Innovation in Science—the Case of Cybernetics in the Soviet Union

Abstract

Cybernetics is one of the notable cases in which the growth of scientific knowledge has appeared to come into conflict with political authority in the Soviet Union. Although it is now a prominent area of research and discussion in the Soviet Union, cybernetics was condemned in the Soviet press in the early 1950S as a reactionary pseudoscience. The public reception given to it was uniformly hostile. The chief attack, which appeared in 1953 under the title 'Whom Cybernetics Serves', declared that it served the interests of the reactiQnary bourgeoisie and reflected its desire to replace potentially revolutionary human beings with machines which would pliantly carry out the commands of the imperialists and militarists.' But these hopes, it was asserted, were futile, for cybernetics was a false science, destined to perish even before imperialism perished. Other wholesale refutations appeared in the early 1950s; but by 1958 cybernetics was acknowledged as a legitimate field of research, and in 1959 a Science Council for Cybernetics was established in the USSR Academy of Sciences. In I96I the first of a series of collected papers was published under the Council's auspices. As if in reply to the earlier attack, it bore the title Cybernetics-to the Service of Communism.2 Since the late 1950S cybernetics has gained recognition in the Soviet Union as an over-arching or synthesizing theory in science and technology. It has been remarked by one writer that