Imaginarium of Science. Part 3

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

OGAS is a legend about an unfulfilled future. It is now fashionable to explore alternative versions of history. Even a special literary genre has appeared - alternative history, which tries to simulate reality under some other key events. What would have happened if Nazi Germany had won the Second World War? What would have happened if not Stalin, but Trotsky, had come to power in the USSR after Lenin? There are also fantasies about the collapse of the USSR in 1991. After Chernenko, it was not Gorbachev who could come to power, but someone else, and the USSR could, without "perestroika", continue to live in "stagnation" or even make another "industrialization" or "modernization". There is also such a plot, and not even in literature, but in the form of a rock opera by composer Viktor Argonov entitled “2032: The Legend of the Unfulfilled Future”. In this story, the USSR did not collapse in 1991, but, on the contrary, strengthened. Due to the fact that in 1985 after Chernenko it was not M. Gorbachev who came to power, but G. V. Romanov - another member of the Politburo. The story takes a different path, and this path turns out to be successful until some next break, which became the basis of the plot.

In the 2000s, according to the plot of the rock opera, Romanov was replaced by N. I. The use of the achievements of cybernetics increases the efficiency of economic management, the USSR is rapidly developing and even expanding its territory - it joins Mongolia and southern Afghanistan. But in 2032, to which the main plot belongs, under the new General Secretary A. S. Milinevsky, ASGU enters into ideological differences with the traditional point of view on communism as a society of collective labor for the common good. It offers another way to abolish commodity relations - transferring automated production capacities under its full control, which should free the economy from the need for commodity exchange, further increase its efficiency and, ultimately, free people from productive labor in general.

This idea seemed dangerous to the country's leadership from three points of view at once. First, from the ethical point of view, there is a danger of turning the population into consumers and parasites. Secondly, from the political point of view, the bureaucracy is afraid of losing power. And, finally, there is also the fear of the embodiment of already known dystopias with the enslavement of people by artificial intelligence. ASGU, according to the plot, has artificial intelligence and even sings in the opera with a pure girlish voice. As a result of the conflict, the machine undergoes reprogramming, the obligatory doctrine of universal labor is introduced into it, but this only reduces the effectiveness of public administration. Moreover, as a result of the actions of the ASGU (as well as the unbalanced character of the secretary general who fell in love with a schoolgirl), a war is unleashed and a nuclear apocalypse sets in. As a result, the plot ends tragically and it turns out that Gorbachev helped us avoid a terrible end …

Such a strange development of the plot, of course, raises a number of questions, both of an ideological and a purely logical nature. Nevertheless, the plot is, in general, very interesting and discusses the most important problems of the socialist model of the development of society. Moreover, it poses absolutely correct questions to the very idea of communism - how should society manage its growing productive capabilities - to create a paradise for consumers, or something else? However, we will not discuss these theoretical issues; they are beyond the scope of this article. There is a moment that lies much closer to reality and is more in line with the theme - the fact is that the main plot of the opera in terms of ASGU is not at all fantastic. In the USSR, already at the end of the 1960s, the question arose about the use of a similar system with a similar name - OGAS (National Automated Accounting and Information Processing System). And the question of its use was decided precisely in line with the understanding of the problems that ASGU posed to the party government of the USSR in 2032 based on the plot of the opera. Consciously or not, the author of the plot, in fact, repeats the real history of the USSR.

Of course, the OGAS system, the project of which was proposed to the government by Academician Viktor Mikhailovich Glushkov back in 1964, did not have artificial intelligence. Its essence was simpler and did not imply an absolutely complete automation of the country's administration. There were quite enough knobs and buttons for political power. And yet, a significant part of the management functions was automated and determined the planned indicators of each specific production. The plan that was previously determined by the bureaucratic apparatus. To understand the essence of Glushkov's proposals, it is necessary to say a few words about the very principles of the planned economy and the problems associated with them.

The economy of the USSR was planned, which meant, oddly enough it may seem to the modern reader, not totalitarianism, but the drawing up of production plans and their implementation. Any more or less large manufacturing company in any country is engaged in such planning of its activities. In any social order. If a plant produces tractors, then for the conveyor you need to supply parts of the entire range at a certain time. The production and delivery of parts to the conveyor is determined by the plan. The only difference is that in the USSR, plans were drawn up on a national scale. It was a huge conveyor belt, where each individual manufacturer was linked to the others by a multitude of production links. And this was the case from the very beginning of the Soviet era, from the GOELRO plan to electrify the country.

