Control engineering in the former USSR. Some ideological aspects of the early years

2 case studies; the Shchipanov Affair of 1940-41, and the work of Andronov in the late 1940s. The author attempts to identify and elucidate some of the socio-political complexities that lie behind theoretical developments in control engineering in the former Soviet Union. The ideological background to scientific research was a crucial element in the 1930s and 1940s: it served to severely hinder early work at the Institute of Automation and Remote Control-yet it might be argued that it also promoted Andronov's seminal contributions both to the development of nonlinear theory and to the history of his subject. The author contends that a study of the history of technology is of great value to students in exposing them to the complexities and "messiness"4 of real-world engineering. The history of Soviet control engineering is a case in point, and should remind us to be extremely wary of simplistic, linear accounts of the development, not only of control engineering, but of all technological disciplines.