (Moscow: Sovetskoe radio, 1970), p. 212.

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for elementary concepts, their classes, and operations on these classes—the same scheme as used in descriptive set theory.131 Markov—the Soviet leader of the constructivist approach in mathematics and a staunch opponent of the methods of set theory—made the theory of algorithms, which he developed, the cornerstone of his version of cybernetics.

Kolmogorov—a world authority on probability theory, who admired Shannon’s work, reformulated information theory in rigorous mathematical terms, and somewhat disliked Wiener’s speculations about the nature of control—naturally came to emphasize the priority of the concept of information in cybernetics at the expense of control. In a 1964 private letter, he wrote sarcastically: “Liapunov and others believe that all organic evolution is ‘controlled’ by someone from above. If organic life on earth suddenly disappears, this would be perhaps an expression of the highest ‘control.’”132

In his 1958 article on cybernetics in The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, Kolmogorov defined cybernetics as a theory of storing, transmitting, and processing information;133 the article on information in the same volume was written also by him, and information was introduced there as the main concept of cybernetics.134 Markov ridiculed Kolmogorov’s definitions, insisting that they produced a vicious circle. Kolmogorov responded by defining information as an “operator which changes the distribution of probabilities in a given set of events.” Markov dismissed this definition too, mockingly describing how “a given computer would receive a given operator, which changes the distribution of its probabilities, and store this operator on its magnetic drum.”135 The word “information” apparently means two very different things in information theory (where the “amount of information” characterizes the diversity of messages produced by the “information source”) and in computing (where the term “information” stands informally for any kind of data processed by a computer). The mechanical unification of information theory and computing under the rubric of cybernetics had amalgamated the two uses of the term “information” together and produced the confusion pointed out by Markov. The insurmountable difficulty of forging a common language for all members of the diverse cybernetic community to a large extent undermined the entire cybernetic project of deep reformation of science. Without a common language, the cybernetics empire soon dissipated and collapsed.

131 The parallel between Liapunov’s methodology in cybernetics and descriptive set theory was first made by his former student Iurii Zhuravlev; see Iu.I. Zhuravlev, “A.A. Liapunov i stanovlenie kibernetiki v nashei strane,” in A.A. Liapunov, Problemy teoreticheskoi i prikladnoi kibernetiki, p. 5.132 Kolmogorov to Uspenskii, December 29, 1964, Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 24 (1997): 243.133 A.N. Kolmogorov, “Kibernetika,” in Bol’shaia Sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 2nd ed., vol. 51 (Moscow, 1958), p. 149.134 A.N. Kolmogorov, “Informatsiia,” in Bol’shaia Sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 2nd ed., vol. 51 (Moscow, 1958), p. 129.135 Markov, “Chto takoe kibernetika?,” p. 41.

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The “Dialectical Materialization” of Cybernetics

When Aksel’ Berg said that cyberneticians did not have to elaborate a definition of cybernetics because it was the concern of philosophers, he actually meant it. In January 1962, at a session of the presidium of the Council, Berg raised the question of organizing a philosophical section within the Council. “Philosophy permeates everything,” he said, “and the philosophical section must be considered most important.” Mathematician Andrei Markov contended that there was no need for a philosophical section: “Since philosophy permeates everything, everybody must be a philosopher. If we create such a section, the philosophical issues would be isolated from the others.” Another mathematician, the director of the Computer Center of the Academy Anatolii Dorodnitsyn disagreed with Markov. “Mathematics also permeates everything,” he said, “but the mathematical section exists. Therefore, a philosophical section must exist too.” Linguist Sebastian Shaumian found an elegant linguistic compromise by proposing to call the section “methodological” rather than “philosophical.” Philosophers present at the meeting made concessions and proposed to organize a “commission” (an insignificant downgrade from a section) on “Methodological Foundations of Cybernetics” and to include non-philosophers among its members. Berg agreed, noting that “philosophy, like other sciences, must obey the order and must not be anarchistic.” The commission was established, led by philosopher Aleksandr Subbotin.136 Soon the commission quietly transformed itself into a section

In 1959, soon after the October 1958 All-Union Conference on Philosophical Problems of Natural Science, the Academy of Sciences created the Council on Philosophical Problems of Contemporary Natural Science (headed by philosopher Petr Fedoseev).137 This Council’s section of philosophical problems of cybernetics acted simultaneously as the philosophical section of Council on Cybernetics. This section was headed by Aleksandr Spirkin;138 Lev Bazhenov, Boris Biriukov,139 Il’ia Novik,140 and Viktor Tiukhtin were members of its bureau.

