Computing in the USSR. The story of the other side of the Iron Curtain

Our review of the prehistory of Linux was focused on the West and particularly on the United States. This is because the largest amount of bibliography available is from that country. However, dthe other side of the Iron Curtain (Iron Curtain, if you like) computing had an interesting development. Although it may not have had much of an impact on the birth of Linux, free software or the Internet, it is still the story of people whose love of knowledge and their passion for technology drove them to take a leap forward despite the limitations.

It is necessary to recognize that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and the countries that were under its sphere of influence always had very good basic science. The Poles were the first to break Enigma (the Nazi cipher machine) while East German optical products were in demand by photographers and astronomers around the world. Nor should we forget that the USSR was a pioneer in space research.

The problem they always had it was his inability to transform his scientific achievements into quality products.

After the end of World War II, the United States and the USSR began the so-called Cold War. This included all kinds of skirmishes to the exclusion of direct military confrontation. One of the battlefields was propaganda.

When Time magazine published a photo of the electromechanical computer in 1950 Mark III and the title "Can man create a superman?" from the Soviet press they responded with a mockery of the capitalist dream of replacing the workers class-conscious and human soldiers, who could choose not to fight for the bourgeoisie, by obedient robots.

As well ridiculed the idea of ​​using computers to process economic information and they compared American business people addicted to information with their fellow hypochondriacs who love prescription pills.

Cybernetics is the science that studies the communication and automatic regulation systems of living beings and applies them to electronic and mechanical systems that look like them. For a time, it was also the focus of attack by some Russian academics. The psychologist Mikhail Iaroshevskii defined it as

A modern pseudo-theory manufactured by ignorant philosophers and totally hostile to the people and science

From what we can understand from the bibliography consulted, none of the criticism came from specialists on the subject. Almost all of them were based on an article by a science journalist from a general interest magazine that was itself inspired by the Time article. Something like someone giving an opinion on the Soviet computer industry from a tweet commenting on this article.

Being fair to the Russians, the Western mainstream press was and still is absolutely ignorant of technology.

Computing in the USSR. The sayings and the facts

At the same time that her journalists reviled her, the military and scientists worked not to lag behind the West.

Sergei Sobolev himself, the chief mathematician of the Soviet nuclear weapons program, tirelessly promoted the development of new computers. Thus appeared the first computer of the Soviet Union, the MESM, and the first small computer, the M-1.

Moscow even had two different teams compete. One was sponsored by the Soviet Academy of Sciences and the other by the Ministry of Manufacture of Machinery and Instruments. The second was the winner, and seven units of Strela, a computer the size of a room, were produced.

Strela was intended for military applications. He was key in the design of the hydrogen bomb, in the efficiency simulations of nuclear attacks, in the design of the missile defense system and in many other Navy and Air Force projects.

Anyway, the Soviet Academy of Sciences project, called BESM, was not forgotten either. An improved version it would become the fastest computer in Europe.

Even today, 29 years after the disappearance of the USSR, it is still impossible to make a dispassionate analysis without fanatics from one side or the other jumping into the jugular of the one who tries to do so. One thing is clear, lhe history of Soviet computing in its early stage is the history of the struggle of scientists against bureaucrats. Historians refer to how researchers had to interrupt their work to attend political indoctrination sessions that included criticism of computers.

I wish one could say that that died with the Soviet Union. But, in Western countries those who seek technological progress continue to be hampered by bureaucrats and politicians.

In the next article we continue with the history of computing on the other side of the Iron Curtain.