this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2025
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It was a failure of leadership. They could have beaten the US and even established an internet first with the OGAS program but funding was cut. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OGAS
At the time the USSR's military R+D was actually decentralised and various different branches were competing with one another. The internet we know was a centralised US military project. Ironically the US won because they had better centralisation.
Another aspect of this was the transition from transistor based architectures to Intergrated Circuit architectures. The US made this transition earlier and faster. The USSR had very little in the way of acceptable Integrated Circuit production, so it was slow to move to the better architecture. They made some really cool stuff like BESM-6, a masterpiece even, but it was transistor based.
To try and catch up they copied IBM and that made them dependent on western technologies so they weren't innovating anymore. The came the microprocessor revolution and they were well and truly behind.
All stems from the root source of failure of leadership to recognise the need to fully commit to it, and also shitty decentralised R+D.
Another factor of this is market. There was no requirement for computers in the USSR outside of Science or Defence. Consider that the entire western computer industry basically evolved from the need for calculators, mostly made by IBM. This was all finance shit. The market for computer innovation was driven by the need for calculation in the market driven economy. This motivation simply did not exist in an economy that was not market driven. There was little need in the Soviet Union to do quarterly projections, calculate capitalisation rates, amortise fixed-costs, etc. All of this drove the production of computers in a way that the USSR simply had no requirement for. In a capitalist economy your entire society has reason to need computers, in a socialist economy only your Science and Defence need it. The capitalists prioritising it faster makes sense when you consider the need would be much more visible for them everywhere in all corners of their system.
Idk it seems like getting the whole planned economy thing right would have been enough motive. If they'd managed big data and applied it to scientific socialism they'd have been unstoppable.
Of course you don't know what you don't know.
Yeah but they didn't really know that at the time. It's a failure of leadership however to realise just how big and important and transformative this was all going to be. Digitalisation should be looked at historically like industrialisation. They were definitely slow to it.
It's not as bad as some people make out though. They were like... 7 years behind I would say. Everyone always talks of it as "20 years behind" and that strikes me as an exaggeration.
There was also a sort of battle internally in the Soviet union between the proponents of socialism and the market reformers though which probably didn't help while simultaneously watching the west get ahead in this area it would have made people seeing it believe that capitalism is innovative without realising the material forces driving it were very different.
i wonder if Allende hadn't been couped that Cybersyn would've made the soviets get into it more
If the Soviets had gotten to digitalisation before the West, and OGAS had created the Internet, not DARPANET...
We, the communists, would probably have won the Cold War. Or at least, we'd have done a hell of a lot better.
God, I want a time machine so I can go knock some sense into Soviet heads of R&D who didn't see the value of computers.
Me dumping boxes of 90's era routers and 56k modems through a time portal pointing to 1950's era USSR trying desperately to make something good happen.
Fuck, that'd be good. I wish we could do that.
Is this your historical analysis or the analysis of other researchers? (Honestly curious)
I'd think that having an "always on digital communication network" would have been amazing for fine tuning things like transportation logistics and agricuture production/supply to an area as large as the USSR in general and Russia specifically.
Was there such a complete failure of imagination by the USSR leadership or did the leadership do the silly thing of "well, if the West is doing it, it must be silly so we should do the opposite of what they're doing"?
I know I've read (and hard to not find lib sources so I always view them with slight suspicion) that leadership was initially opposed to cybernetics, for example, and considered it as reactionary pseudoscience. Eventually they warmed up to it. But it wasn't enough to make a difference to how the planned economy worked. And I've read that they also viewed OGAS with suspicion too.
Its easy to find lib sources like How Not to Network a Nation, but idk enough communist sources for this (would love to know more). Maybe a proper book hasn't been written yet about it? Someone dig into the archives and write this stuff up!
And once computers are realized to be useful, then you also have sanctions that the west placed on the USSR that made importing computers more restrictive at certain times.
This is information I learned from speaking with russian comrades. I don't know if there's research on the matter, I just trust the people I have had conversations with about it and am mostly regurgitating what they said to me.
What I seem to recall being said was that supporters of market reforms convinced leadership that OGAS would cost far more than their proposals to reform with no guarantees of success.
That's just not true. The economy in general has a need of computing, including for automation of production processes, bookkeeping, communication, probably other stuff that doesn't fall under those.
Yes but the scale of what's needed and why is very different compared to everyday people in hundreds of thousands of jobs finding direct and obvious benefits in their day to day jobs in a capitalist market driven economy.
Not to mention that the capitalist class itself were the ones directly doing calculations that could see the benefit of computerising what they do every day.
I'm not trying to say a socialist economy wouldn't benefit from it. What I'm saying is that the forces driving a socialist economy towards it were smaller than the forces driving the capitalist economy towards it due to the sheer number of people that could see the benefits of computers in the west compared to the significantly smaller number of people that could see the direct benefits in the socialist economy. Many thousands of finance people vs only scientists, r+d, leadership and so on.
This isn't a value judgement against socialist economy either. Just that in this particular instance capitalism's large number of people working with bullshit made up finance numbers gave capitalism a bigger force pushing towards computerisation. Socialism's lack of people doing these bullshit "jobs" worked against them in this one particular instance.
Not sure what you mean there.
The same applies to the calculations done by various economic leadership figures (from local factory managers to the union government figures), so this does not seem to be a factor.
And I don't see how that could be the reason for that.
This explanation especially doesn't seem to work when we consider that most of the capitalist world wasn't any more successful in adopting computers than the USSR.
The much more significant factors seem to be colonial plunder of the world by the imperial core, induction of brain drain in favour of electronics R&D in the imperial core, and the USSR's liberalisation reforms that led to the stifling of industrial innovation.
How were the 'finance people' that were not in leading positions any different from bookkeepers in the USSR in this context?
I do understand that.
I do, however, think that that explanation does not have a good basis, and am pointing that out.