The philosophical section had a clear mission: to reconcile cybernetics with dialectical materialism, or better, to adapt dialectical materialism to cybernetics. In historian Alexander Vucinich’s characterization of this period, “the new orientation demanded a shift in emphasis from the interpretation of modern science in the light of dialectical materialism to the interpretation of dialectical materialism in the light of modern science.”141 The section duly accomplished its task. Philosophers loyal to cybernetics managed to incorporate the concept of information into the canonical list of categories of dialectical materialism. Downplaying the significance of Wiener’s formulation, “information is information, not matter or energy,”142 which had given a pretext for accusing cyberneticians of idealism in the course of the anti-

136 Protokol rasshirennogo zasedaniia presidiuma Nauchnogo Soveta po kibernetike Akademii nauk SSSR, January 10, 1962; ARAN, f. 1807, op. 1, d. 18, ll. 3-4.137 Nauchnyi sovet po filosofskim voprosam sovremennogo estestvoznaniia AN SSSR.138 See Spirkin’s memoirs: A.G. Spirkin, “Rovesnik Sovetskoi vlasti (Vospominaniia),” Vestnik, nos. 12-15 (1997).139 See Biriukov’s memoirs; B.V. Biriukov, “Otrazhenie sud’by Rossii: K stoletiiu so dnia rozhdeniia A.I. Berga,” Voprosy filosofii, no. 10 (1993): 152-68.140 See Novik’s memoirs: I.B. Novik, “Normal’naia lzhenauka,” Voprosy istorii estestvoznaniia i tekhniki, no. 4 (1990): 3-16.141 Alexander Vucinich, Empire of Knowledge: The Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1917-1970) (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984), p. 332.142 Wiener, Cybernetics, p. 132.

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cybernetics campaign, they employed their rhetorical skills to the full extent. “Information is not identical with matter,” they argued in a characteristic scholastic manner, “although it would be wrong to consider information a non-material entity.”143 Carefully choosing their words, they asserted that information was “inextricably connected with matter” and emphasized the “dialectical rotation of information and noise.”144

In June 1962, the philosophical section organized the Theoretical Conference of Philosophical (Methodological) Seminars on the Philosophical Problems of Cybernetics in Moscow. The conference was attended by more than a thousand philosophers, psychologists, mathematicians, physicists, biologists, engineers, computer specialists, and educators from thirty cities.145 Philosophers employed by the Council on Cybernetics asserted that cybernetics was “the most important element of the contemporary natural scientific foundation of dialectical materialism.”146 They argued:147

The conceptualization of living beings as relatively stable dynamic systems of control and information processing . . . leads to the clarification of the notions of “purpose” and “purposefulness.” The cybernetic approach to these notions stands in full agreement with the ideas of dialectical materialism, according to which purposefulness must be explained as a system of causal relations.

By attributing an “objective character” to the notion of purpose, philosophers contended, “cybernetics delivered a sharp blow to idealist teleology.”148 Cybernetics enriched the treasury of dialectical principles of Soviet philosophy by the “principle of the unity of the discrete and continuous approaches” and the “principle of the unity of the deterministic and probabilistic approaches.”149 The applications of the same mathematical models to qualitatively different phenomena illustrated the “principle of the material unity of the world.”150 No philosophical critique of cybernetics was presented at the conference.

