BEFORE THE COLLAPSE

Programming Cultures in the Soviet Union

Ksenia Tatarchenko

"We desperately need a programmer." — "I'll talk to the guys — I promise — I know ? few who are unhappy." —"We do not need any programmer — said the hook-nosed. — Programmers — are the sought-after people, and are spoiled, but we need the unspoiled one."

— STRUGATSKY BROTHERS, Monday Begins on Saturday (1964)

In the early 1990s, in a typical middle school located in an industrial neighborhood of the city of Novosibirsk, we had an "informatics" class where we learned about the principles of hardware and programming and could play computer games. The machines were not called "computers" but "EVM" (electronic calculating machines); they had a gray and green interface and were all connected to the main computer controlled by the teacher.

My high school was an experimental school endowed with additional funds, and was where I first experienced a modern computer class with "real" personal computers. The classroom itself often stayed closed behind iron doors and barred windows — during the "wild" 1990s the robbery of school computer classrooms supplied with expensive foreign machines was common. This classroom was closed because the informatics teacher I had met during the admission tests left for Israel; she was greatly missed by older students, who said she was very competent. Eventually, the administration found a replacement and we began to learn how to use a text-editing application. By this time it was generally understood that Word and Excel were what informatics classes should be about. In those days, I was busy discovering French existentialism and Russian semiotics and remember cheating on the Excel assignment.

Among other things, the collapse of the Soviet Union wrecked the national education system and opened the country's frontiers: a calamity turned into an opportunity when I got a chance to study abroad. Moving from Russia to France and then to the US, my own personal trajectory impacted my research subject: the history of Soviet computing from a transnational perspective. Working on my PhD thesis and book manuscript (Tatarchenko 2013), I uncovered in the history of computing itself explanations and connections that shed light on what I experienced in my computer classes as compared to those skills taught to my American friends. In this connection, it is worth pointing out that claims stating the Soviets had missed the "Computer Revolution" were at best misleading and that the relative rarity of personal computers in Soviet homes did not represent the absence of a computer industry or professional programmers. I learned that Western and Eastern IT histories were entangled on many levels and that the Iron Curtain simultaneously isolated and connected these two worlds.

To discern the depth of the transnational connections, we need to consider multiple facets of Soviet IT, including: hardware and software as complex technological artifacts; the emergence of a new mathematical discipline called "computer science" in English and informatika in Russian; a set of localized practices; and machines as emblems of political legitimacy. The Cold War military and space race was the chief driving force behind the miniaturization of electronic components encapsulated by what is termed "Moore's law." The military origins of American networking systems and the parallel Soviet efforts to computerize their economy into a single "big data" network are other well-known cases of contemporary IT systems that had Cold War origins. If electronics and computer network technology were the material embodiments of competition between the East and West, the capitalist and socialist versions of modernity were equally rooted in a techno-utopian imaginary that led to different visions of the "Information Age." Accordingly, the curricula for school computer education reflected two versions of an "information society": the American one was predicated on a proficient instrumental use of the personal computer as a basic commodity and a data-processing device; the Soviet one aimed at inculcating thought habits and programming skills in an effort to enable self-control and self-expression for a new kind of responsible individual.

The collapse of the party state and the ensuing political transformations put an end to the project of creating a "socialist information society." The invasion of global IT products following the opening of the Russian markets during the 1990s dramatically altered the material landscape of computing in the New Russia. Yet a half century's worth of Soviet experience with computing did not just disappear; instead, important continuities exist across the 1991 fault line. In this chapter, I take a synthetic approach to the history of Soviet programming in order to provide context and genealogy explaining the distinctly national dimensions of the contemporary IT landscape. First, I provide an overview of the pioneering stage of Soviet programming efforts, as shaped by early Soviet hardware and cybernetics. Next, I focus on the commodification of programming work and analyze the professionalization efforts led by Soviet programming experts who came to claim that programming was a form of human and machine brotherhood. I then conclude with reflections on the philosophy behind the 1985 educational reform, which introduced compulsory programming classes within a context where the cloning of Western hardware became the norm.

EXCLUSIVE AND ILLUSIVE: EARLY PROGRAMMERS BETWEEN ENGINEERS AND CYBERNETICIANS

The specificity of Soviet computing history is inextricably linked to key features of the socialist state: its planned economy and the party's ideological guidance. Centralized power and the planned economy did not lead to an absence of inventiveness or competition. On the...