Andrei Ershov and the Soviet Information Age

Abstract

I'm not original. My ideal is creative mind, or, in terms of mottoes: IBM's Think and poetic never a day without a line. --A. P. Ershov When Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985, Soviet Union was suddenly confronted with two major, imminent transformations. The first was restructuring and liberalization of Soviet under banner of glasnost' and free market reform, subject of most influential studies of late Soviet era, which depict break of early perestroika years primarily in ideological or personal terms. (1) The second, in a longer timeframe, was arrival of post-Fordist information economy, heralded in part by worldwide explosion in personal computing over course of decade. Although it has received little attention, plan to modernize and retool Soviet economy using advanced scientific and technological means was integral to Gorbachev's promise. If Soviet Union was to present an effective counterpart to capitalism of age of electronics and informatics, of computers and robots--as he put it in his address to 27th Party Congress--it needed to turn of scientific-technical progress to its advantage, making most of transformation of consciousness and new psychology it would bring. (2) This approach implied a number of concrete tasks, among which securing computer literacy of was especially urgent. (3) In fact, Gorbachev had pushed through a mass computer literacy campaign in 1985, even before death of Chernenko. Andrei Petrovich Ershov, a 53-year-old academician and computer programmer, took command of project from very beginning. He was already known throughout programming community on both sides of Iron Curtain for his visionary views on transformative power of mass computing, and he had risen to prominence in Academy of Sciences partly as a result of his international network of contacts. In party journal Kommunist, Ershov made a powerful case for centrality of informatization to perestroika project: expansion of personal computing, guided and pushed forward by Soviet educational system, promised not only democratization of information structure of society but a dramatic society-wide shift toward private initiative at expense of bureaucracy. Ershov thus proposed a single solution to twin challenges of 1980s. Universal computer literacy was to be a worthy successor to grandest of Soviet enterprises--electrification, collectivization, and industrialization. (4) By time Soviet Union ceased to exist in 1991, computer literacy campaign had collapsed utterly, squandering widespread initial interest in subject. Today, millions of students who once used Ershov's textbooks remember it as a late Soviet absurdity. How did this gifted programmer, whose writings on computer literacy had been widely publicized at home and abroad, fail so completely at turning his ideas into reality? It was not, I argue, merely unpropitious conditions of an imploding system that led to reform's collapse. Its origins lay instead in a persistent set of ideals formulated within post-Stalin scientific community and rearticulated through contemporary debates on cybernetics and correspondence networks of international computer science. These ideals provided confident, affirmative answers to questions that had become unusually potent as postwar years made science more massive, popular, and public, in Soviet Union as well as elsewhere: Could scientific life provide a blueprint for human flourishing? Could science be made to serve moral and social, as well as technical, ends? Much of this heritage--the utopian appeal of science in public imagination--was shared by Gorbachev project more broadly; after all, the acceleration of scientific-technical progress had been one of cardinal slogans of 22nd Party Congress of 1961, long before Gorbachev made uskorenie a keystone of perestroika. …