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Article ID: CBB931819752

Cybernetics for the Command Economy: Foregrounding Entropy in Late Soviet Planning (2020)

West, Diana Kurkovsky (Author)

History of the Human Sciences
Volume: 33
Issue: 1
Pages: 36-51

DOI: 10.1177/0952695119886520

URI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0952695119886520

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Central planning Economics Science and government Socialism Cybernetics 20th century, late Siberia (Russia) Soviet Union

The Soviet Union had a long and complex relationship with cybernetics, especially in the domain of planning. This article looks at Soviet postwar efforts to draw up plans for the rapidly developing, industrializing, and urbanizing Siberia, where cybernetic models were used to develop a vision of cybernetic socialism. Removed from Moscow bureaucracy and politics, the various planning institutes of the Siberian Academy of Sciences became a key frontier for exploring the potential of cybernetic thinking to offer a necessary corrective to Soviet planning. Researchers there put forth a vision of a dynamic Soviet economy managed through partially automated subsystems, which, while decentralized, would grant the central planning apparatus flexibility, a capacity for emergence, and overall solvency in the face of increasingly complex factors that required consideration.

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Article Stefanos Geroulanos; Leif Weatherby (2020) Cybernetics and the Human Sciences. History of the Human Sciences (pp. 3-11). unapi

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https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB931819752/

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