At first, planning for economic development was very successful - it made it possible to concentrate the efforts of the people and the resources of the entire country in the most important areas, giving an unprecedented pace of development. So the country in the very first stage of its development in a short time built many power plants necessary for industrial development. The industrialization of the country began from this stage. Already during the first five-year plan (1928-1932), 1,500 large enterprises were built, including: automobile plants in Moscow (AZLK) and Nizhny Novgorod (GAZ), Magnitogorsk and Kuznetsk metallurgical plants, Stalingrad and Kharkov tractor plants. Without electricity they could not work, and without central planning they could not be built.

The usual planning period was five years, and the Communist Party congresses were tied to these periods. In fact, the government at these congresses reported to the party for the implementation of the plans for the development of the economy (only this moment speaks of a completely definite totalitarianism - the dictatorship of the party bureaucracy). The planning of the work of the conveyor country was a difficult matter, it required processing a huge mass of economic information, but at the beginning of the history of the USSR, they were still coping with it, albeit with the help of the simplest accounting accounts. He was engaged in the analysis of economic information and planning the most important institution of the Soviet Union - the State Planning Committee (the exact name of the organization changed several times from "State General Planning Commission under the Council of Labor and Defense of the RSFSR" to "State Planning Committee of the USSR of the Council of Ministers of the USSR").

While the product line of the conveyor country was not very large, such plans could be calculated using the accounting accounts. Problems began when the amount of processed information exceeded a certain critical value. So, according to the calculations of economists in the 1960s, the range of products produced was already up to 20 million types, and for the management of the national economy it was necessary to perform about ten to the sixteenth power of mathematical operations, that is, more than ten quadrillion operations [3]. Despite the fact that computers had already been used in scientific institutions by that time, work in the State Planning Committee was organized according to the old way - its departments were equipped only with calculating and analytical machines of the 1939 model, and people were engaged in analysis and drawing up plans. Moreover, these plans were only of a coordinating and recommendatory nature, the main decisions were made taking them into account by the relevant ministries and party bodies. By this time, it became obvious that the State Planning Commission was already struggling to fulfill the planning tasks assigned to it. They even had to reduce the number of indicators of the national economic plan:

“In the fourth and early fifth five-year plans, due to the complication of economic development and to strengthen control over the use of material resources, the number of indicators of the production plan, material and technical supply and directive norms for the consumption of materials was significantly expanded, which had a positive effect on strengthening the balance of production plans, supply and a decrease in the consumption rates of material resources, which during this period were extremely high. At the same time, these measures to strengthen centralization have complicated the planning and management process and the burden on the central economic bodies. Instead of intellectualizing the planning process (for example, using computer technology), after Stalin's death, the Soviet leadership, under the slogan of expanding the independence of lower economic bodies, for which the necessary economic prerequisites were not created, went for a predominantly unjustified reduction in the number of indicators of the national economic plan. Having increased from 4744 in 1940 to 9490 in 1953, they then continuously decreased to 6308 in 1954, 3390 in 1957 and 1780 (!) In 1958.21"

Academician Viktor Mikhailovich Glushkov

Therefore, when in 1962 the president of the USSR Academy of Sciences M. V. Keldysh led to A. N. Kosygin (who was then Deputy Chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers), a talented Ukrainian engineer and scientist Viktor Mikhailovich Glushkov (head of the Institute of Cybernetics of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR) with ideas for automating the work of planning bodies, his proposals were very positively received. There was even an order of the Council of Ministers of the USSR on the creation of a special commission chaired by Glushkov to prepare materials for a government decree. Glushkov very energetically got down to business. He spent a lot of time studying the work of the CSO (Central Statistical Office) and the State Planning Commission. He visited about a hundred different enterprises and institutions, studying the intricacies of production process management. The result of the work was the concept of creating a network of computer centers with remote access.

The first draft design of the Unified State Network of Computing Centers (USVC) included about 100 centers in large industrial cities and centers of economic regions, united by broadband communication channels. As Glushkov himself described:

“These centers, distributed throughout the country, in accordance with the configuration of the system, are combined with the rest involved in the processing of economic information. At that time, we determined their number at 20 thousand. These are large enterprises, ministries, as well as cluster centers serving small enterprises. Characteristic was the presence of a distributed databank and the possibility of unaddressed access from any point of this system to any information after an automatic check of the requester's credentials. A number of information security issues have been developed. In addition, in this two-tier system, the main computing centers exchange information with each other not through channel switching and message switching, as is the practice now, with a breakdown into letters, I proposed to connect these 100 or 200 centers with broadband channels bypassing the channel-forming equipment so that was to rewrite information from a magnetic tape in Vladivostok to tape in Moscow without reducing the speed. Then all protocols are greatly simplified, and the network acquires new properties. This has not yet been implemented anywhere in the world. Our project was secret until 1977”.

