kibertonija.in
not a cyberspace. a cybertonia!
Peters-Soviet-Internet-Paper-2015-11-19-.pdf
(an extract from "How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet" by Benjamin Peters, 2016, MIT Press)
“Cybertonia”: From National Cyberculture to Local Counterculture
Glushkov’s proposal to rationalize and automate the national economy in 1962 took shape just as his own institutional environment was being upgraded from a small computing center to a more ambitious formal setting of an academic institute, without losing its informal and, in after-work hours, almost countercultural work environment. In the early 1960s, his vision for reforming the command economy took on national ambitions at the same time that his own local institution entered national prominence. A glance at the institutional transition from Sergei Lebedev’s laboratory in the valley of Feofania to Glushkov’s Institute of Cybernetics will provide insights into how the local institutional culture of this particular transition animated both formal and informal attempts to imagine an alternate Soviet information society.
The formal history of the transition from computing center to academic institute is illustrious if not unusual. In the late 1940s and 1950s, Sergei Alexeyevich Lebedev gathered a small and extraordinarily talented group of electrical engineers into a computing laboratory in the valley of Feofania in the southern outskirts of Kiev, Ukraine. That small group brought into existence the MESM (malaya electronicheskaya schetnaya mashina, or the small electronic calculating machine, and predecessor to the mainframe workhorse BESM series), the first stored-memory electronic computer in Europe, arriving four years after von Neumann’s UNIAC39 (figure 4.4). In 1952, the first “large electronic computer,” the BESM, or bol’shaya electronicheskaya schetnaya mashina, followed, and then a series of Soviet native mainframe computers—the M-20, the BESM-3M, BESM-4, M-220, M-222, and finally the BESM-6. Designed in 1966 and produced first in 1968, the impressive BESM-6 went into serial production and served in special-purpose computation centers and military computer networks for the next two decades. In 1962, under Glushkov’s direction, Lebedev’s laboratory was relocated a mile away to a separate campus facility of the future Institute of Cybernetics that was known for a series of subsequent impressive achievements. Researchers at that facility developed the “Dnieper” computer series, which powered the base stations for Soviet cosmonaut flight south of Moscow while pressing the frontiers of Soviet information science and technology. The institute also is known for developing the mainframe and early microcomputers Mir and Promin and a range of research on economic cybernetics, medical cybernetics, artificial intelligence, optimization, and defense research. The projects included the first network project to digitize the entire command economy and their central project—the OGAS and its technical base EGSVT beginning in 1963. In all, the official histories convey the gravitas that one would expect from one of the elite teams of Soviet scientists.
Figure 4.4
The MESM (small electronic calculating machine) and its team in the monastery near the cathedral in Theophania, 1952.
A closer look at the local practices of these institutions, however, sheds a very different light on this moment of Soviet optimism. The years 1962 and 1963 marked the height of enthusiasm for a young, entrepreneurial, and surprisingly humorous and mischievous group of cyberneticists. Lebedev’s laboratory was situated in a forest that was enchanted with Slavic legends. Overrun by songbirds, rabbits, mushrooms, and berries in the summer and haunted in the winter by rumors of wolves and Baba Yaga (the famous witch of eastern European folklore), this forest served as a curiously naturalistic cradle for Lebedev’s MESM, which was then the emblem of the new Soviet religion of rational scientific progress. In the center of an opening in the woods stands St. Panteleimon’s Cathedral (Panteleimonivs’kii sobor), a high point of Russian revival ecclesiastical architecture since its construction in 1905 to 1912 (figures 4.5 and 4.6).
Figure 4.5
St. Panteleimon’s cathedral and monastery (left), which housed the MESM.
Figure 4.6
Park, pond, and forest in Feofania, the general setting for Sergei Lebedev’s computing laboratory, late 1940s to 1950s.
