The Thinking Reed

Cybernetics was rehabilitated at the end of the fifties, and very soon the ruling circles came to swear by it. Alongside the oppositionist idea of market socialism, elements of a new idea appeared — cybernetic socialism. ‘Cybernetics’, writes Graham,

revitalized, at least temporarily, the Soviet leaders’ confidence that the Soviet system could control the economy rationally. This renewal came exactly at the moment when the possibility seemed to be irretrievably vanishing. This rebirth of hope was the explanation of the intoxication with cybernetics in the Soviet Union in the late fifties; in the period after 1958 thousands of articles, pamphlets and books on cybernetics appeared in the Soviet press. In the more popular articles the full utilization of cybernetics was equated with the advent of Communism and the fulfilment of the Revolution. If the curious mixture of ideology and politics in the Soviet Union can upon occasion affect certain sciences adversely — as it did at one time with genetics — it can also catapult others to unusual prominence.29

The idea that the economy could be roused by adopting advanced methods of management, without changing the organization, was utopian and absurd. It failed at once when put into practice, because owing to the outdated relations of production the introduction of any new achievements of science and technology — in particular the use of computers — came up against many difficulties and proved ineffective. Soviet experience in the sixties and seventies brilliantly confirmed Šik’s conjecture: that unless organization was reformed,

the new computer technology not only will not secure ideal economic development, but may even serve to justify absolutely one-sided development, aimed at the solution of simplified tasks which do not correspond to the public interest.30

This became clear pretty soon. For this reason, evidently, technocratic tendencies (in the form of pan-cyberneticism or any other) turned out not to be so strong here as could have been expected at first. Nevertheless, they did affect the ideology of the government, the opposition’s ideas, and even — as we shall see — literature as well. Technocratic illusions can be perceived in the views of Khrushchev and Brezhnev no less than in the ideas of Sakharov and Turchin, and they are apparent in the plays of Dvoretsky and Shatrov. On the whole, though, no special ideology of ‘technocracy’ arose in the USSR as it did in the USA in the sixties. True, the incapacity of the statocratic system to 'get rationalized’, which dismayed experts of the Western type, gave rise at the end of the sixties and in the seventies to such strange phenomena as ‘the disappointed technocrat’ and even ‘the enraged technocrat’ — of whom more later.