OGAS - Automated State System of Economic Management
Description
Benjamin Peters:
"The OGAS project was the most ambitious attempt to network the Soviet Union—to construct a national computer network. Viktor M. Glushkov, whose New York Times obituary dubbed him the “king of Soviet cybernetics,” considered the OGAS his lifework between his appointment as director of the Institute of Cybernetics in Kiev in 1962 and his death of an apparent brain hemorrhage in 1982. “OGAS” is short for the obshchee-gosudarstvennaya avtomatizirovannaya system—or the all-state automated system, which itself was a shortening of its full train-length name: the All-State Automated System for the Gathering and Processing of Information for the Accounting, Planning, and Governance of the National Economy, USSR. This heroic or gargantuan project, in Glushkov’s 1962 proposal, sought to build incrementally on preexisting and new telephony networks until it would go fully online 30 years later, offering up in the process a real-time decentralized hierarchical computer network for managing all the information flows in the command economy. He envisioned it reaching from one central computer center in Moscow, to several hundred regional computer centers in prominent cities, and then to as many as 20,000 local computing centers in factories and enterprises stretching over all of Soviet Eurasia. Its higher purpose was to realize “electronic socialism” technocratically, guiding the socialist experiment another step toward communism itself. However, the project encountered significant obstacles on the path to its realization in the 1960s and 1970s. By the 1980s, the OGAS project had splintered into a patchwork of unconnected and non-interoperable local factory control systems spread throughout the country."
(https://mitpress.mit.edu/five-minutes-with-benjamin-peters/)
Discussion
Renato Flores:
"As early as 1958, Victor Glushkov proposed the idea of creating a universal control machine, which, unlike the highly specialized automatic control machines that existed at that time, could be used in any of the most complex technological processes. Three years later, such a machine was built. It was called “Dnieper”. With this machine, for the first time in Europe, it was possible to remotely control a complex process of converting liquid iron into cast steel. It was used to automate one of the most labor-intensive processes in the shipbuilding industry: the cutting of steel plates for the manufacture of a ship’s hull. The hull has a complex spatial configuration and, therefore, cutting the flat steel plates with which the hull will be made is a highly complex engineering task. In the United States, a similar machine was released at the same time, although its development had started earlier. «Dnieper» also broke a record in terms of longevity: it was produced for ten years, while the usual lifespan of a computer model rarely exceeded five or six years.
Glushkov, a passionate promoter of electronic computer technology and cybernetics, immediately saw the incredible capabilities of this science, which far exceeded any fantasy. At the same time, the scientist did not participate in the famous “dispute about cybernetics”, which is now presented as nothing less than “Soviet persecution”.
The essence of Glushkov’s approach was that he did not see in the machine a substitute for the human brain, but rather a special tool that would strengthen it, just as a hammer amplifies the hand and a microscope the eye. Therefore, the machine is not man’s competitor, but an instrument that multiplies his capabilities.
Only in this sense does the machine, or rather the system of machines, become the technical basis for the transition to a new model of economic management. At the same time, Glushkov believed that the effective use of machines in this capacity is possible only in a single complex, when there is no competition, no associated trade secrets, no industrial espionage, etc.
Economic Management:
Among Glushkov’s many groundbreaking scientific ideas, we should single out the one that he considered his life’s work. This is his idea of the Automated State System of Economic Management (OGAS). Even at the time, Glushkov himself failed to appreciate the role his OGAS idea could play in our history. Of course, he predicted that the country would face “great difficulties” in managing the economy unless the role of information technologies in planning was adequately evaluated on time, but he could not predict that, at the end of the 20th century, this country would cease to exist.
It so happened that, in connection with OGAS, the Soviet leadership had to choose between two alternatives:
- to go down the road of improving economic planning on a national scale,
- or to go down the road to the market as a regulator of production.
In his memoirs, Viktor Glushkov said that this question was not so easy to solve. For a long time, the top leadership of the USSR hesitated. The very fact that Glushkov was commissioned to lead a commission to prepare materials for the resolution of the Council of Ministers on the start of work on the OGAS project speaks volumes.
The reasons for the decision to initiate the notorious economic reform in 1965 (t.n. the Kosygin-Lieberman reform), whose main idea was to make the market the main regulator of production, are still not entirely clear. Here is what one of the spokesmen for the 1965 market reform, Alexandr Birman, wrote: “Now, the main indicator by which the performance of the company will be judged and […] on which all its well-being and its direct ability to carry the production schedule is carried out, it is the indicator of the sales volume (i.e. the sales of the products)”. In other words, the economy began to adopt a market logic.
