The Power of Systems: How Policy Sciences Opened Up the Cold War World by Eglė Rindzevičiūtė (review).

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Power of Systems: How Policy Sciences Opened Up the Cold War World by Eglė Rindzevičiūtė Ekaterina Babintseva (bio) The Power of Systems: How Policy Sciences Opened Up the Cold War World By Eglė Rindzevičiūtė. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2016. Pp. 306. The history of Soviet computing and cybernetics is still a nascent field. The few pioneering accounts that we have—Peters, How Not to Network a Nation, and Gerovitch, From Newspeak to Cyberspeak—are concerned with why computing and cybernetics were less successful in the Soviet Union than in the United States. Eglė Rindzevičiūtė's The Power of Systems rejects the narrative of failure to reveal important [End Page 886] Soviet contributions to the production of cybernetic methods of global governance. Developed under the umbrella term "the systems approach," these methods were the product of the circulation of knowledge in computational modeling between the United States and the Soviet Union from the 1960s through the 1980s. Institutionally, the circulation of knowledge was enabled by the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), an international version of the RAND Corporation. IIASA became a meeting platform for Soviet and American scholars and scientists working on computational models of social, economic, and natural processes. Rindzevičiūtė argues that the East-West cooperation in systems analysis led to the emergence of new instruments, language, and visions of governance, which were premised on the principles of self-reflexivity and uncertainty. The IIASA steered away from the conception of governance as a teleological and goal-oriented process, offered by American cyberneticists in the 1940s. Initially, Soviet bureaucrats favored the systems approach because it seemed to promise more control over industries and social planning. But, contrary to their expectations, the systems approach "transformed the very character of control" (p. 13). For instance, while working on a computational model of the environmental effects of a nuclear attack, Soviet mathematician Nikita Moiseev argued for the need to replace the notion of upravlenie (control) with napravlenia (guidance), explicitly criticizing the unfeasibility of the totalitarian ambition for complete subordination. The Power of Systems opens with a discussion of political and intellectual shifts in the post-Stalinist Soviet Union, which are key to understanding Soviet interest in the IIASA and systems analysis. The two most notable figures of this chapter are Soviet Prime Minister Aleksei Kosygin and his son-in-law Dzhermen Gvishiani, who was the director of the powerful State Committee for Science and Technology that oversaw the importation of Western theories of management and technology to the Soviet Union. Kosygin and Gvishiani both believed that the Soviet system needed to embrace Western approaches to management and governance in order to survive. Chapter 2 shows that while the Soviets were motivated by gaining access to Western knowledge and technology, the U.S. government was more interested in building connections between East and West. In Chapters 3 and 4, Rindzevičiūtė examines the formation of the transnational community of systems analysis, paying attention to the IIASA's insistence on the political neutrality of cybernetic-inflected methods of policymaking. The last three chapters present three captivating case studies of the application of systems analysis to global modeling, making these chapters of particular interest to historians of data and computing. As Chapter 5 shows, the first computer-based global models of social and economic development sought to understand the effects of human activity on the [End Page 887] planetary geophysical processes. One such model, created by American economist Wassili Leontief and Russian economist Stanislav Menshikov in the 1970s, investigated the impact of economic growth on the environment. Later, in the 1980s, their model was instrumental in the work of the Moscow-based Institute for Systems Research, which predicted the potential decline of the Soviet economy. Chapters 6 and 7 continue tracing the circulation of data, models, people, and technology to understand the Soviet-American modeling of the environmental consequences of a nuclear war. In all of them, Rindzevičiūtė highlights Soviet contributions to rethinking the possibility of total control. The book concludes with an epilogue that suggests that the roots of post-Soviet Russian neoliberalism can be found in systems analysis. The...