How Not to Network a Nation [Book Review]

This book is a well-informed and significant analysis of an event in the history of information systems that is little known in the West. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Soviet Union made an enormous effort to create an economy based upon a unified network of information systems. The dream was that what humans alone could not do - handle a complex economy from central offices in Moscow - a system of computers linked together and controlled centrally could do. Cybernetics would allow the Marxist dream of a planned economy to be realized after all. Cybernetics would rescue the Soviet Union, and, in the process, communism itself. This effort failed. The athor wants to explain why. In his opinion, the reason for the dramatic failure was institutional barriers and resistance. He shows very clearly how "entrenched bureaucratic corruption and conflicts of interest" dashed the dreams of cyberneticists like Viktor Glushkov. The author researched his topic thoroughly. Not only has he read the relevant sources, but he has also conducted interviews in Russia with people who still remember, and often participated in, the events he describes. As a result, he has written a valuable book that will undoubtedly stand for many years as the best work on this important but underappreciated effort.