In 1964, it was unlikely that any serious production or science manager could doubt that the future lay in the scientific application of electronic computing technology. For this reason, the idea of OGAS was initially welcomed with enthusiasm. Furthermore, it is not clear how it could happen that, at the last moment, a preference was expressed for the project of the so-called “economists”. The initiators of the economic reform of 1965 were little known, they came out of nowhere, and immediately began to play an almost key role in Soviet economic science. Their activities were directed against Glushkov’s project. In the end, they played a fatal role as the development of the IT infrastructure for the existing planned economic management system was abandoned in favour of market mechanisms.
...
In Vitaly Moev’s book-interview “The Reins of Power”, Viktor Glushkov proposed the idea that humanity in its history has passed through two “information barriers”, as he called them using the language of cybernetics. Two thresholds, two management crises. The first arose in the context of the decomposition of the clan economy and was resolved with the emergence, on the one hand, of monetary-commercial relations and, on the other, of a hierarchical management system, in which the superior manager directs the subordinates, and these the executors.
Starting in the 1930s, according to Glushkov, it becomes clear that the second “information barrier” is coming, when neither hierarchy in management nor commodity-money relations help anymore. The cause of such a crisis is the inability, even with the participation of many actors, to cover all the problems of economic management. Viktor Glushkov said that according to his calculations from the 1930s, solving the management problems of the Soviet economy required some 1014 mathematical operations per year. At the time of the interview, in the mid-1970s, already about 1016 operations. If we assume that one person without the help of machinery can perform on average 1 million operations a year, then it turns out that about 10 billion people are needed to maintain a well-run economy. Next, we will present the words of Victor Glushkov himself:
From now on, only ‘machineless’ management efforts are not enough. Humanity managed to overcome the first information barrier or threshold because it invented monetary-commercial relations and the pyramidal management structure. The invention that will allow us to cross the second threshold is computer technology.
A historical turn in the famous spiral of development takes place. When an automated state management system appears, we will easily grasp the entire economy at a single glance. In the new historical stage, with new technology, in the next turn of the dialectical spiral, we are as if “floating” over that point of the dialectical spiral below which, separated from us by millennia, was the period when the subsistence economy of man was easy to see with the naked eye.
This is what the scientist was aiming at! It should be noted that the U.S. intelligence agencies fully appreciated the seriousness of his ideas. In Glushkov’s “testament” you will also find such thoughts:
The Americans were the first to get agitated. Of course, they are not hedging bets on a war against us, it is only a cover, they are trying to crush our already weak economy with an arms race. And, of course, any strengthening of our economy is to them the worst of all things. So they immediately opened fire on me with every conceivable caliber. Two articles appeared first, one in Victor Zorza’s Washington Post and the other in the English Guardian. The first one was called “The punch card runs the Kremlin” and was aimed at our leaders. It read as follows: “Academician V.M. Glushkov, the czar of Soviet cybernetics, proposes replacing the Kremlin leaders with computing machines.” And so on, a lowbrow article.
The article in the Guardian was aimed at the Soviet intelligentsia. It said that Academician Glushkov proposes to create a network of computer centers with databanks, that it sounds very modern and more advanced than it is now in the West, but that it is not done for the economy, but it is in fact it is an order of the KGB, aimed at storing the thoughts of Soviet citizens in data centers and monitoring every person.
Glushkov was fully convinced that the CIA had a hand in the campaign against OGAS. But the fact remains that the draft decree of the Council of Ministers on the start of the OGAS deployment, which had already been prepared, was pushed aside."
More information
- Book: How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet. By Benjamin Peters. MIT Press,
"My book describes the rise and fall of the OGAS project and analyzes what sped its undoing. I should note that many English-language readers may be tempted to wager explanations of their own before they read the book, such as technological backwardness, censorship cultures, and hierarchical command economies. While there is surely a grain of truth in each of these three, none tells the full story."
(https://mitpress.mit.edu/five-minutes-with-benjamin-peters/)
- Principles of OGAS Construction:
"Glushkov’s monograph “Macroeconomic Models and Principles of OGAS Construction” was published in 1975. This book describes the experience of using computer technology in the management of economic processes, accumulated over a decade and a half, shows the methods for forecasting and managing discrete processes, presents operational planning and management models, examines the problems of human resource and salary management, and offers a new structure of the OGAS, which corresponds to the then level of technology development informatics, and to the stages of its creation.
The concept of the OGAS was directly related to the academic’s social and political views. Take, for example, his idea of a non-monetary distribution, about which both party and state leaders and official economists tried to keep silent. It is indicative that when preparing the first draft of the OGAS, the part related to this topic was immediately excluded from consideration as premature, and all preparatory materials were ordered to be destroyed."