In this book, Slava Gerovitch argues that Soviet cybernetics was not just an intellectual trend but a social movement for radical reform in science and society as a whole. Followers of cybernetics viewed computer simulation as a universal method of problem solving and the language of cybernetics as a language of objectivity and truth. With this new objectivity, they challenged the existing order of things in economics and politics as well as in science.
The history of Soviet cybernetics followed a curious arc. In the 1950s it was labeled a reactionary pseudoscience and a weapon of imperialist ideology. With the arrival of Khrushchev's political "thaw," however, it was seen as an innocent victim of political oppression, and it evolved into a movement for radical reform of the Stalinist system of science. In the early 1960s it was hailed as "science in the service of communism," but by the end of the decade it had turned into a shallow fashionable trend. Using extensive new archival materials, Gerovitch argues that these fluctuating attitudes reflected profound changes in scientific language and research methodology across disciplines, in power relations within the scientific community, and in the political role of scientists and engineers in Soviet society. His detailed analysis of scientific discourse shows how the Newspeak of the late Stalinist period and the Cyberspeak that challenged it eventually blended into "CyberNewspeak."
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ABSTRACTSoviet propaganda often used the Soviet space program as a symbol of a much larger and more ambitious political/engineering project-the construction of communism. Both projects involved the construction of a new self, and the cosmonaut was often regarded as a model for the "new Soviet man." The Soviet cosmonauts publicly represented a communist ideal, an active human agency of sociopolitical and economic change. At the same time, space engineers and psychologists viewed human operators as integral parts of a complex technological system and assigned the cosmonauts a very limited role in spacecraft control. This article examines how the cosmonaut self became the subject of "human engineering," explores the tension between the public image of the cosmonauts and their professional identity, and draws parallels between the iconic roles of the cosmonaut and the astronaut in the cold war context.
A great social reconstruction of Soviet society (perestroika) ended with the disappearance of the reconstructed object-the Soviet Union-in December 1991. Something else, however, was reconstructed: people's thinking-their attitude to socialism, to their history, and to themselves. Remarkable changes also emerged in Soviet research on the history of technology and science, both reshaping the thematic discourse and altering the methodological profile. Soviet scholarship in the history of technology and science evolved along the lines of the political and social evolution of Soviet society: from sincere and enthusiastic belief in Marxism to degeneration of the Marxist theoretical framework into an instrument of rhetoric. By the mid-1980s, the time of perestroika, this evolution had resulted in an internalist methodology of research, ideological servility, limitations imposed on the sphere of discussion, and a scarcity of imaginative analysis. The policy of openness (glasnost') led to the weakening of ideological censorship and opened the doors of some previously inaccessible archives. New opportunities caused a drastic shift in the interests of Soviet scholars toward the recent history of Soviet technology and science. At the same time, the role of Marxist rhetoric began to decrease. Changes in research methodology developed more slowly, for they were touching deeper layers of the discourse. The process of
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