Soviet authors quickly turned cybernetics—a former “handmaid of religion”—into a handmaid of atheism. One of them argued that “if man can design machines which in a simplified form simulate the workings of the brain, then mental activity must be a natural, material process, and therefore no soul, no supernatural element allegedly put into man by god can really exist.”151 Another author reasoned that “god is information that is isolated from any signals and exists by itself”; since information was impossible without signals, the existence of god was impossible.152 Books with titles like “Cybernetics is Anti-Religion” and “Information Theory and Religion” appeared.153

143 Parin et al., Problemy kibernetiki, p. 45.144 I.B. Novik, Kibernetika: filosofskie i sotsiologicheskie problemy (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1963), pp. 58, 80.145 A.I. Berg, “Kibernetika i stroitel’stvo kommunizma,” in A.I. Berg et al., eds., Kibernetika. Myshlenie. Zhizn’ (Moscow: Mysl’, 1964), p. 7.146 B.V. Biriukov and V.S. Tiukhtin, “O filosofskoi problematike kibernetiki,” in Berg et al., eds., Kibernetika. Myshlenie. Zhizn’, p. 79.147 Ibid., pp. 96-97.148 Ibid., p. 97.149 Ibid., pp. 87-92.150 Ibid., pp. 79-82.151 V.D. Pekelis, “Chelovek, kibernetika i bog,” Nauka i religiia, no. 2 (1960): 29.152 L.P. Teplov, “Vysshii razum,” Komsomol’skaia pravda (March 1963).153 See Iu.G. Antonomov and V.S. Kazakovtsev, Kibernetika—antireligiia (Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia, 1964); A.D. Ursul, Teoriia informatsii i religiia (Moscow: Znanie, 1968).

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Philosopher Spirkin—head of the philosophical section—was also deputy editor-in-chief of the fundamental five-volume edition The Philosophical Encyclopedia, published in 1960-70. He not only secured the publication of a huge 11-page article on cybernetics (the article on mathematics, for comparison, ran 6 pages), but also included such entries as “control systems,” “information theory,” “coding,” “algorithm,” “isomorphism,” and “homomorphism,” thus legitimizing them as philosophical categories. The first version of the entry on the philosophical problems of cybernetics was written by Ernest Kolman; the philosophical section of the Council on Cybernetics, however, rejected his draft. Kolman stated that cybernetic devices did not have consciousness and could not think; he emphasized the “qualitative differences” between humans and machines. Such views were already left behind by the proponents of cybernetics. “It is said [in the draft] that cybernetic devices have no consciousness. But we do not know yet what is called consciousness,” argued one critic.154 “Why such a sharp boundary between man and machine?” asked another.155 Philosopher Bazhenov pointed out that cybernetics, not philosophy, should find answers to the key philosophical problems of cybernetics:156

The existence of a essential boundary between man and machine has not been proven yet; this would be a major discovery, not something self-evident. . . . Today’s quantitative differences between the machine (of today!) and the human brain may be overturned by the development of science.

The philosophical section decided that Kolman’s manuscript was beyond repair and appointed a group of dedicated pro-cybernetics philosophers—Spirkin, Biriukov, and Tiukhtin—to write a new article for the Encyclopedia. Their article, published in the second volume of The Philosophical Encyclopedia, placed no philosophical limits on cybernetics and stated that “the question of the possibility of creating automata of a new type, which . . . would have the abilities of reduplication, adaptation to the environment, self-improvement, and creativity . . . is currently open to debate.”157

The old order was turned upside down: philosophers no longer claimed their right to judge scientists’ work; on the contrary, cybernetics itself provided guidance to solving philosophical problems. Pro-cybernetics philosophers did not challenge the validity of any cybernetics research; instead, they adapted philosophical discourse to cybernetic innovations. This skillful discursive maneuver not only legitimized cybernetics philosophically and updated the science files of dialectical materialism, but also created a symbiosis of cybernetics and philosophy. Cybernetics no longer posed a challenge to dialectical materialism; it no longer served as a stick with which Liapunov and Sobolev tried to chase philosophers out of the domain of science. Cybernetics was tamed and domesticated; a former rebel turned into a respectable discipline fully compatible with the principles of dialectical materialism.

154 Protokol zasedaniia sektsii filosofii Soveta po kibernetike, March 24, 1962; ARAN, f. 1807, op. 1, d. 23, l. 3.155 Ibidem.156 Ibid., l. 4.157 A.Berg et al., “Kibernetika,” in Filosofskaia entsiklopediia, vol. II (1962), p. 505.

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Figure 4.1

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Firgure 4.2

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