In recent history, no other phenomenon has impacted our society and culture as much as information technology. Entirely based on computing - the action of using or operating a computer - information technology’s origins may be traced back for centuries to primitive counting tools and calculating methods. Large-scale contemporary number crunching for business or scientific purposes, however, took hold only in the mid-twentieth century and grew exponentially.

While the history of computing in the industrialized nations of America, Western Europe, and Japan has received a good deal of attention, thorough historical understanding of computer technology developments in the Soviet Union has remained elusive even after this nation’s breakup in the early 1990s.

Professor Boris Malinovsky was the first Soviet-era computer practitioner to publish a full-length Russian language book on the history of Soviet computing in 1995, Istoriya vuichislitelnoi tekhniki v litsakh, or The History of Computing in Personalities. The title deliberately emphasized its focus on the people who led the Soviet Union’s early computing industry and fought for its survival in the face of political intrigue and as the Soviet economy collapsed in the Brezhnev years. This English language version is a slight abridgement of Malinovsky’s original book, but is a close translation, intended to retain the substance implied by his Russian language title.

The end of the Cold War allowed this history to reach the West. Malinovsky himself was forbidden to write on many of the technical topics found in this book prior to the early 1990s because they were secret, military-supported projects. Although not all of the Soviet computing industry was military-oriented, it became increasingly so as computer technology matured, mostly because the Soviet political machine never understood the ever-increasing value of computing for its society. Thus, computing as an independent scientific field never achieved the high-profile public status like the Soviet space and nuclear-military complexes. Nevertheless, it provided a technological base that made most of these other glorified scientific achievements possible.

Based on all available evidence, Russian and Western historians of technology have concluded that Lebedev’s and many of his other colleagues’ early computer designs were original. The editor confirmed this herself while living and working in Moscow and Kiev. Soviet computing, as Malinovsky keenly elucidates in this book, has its own story independent from that of the West or Japan. This story combines intrigue, scientific and technological enthusiasm, politics, war, often corrupt and yet sometimes sympathetic bureaucracy, and numerous engaging personalities. No scientific or technological effort is entirely separate from the culture in which it is undertaken: while Soviet scientists often had similar research and development goals as their counterparts in the West and Japan, their history has a distinctive Russian flavor, as readers will understand from Malinovsky’s account.

Many specialized fields of research science flourished in the Soviet Union, particularly in physics and mathematics. Likewise, innovations in technology and engineering were numerous in the Soviet countries, especially early on during the Cold War when, for example, Yuri Gagarin became the first human to orbit earth in 1961, carried by a crude but effective Vostok space capsule. Russian scientists and engineers often describe Soviet technological and military innovations with a famous Russian proverb – “Better is the Enemy of Good.” This was true of Soviet computing as well. They did not necessarily build the most cutting-edge, slickest looking machines, but instead designed their computers as workhorses that would last a long time. When a computing laboratory could not obtain certain technologies, such as advanced vacuum tubes and other components, workers fabricated their own devices or made up for the lack of the most advanced components by designing unique architectural features or pushing algorithmic development: indigenous Soviet computers of the 1950s and 1960s were often more efficient at number-crunching than their Western counterparts.

The computing industry in the Soviet Union always lagged behind those of the United States and Europe. The reasons for this were varied, but stemmed from having almost no industrial base at the time of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, no large-scale punched card industry, and no commercial computing industry analogous to IBM that would have helped foster competition. Also, the Soviet government did not aggressively promote computer construction before the Second World War or immediately after.

Russian computer designers worked diligently to close this gap, given the poor economic conditions they faced in the post-war period. The heroes in Malinovsky’s account – Sergei Lebedev, Viktor Glushkov and several others, deeply believed in the Soviet government’s emphases on education and socialized progress, and devoted their lives and careers to improving the state of the art of computer technology in the communist bloc countries. According to Malinovsky, when their government decided to copy the IBM 360 system in the 1960s instead of relying on their own enormous community of scientific and engineering talent, Lebedev, Glushkov, and several of the Soviet Union’s established computer scientists fought this directive vigilantly while trying to retain faith in their political leaders. This decision remains a topic of dispute among former Soviet computer scientists. Those Soviet scientists who pursued the IBM 360-based series of computers – the well-known ES (Unified System) machines - undoubtedly had their own good reasons for following this path. Their story deserves to be told as well.

The opinions expressed in this book belong solely to the author, and are not those of the editor, editorial consultant, or translator. Malinovsky’s narrative addresses only part of the history of Soviet and Russian computing, focusing mainly on certain developments in hardware and the people responsible for them. A separate manuscript that analyzes programming, algorithmic, and software innovation in the former Soviet Union awaits another scholar. Sadly, though, while there are some efforts in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) to preserve Soviet era hardware and computing-related documentation, much primary source material about the history of Soviet-era computing has been destroyed or lost.

The Soviet legacy for science and engineering is two-sided. On the one hand, Soviet bureaucratic mismanagement and lack of a safety culture is partially responsible for the Chernobyl accident and numerous other less-known aviation, naval, and environmental disasters. On the other hand many of the CIS countries still boast a highly literate population and one of the world’s largest cadres of talented scientists and engineers, Nobel Prize-winning physicists, and top-notch computer programmers.

Lebedev, Glushkov, Alexei Lyapunov, George Lopato, and several other eastern bloc scientists all received the prestigious Computer Pioneer Award of the American Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Computer Society after the fall of the iron curtain. This bronze medal is awarded annually for significant contributions to concepts and developments in the electronic computer field that have advanced the state of the art in computing. For the first time in English, these Soviet computer pioneers are portrayed as people in this book, along with some extremely detailed descriptions of many of their technical achievements and advances made in the computing field.

This book demonstrates clearly that scientists in this once totalitarian group of nations strived to keep on par with Western science and technology, and that Soviet computing in many respects did not lag staggeringly far behind its equivalents in the West and Japan. From the materials presented in this book, readers will better understand not only the history of technology in a formerly closed community of nations, but also how the undermining of democratic principles, free thought and open research can devastate a nation’s scientific community and ultimately its society.

Today, from a Western point-of-view, many of the nations within the CIS are struggling to gain a foothold in the global economy while still shedding the Soviet-era political and economic infrastructure. We can only hope that in time, these nations will make more significant, visible strides in science and in technological research and development, and both seek and welcome increased peaceful cooperation with the West and other world regions, leading to economic betterment and more equal participation in today’s globalizing world.

Anne Fitzpatrick
Washington, DC, 2006