The author and editor (I will treat them as one entity) have several aims in this book. One is to provide a historical and technical overview of Soviet computing developments from the 1940s through the 1970s, which have been only partially covered elsewhere. Judging from the sample chapters, this aim will be achieved. In addition, the author provides a rich social, institutional, political and economic context for these events, demonstrating that Soviet computing developed in a culturally distinctive way. A second aim is to gain recognition for Soviet computing pioneers who labored in relative obscurity—at least as far as the West and its historians have been concerned. The book is likely to achieve this as well, given its sympathetic portraits of the key players and its documentation of their accomplishments and historical "firsts." A third goal is to show how political considerations—both the geopolitics of the Cold War and the institutional infighting of bureaucrats—shaped Soviet science and technology, sometimes to disastrous effect.

The work is certainly original: it draws on the author's own experiences and describes events that have had very little coverage in the published literature (some of which was written by the same author). The scholarship appears to be sound. While it draws substantially on the author's own knowledge rather than documentary evidence, the author and editor have provided a number of citations to supporting literature, as well as including the entire text of some key primary documents.

The work is a significant contribution to the field of history of technology, and more specifically history of computing, because it covers a topic that is both important and underrepresented. With the exception of Japan, there is a dearth of information on the history of computing outside the English-speaking world. This lack is especially glaring in the case of Soviet computing, given the many groundbreaking innovations made in that country and the historically important connections between the USSR's computing program and its industrial, space, and military ventures. The work is also significant in showing how technical developments were shaped by their historical and cultural context. The absence of a commercial market for computers and software within a communist regime; intense secrecy even during peacetime; the allocation of government resources to military rather than civilian applications; and the limited communication between Soviet and Western scientists all influenced the technical designs and uses of Soviet computers.

The book addresses two broad audiences: scholars and the interested public (in which I include engineers and computer professionals). I will discuss these separately.

The most obvious audience are scholars and historians of computing, as well as historians of science and technology more generally. As mentioned above, there is almost no existing historical literature on Soviet computing. Both scholarly and personal accounts of this topic are currently needed—a first person account such as Malinovsky's can serve as primary source material for more analytical works. Indeed, the main scholarly journal in this area, the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, has often published edited firsthand accounts by computing figures, in recognition of the usefulness of these narratives to historians and the need to capture this information while the participants are still alive. The book under review would emphatically be welcomed by these historians. Not only does it provide details of key Soviet computing projects, but it also provides rich resources for constructing a cultural, political, or institutional analysis of Soviet computing. For the wider community of historians of science and technology, the book provides compelling insights into what life was like for scientists working under a totalitarian regime.

A second academic group would be teachers of history of science and technology. I think this book (or portions of it) would work well for an undergraduate or graduate course--especially given the relatively few readable books on any aspect of Soviet science and technology. I have often assigned Tracy Kidder's Soul of a New Machine, which describes an American computing project from the personal viewpoints of its participants; Malinovsky's book would make an interesting pairing with that. A third scholarly category would be science policy advisers, who often draw on historical examples to evaluate policy approaches. As a cautionary tale about political influences on science and innovation, this book appears ready-made for that audience, and seems particularly relevant for drawing policy lessons. These chapters deal respectively with Viktor Glushkov's failed attempts at science policy and the "fatal decision" of the Soviet government to abandon its own computer designs in favor of copying IBM's machines.

The excerpts I have read are also accessible to an audience with no special knowledge of computing or the Soviet Union. However, I would expect this book to appeal mainly to readers with some technical background or interest in Soviet history, rather than the public at large. A remarkable number of autobiographical accounts by computer personalities (mainly American) have been published, and there appears to be a substantial audience for this genre. Malinovsky's unique inside perspective on Soviet computing history might draw some of this audience. The book provides two things to this target group: lively "human interest" portraits of the major players of Soviet computing, whom most readers will be learning about for the first time; and descriptions of virtually all the major developments in Soviet computing, many of which had been secret until the last decade or so.

I found the text quite lively and readable. Occasionally the prose takes on a heroic or patriotic tone that may be jarring to American readers (though quite common in its Russian/Ukrainian context). A reader with no technical background might find some of the details about computing machines cumbersome, although the technical descriptions can be skipped over without losing the general sense of the narrative.

The overall organization of the book, as far as I could tell from the chapter summary in the prospectus, follows a logical temporal/thematic order. Chapter 1 coherently covers the early years of Soviet computing. One small criticism: in the section from 44-50 describing how rival computing groups emerged to build the MESM and Strela, I found it a bit difficult to keep track of the various actors and institutions. Chapter 4 does not flow as well, since it jumps around between several topics that seem only loosely connected (Zalkind, Lepato, Kartsev, Michailov, Lebedev). Each of these smaller vignettes is individually interesting and internally coherent, but the chapter as a whole needs some kind of framework. This might be accomplished with an introductory overview and some transitional material between sections.

One unusual feature of the manuscript is the inclusion of entire documents--some of them several pages long--within the chapter text (for example, the "top secret" reports about the MESM in chapter 1). This has both advantages and disadvantages. Some readers might find these quotations overly long and feel that they interrupt the flow of the text. On the other hand, they provide fascinating glimpses into contemporary scientific thinking and practice (the Q&A session at the Academy of Science of the Ukraine was particularly illuminating). Overall I did not find them to be intrusive and strongly believe that they add to the historical value of the book. Perhaps some subtle change in formatting, such as a different font, could be used to differentiate these extended quotations from the body of the text.

It would also be helpful to place these events into a wider historical context by providing more references to parallel Western developments. This is done in Chapter 1, for example, on pp. 38 and 58-59, where Soviet machines are compared to those in the UK and US; and in chapter 4 where Soviet innovations are compared to the American SAGE and Cray systems. Other obvious examples would be to mention Vannevar Bush's differential analyzer in connection with Soviet analog computers or George Stibitz's binary calculators when discussing Lebedev's use of binary numbers; or in chapter 4, the use of core memory. This would give the reader a better sense of whether Soviet innovates predated or postdated their Western counterparts and how their performance compared.

The technical document on pages 31-36 of chapter 1 will be opaque to most readers without some interpretation of its significance. For example, the author could follow the document with a paragraph or two commenting on the purpose of the mathematical equations calculated, the speed with which the machine was built, or the different groups that became involved in it as time went on (including at least two scientific institutes, a government commission, and a hydroelectric plant).

I recommend publication of this manuscript, leaving the adoption of the suggestions in this review to the discretion of the author. I found this manuscript extremely informative and generally enjoyable. It is clearly of historical significance and fills a void in the literature.

Janet Abbate, Ph.D.
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University