IsisCB Explore

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
Publication date: 2020
Language: English

DOI: 10.1177/0952695119886520

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

Outside Links

WorldCat

Google Scholar

JSTOR

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.

...More

Included in

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

Citation URI

data.isiscb.org/p/isis/citation/CBB931819752

This citation is part of the Isis database.

Citations Indexes

Similar Citations

Article Serhii Zhabin; (2020)
Making Forecasting Dynamic: The Soviet project OGAS (/p/isis/citation/CBB096145384/)

Article Malcolm R Hill; (2020)
Politics and Technology: The case of Soviet mechanical engineering (/p/isis/citation/CBB895910007/)

Article Viktor Pál; (2023)
Toward Socialist Environmentalism? Scientists and Environmental Change in Modern Hungary (/p/isis/citation/CBB781258575/)

Thesis West, Diana Kurkovsky; (2013)
Cybersovietica: Planning, Design, and the Cybernetics of Soviet Space, 1954--1986 (/p/isis/citation/CBB001567482/)

Article Rindzeviciute, Egle; (2010)
Purification and Hybridisation of Soviet Cybernetics. The Politics of Scientific Governance in an Authoritarian Regime (/p/isis/citation/CBB001023660/)

Article Kuteinikov, A. V.; Shilov, V. V.; (2011)
Automated Management Systems for the Soviet Union: A 1959 Letter from A. I. Kitov to N. S. Khrushchev (/p/isis/citation/CBB001211394/)

Article Ivan Boldyrev; Olessia Kirtchik; (2017)
The Cultures of Mathematical Economics in the Postwar Soviet Union: More Than a Method, Less Than a Discipline (/p/isis/citation/CBB629260864/)

Article Tomáš Vilímek; Valentina Fava; (June 2017)
The Czechoslovak automotive industry and the launch of a new model: The Škoda factory in Mladá Boleslav, in the 1970s and 1980s (/p/isis/citation/CBB260052762/)

Article McCannon, John; (2010)
Winged Prometheans: Arctic Aviation as Socialist Construction in Stalinist Russia, 1928--1939 (/p/isis/citation/CBB001211530/)

Thesis Tatarchenko, Ksenia; (2013)
“A House with the Window to the West”: The Akademgorodok Computer Center (1958--1993). (/p/isis/citation/CBB001567455/)

Article Isabella M. Weber; (2022)
Neoliberal Economic Thinking and the Quest for Rational Socialism in China: Ludwig von Mises and the Market Reform Debate (/p/isis/citation/CBB173671922/)

Article Johanna Bockman; (2019)
Democratic Socialism in Chile and Peru: Revisiting the “Chicago Boys” as the Origin of Neoliberalism (/p/isis/citation/CBB706625383/)

Article Elke Seefried; (2017)
Globalized Science. The 1970s Futures Field (/p/isis/citation/CBB360888975/)

Article Julia Fein; (2018)
“Scientific Crude” for Currency: Prospecting for Specimens in Stalin’s Siberia (/p/isis/citation/CBB630306692/)

Article Arunabh Ghosh; (2018)
Lies, Damned Lies, and (Bourgeois) Statistics: Ascertaining Social Fact in Midcentury China and the Soviet Union (/p/isis/citation/CBB399530810/)

Book Alexey Golubev; (2020)
The Things of Life: Materiality in Late Soviet Russia (/p/isis/citation/CBB886155448/)

Book Michael Kaasch; Joachim Kaasch; Torsten K. D. Himmel; (2018)
Biologie in der DDR: Beiträge zur 24. Jahrestagung der DGGTB in Greifswald 2015. (/p/isis/citation/CBB682224284/)

Book William Wheeler; (2021)
Environment and Post-Soviet Transformation in Kazakhstan’s Aral Sea Region: Sea changes (/p/isis/citation/CBB794583659/)

Thesis Gabrielle Cornish; (2020)
Sounding Socialist, Sounding Modern: Music, Technology, and Everyday Life in the Soviet Union, 1956-1975 (/p/isis/citation/CBB077352934/)

Thesis Smith, Jenny Leigh; (2006)
The Soviet Farm Complex: Industrial Agriculture in a Socialist Context, 1945--1965 (/p/isis/citation/CBB001561283/)