Nearby stands a two-story brick building that tells a story of a complicated intersection of faith, madness, murder, and science. Initially built as a dormitory for Eastern Orthodox priests, the building was looted during the 1917 Russian revolution and converted into a psychiatric hospital. In 1941, the Nazis murdered its patients and established it as a military hospital. In 1948, the badly damaged building was transferred to Lebedev’s work on the newest icon of Soviet atheism—that triumph of human rationality and creativity that was the automated computer. Six thousand vacuum tubes and two years of astonishing effort later, Lebedev’s team turned on the monster calculating machine in 1950. A sense of collaborative, dedicated work ethic lingered in the decades thereafter, and a sense of local autonomy that was away from the watchful eyes of Moscow pervaded the area of Feofania. Researchers who received housing nearby rarely chose to leave, even when offered more prestigious positions. Informal play and even troublemaking abounded. To the priests’ chagrin today, engineers sometimes tested controlled mechanical explosions in the magisterial monastery. Water fetched from a nearby well was used to extinguish the fires because the building where the first computer in Europe was built had no plumbing. After work, the mood lightened. Bus drivers were sent on wild goose chases through the forest, and juggling and ping-pong balls ricocheted down the hallways of offices and laboratories. On work breaks, volleyball and soccer games broke out, and after work, the researchers ran to swim in the nearby lake and to wander through the tall pines and oak trees of the surrounding forest. Lebedev and Glushkov are rumored to have drafted the organization of the Institute of Cybernetics, built three kilometers to the west, while strolling together through that forest.
When the Academy of Sciences appointed Glushkov to be the first director of the new Institute of Cybernetics, some of that informal spirit transferred to the new institution, in part thanks to a prolonged transition period during the 1960s in which the campus where the institute is currently housed was built. In the after-work hours and at holiday parties, the growing group of young institute researchers even imagined a humorous autonomous country of their own, “Cybertonia,” a virtual country. The researchers, whose average age was roughly twenty-five, first christened this “fairytale [skazochnaya] land” during a New Year’s Eve party in 1960. The joke snowballed. The fairytale land offered scientific seminars, lectures, films, and auctions mainly in the capital Kiev and an evening ball in the Ukrainian nationalist border city of L’vov, spinning off more and more activities (artwork, ballads, a short film, passports, currency), press releases, seminars, holiday and after-hour gatherings, community functions, and more parties.40 The researchers at the Institute of Cybernetics were still several years away from occupying the Institute’s future campus, which eventually included more than a dozen buildings along Glushkov Prospect in southwest Kiev (figure 4.7). From 1962 to 1970, the institute occupied a building at 4 Lysogorskaya Street several kilometers north, at an intersection with Nauka (Science) Street, an area famous for being featured in the science fiction of the Strugatskii brothers, who worked in the Institute of Physics a few blocks away41 (figure 4.8).
Figure 4.7
Sketch of the Institute of Cybernetics campus, Prospect Academic Glushkov, 40, Kiev, 1970.
Figure 4.8
Sketch of the Institute of Cybernetics building, Lysogarskaya 4, Kiev, 1966.
In its informal practices, the Cybertonia society abounded in pranks, puns, and puzzling wit, recreating a country in the image of the autonomous Soviet automata. The collective issued fake stamped passports and marriage certificates to the mostly male research staff and female administrative staff, authorized by the “Robot Council of Cybertonia.”42 (figures 4.9 and 4.10). Each passport packed mathematical equations into the blanks for personal identification, accompanied by a national constitution and a map of the future capital of “Cyber City” (Kybergrad). The workplace culture at this prominent research institute embraced the joke as an ambiguous means for letting a little steam off after work and, in their more ambitious flights of imagination, envisioning a nation that was independent from the Soviet Union. The blurring of reality and virtuality, work and play, science and art was the point of “Cybertonia,” a name that lives on in the title of an academic journal recently begun by Glushkov’s youngest daughter, Vera Viktorevna Glushkova.43 The Cybertonia constitution guaranteed the rights to frivolity and humor complete with the faux-newspeak warning: “anyone who disobeys the Robot will be stripped of their rights and cast out of the country for 24 seconds” (figure 4.11). The map featured landmarks such as “a Main Post Office and the Feedback Division (or Returned Communication),” or Glavpochtamt y otdel obratnyi svazi, a possible reference to Cybertonia as a self-contained system apart from the Soviet regime, as well as the “Temple of the 12 Abends” (abnormal program ends, or software terminations), or Khram 12 avostov, a near Russian homophone with “the Temple of the Twelve Apostles.” Currency was issued on the punch cards that were used in analog computer memory storage.
