Proposed nationwide computer network for managing the planned economy
As part of the OGAS vision, Glushkov proposes cashless electronic payments and paperless administration, decades ahead of its time.
Viktor Glushkov, director of the Kiev Institute of Cybernetics, develops OGAS, a nationwide automated system to manage the planned economy, the 'nervous system' of socialism, years before ARPANET. His institute's mascot is a saxophone-playing robot.
Brought to Deputy Premier Kosygin by Academy president Keldysh, Glushkov is tasked with OGAS: a three-tier real-time network: one central computer center in Moscow, up to 200 mid-level centers, up to 20,000 smaller computing centers in agencies and large plants, linked by dedicated broadband channels. To prepare, he personally studies over a hundred organizations of the planned economy.
Glushkov names Liberman, Belkin, Birman and other market-reform economists as open opponents of OGAS from 1964. They tell Kosygin their reform costs 'nothing but the paper'; Glushkov estimates OGAS at 20 billion rubles over three five-year plans, with over 100 billion in returns.
The thaw ends. Under Brezhnev the ministries' bureaucratic rivalry hardens: the environment in which OGAS will die and the IBM-cloning decision will be made.
Well-directed state subsidies and collaborative research build the network the USSR only proposed. Glushkov's older OGAS vision is rejected by the Politburo one year later.
One year after ARPANET goes live, the Politburo shelves Glushkov's national network. Benjamin Peters' verdict: 'The capitalists behaved like socialists while the socialists behaved like capitalists': unregulated competition between self-interested ministries killed the Soviet internet.
Glushkov enters the Kremlin full of hope and sees two empty chairs: his strongest allies Kosygin and Brezhnev have stayed away. Finance Minister Garbuzov argues the country needs no costly real-time optimization, just simple computers that flash lights and play music in chicken coops to boost egg production, as he had just seen in Minsk. OGAS is demoted to a
The 24th Party Congress, which was to authorize OGAS, approves only the expansion of local systems. Over the following decade OGAS splinters into a patchwork of non-interoperable local management systems.
Around 1980 Vladimir Kitov marries Olga Glushkova: the two pioneer families of the Soviet internet idea become in-laws. Glushkov's younger daughter Vera later jokes that OGAS was 'a family business': 'The first to propose it was my elder sister's father-in-law, Anatoly Kitov. For that he was dismissed and expelled from the party.'
The 'king of Soviet cybernetics' dies of a brainstem tumor diagnosed only by an invited German professor. In his last nine days, after waking from a coma, he dictates his memoirs and ideas to his daughter Olga. He remained convinced the CIA had orchestrated the press campaign against OGAS.
This object is named in 2 verified source entries across 1 dossier of this book. The entries sit with the people who built or used it, which is where the research recorded them.