Figure 4.9
Cybertonia passport, 1965. (a) front, (b) back.
Figure 4.10
Cybertonia wedding certificate, 1965.
Figure 4.11
Constitution of the country of Cybertonia, about 1966.
Perhaps most boldly, the Cybertonia society hosted a saxophone-playing robot mascot as a unveiled reference to jazz, an export of American global culture (figure 4.12),44 and it published at least one issue of a newspaper and made a comedic short film titled “Feofan Stepanovich serditsya” (figure 4.13). By 1966, its motto had evolved to “energy, laughter, dreams, and fantasy.” Stamped on the headline of the single issue of the group’s newspaper the Evening Cyber stood the greetings “s novyim kodom” (or “happy new code,” a near homophone with “happy new year” in Russian). In 1968, a season ripe with revolt, a symposium of cybertonians published an irreverent report on the “complex cybernetic aspects of humor” that was issued from “Cyber City” in April 1969. The report contains nothing explicitly subversive but overflows with technocratic wit and sarcasm directed against Soviet authority figures. These merry pranksters compared the task of securing living quarters (a notorious challenge of everyday Soviet life) to hyperdimensional geometry and published “formal” reports on “theory of Graphs/Counts” (teoriya grafov, the royal title of count is a homophone with the word graph in Russian), a Jonathan Swift–like account of laughter at work as an underutilized national economic resource, odes to the virtues of Georgian soccer, cheese, beer, and a few chauvinistic laughs about the prospects of the feminization of science. Another report in 1965 bore the bold title “Executives Incognito: On Wanting to Remain Unknown, at Least to the Authorities.”45 Puns punctuated the technocratic discourse while quietly resisting power. These scientists sought in Cybertonia their own Cyberia away from Siberia, an escape from the great error of Khrushchev’s age if not the great terror of Stalin’s. Alas, Cybertonia never did grow to become, as the editors of its 1968 symposium had gleefully enthused, an “interplanetary congress.” At some point between 1969 and 1970, as the Brezhnev doctrine compelled the Warsaw Pact to invade Czechoslovakia, “the entire idea of Cybertonia,” as a participant recalled, “was buried by the pressure of the Party and government.”46
Figure 4.12
Cybertonia logo: a robot playing jazz on a saxophone, about 1966.
Figure 4.13
Parody newsletter: Vechernii Kiber (Evening Cyber), 1966.
The purpose of this snapshot into the informal lives of Soviet cyberneticists should be clear. In the forests of Feofania and in the virtual playground of Cybertonia, network entrepreneurs sought intellectual, political, and social autonomy, revelry, and even subtle informal protest from the oppressive regime that they served. Just as other cultures have demonstrated the rich connections between informal countercultures and cybercultures, lively network forums reproduced the cultural, institutional, and gendered mores of the Soviet 1960s, conceiving of a kind of privileged cybercommune of their own making.47
In the early 1960s—when Glushkov’s ambitious plan to network, account for, and automate the nationwide command economy faced both partial formal approval and informal resistance from the top state authorities—his own local institution was undergoing significant institutional growth even as it was being told it must develop the EGSVTs before the OGAS network. In this fleeting period of optimism, the establishment and growth of the Institute of Cybernetics led to a form of institutional adolescence in which it exercised institutional ambitions on the national stage while informally and internally venting a kind of countercultural defiance against the state regime that governed it.
In fact, at the same time, 1962 to 1968, that Cybertonia was being celebrated during after-work hours, the Institute of Cybernetics was transitioning from a relatively small set of buildings near Theofania to a spacious campus a few kilometers to the southwest. It had enough modern buildings to house each major field of cybernetics with its own research department (except for Glushkov’s “theoretical and economic cybernetics,” which remained a department that preserves to this day the particular universal of Glushkov’s merger of mathematics and economics).