Glushkov also developed mathematical models for managing the economy. A system of cashless payments for the population (a kind of analogue of modern banking card systems) was even invested in the project, but Academician Keldysh did not approve of such an innovation, and she was excluded from the project. On this occasion, Glushkov wrote a note to the Central Committee of the CPSU, but that remained unanswered. Nevertheless, in general, Glushkov's work was approved and in 1963 a Resolution of the Central Committee of the CPSU and the Council of Ministers of the USSR was issued, which noted the need to create a Unified Planning and Management System (ESPU) and a State network of computing centers in the country.

According to Glushkov's estimates, the implementation of the OGAS program in full required three or four five-year plans and at least 20 billion rubles (a huge amount, comparable to the country's annual military budget). In his opinion, the creation of such a planning system by the economy was more difficult and more difficult than the programs of space and nuclear research combined, moreover, it affected the political and social aspects of society. However, with a skillful organization of work, in five years, the costs of OGAS will begin to pay off, and after its implementation, the possibilities of the economy and the well-being of the population will at least double. He attributed the complete completion of work on OGAS already in the 90s. Such calculations did not scare off the leadership, which had already experienced the success of space programs. It was a time of enthusiasm and gigantic projects, and money was allocated for the construction of data centers. At the same time, however, the project has undergone significant changes. As Glushkov himself wrote:

“Unfortunately, after the consideration of the project by the commission, almost nothing was left of it, the entire economic part was withdrawn, only the network itself remained. The seized materials were destroyed, burned, as they were secret. We were not even allowed to have a copy at the institute. Therefore, we, unfortunately, will not be able to restore them. V. N. Starovsky, head of the CSO. His objections were demagogic. We insisted on such a new accounting system so that any information could be immediately obtained from anywhere. And he referred to the fact that the Central Statistical Board was organized on the initiative of Lenin, and it copes with the tasks set by him; managed to get assurances from Kosygin that the information that the CSO gives to the government is enough for management, and therefore nothing needs to be done. In the end, when it came to approving the project, everyone signed it, but the CSO objected. And so it was written that the CSO objected to the whole project as a whole. In June 1964, we submitted our project to the government. In November 1964, a meeting of the Presidium of the Council of Ministers took place, at which I reported on this project. Naturally, I did not keep silent about the objection of the CSB. The decision was as follows: instruct the revision of the draft CSO, involving the Ministry of Radio Industry."

Thus, the project was not accepted, the finalization of the project was entrusted to its main enemy. How not to remember the end of the lunar program - there the "revision" was also entrusted to Mishin's main competitor - Glushko. An absolutely complete analogy. The project is closed by the hands of a competitor, while the decision maker's hands remain clean. Let us also note that in both cases the accumulated results are diligently destroyed - documentation, technology. That is, the very possibility of continuing work in this direction is being destroyed. Such examples include the closure of a very promising project of a supersonic aircraft-carrier T-4 developed by the Sukhoi Design Bureau. The project was closed in 1974 with the direct participation of a competitor - Tupolev.

Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR Alexei Nikolaevich Kosygin

An interesting detail should be noted here. In the same year when Kosygin gave the go-ahead to Glushkov for his project, that is, back in 1962, the Pravda newspaper published a sensational article by a certain Kharkov economist, Professor Yevsey Grigorievich Lieberman entitled "Plan, Profit, Bonus", in which for the first time it was proposed to make the main criterion for the efficiency of the enterprise's work profit and profitability, that is, the ratio of profit to fixed and normalized working capital. In subsequent articles by Lieberman under flashy headlines ("Open the safe with diamonds" and others), this idea was further developed. Before that, Glushkov also published an article in Pravda in order to popularize his ideas. Thus, Lieberman's article sounded like an answer to Glushkov. A whole bunch of economists joined Lieberman's opinion. And in the same 1962, Khrushchev gave the go-ahead for an economic experiment in the spirit of Lieberman's concept. For its implementation, two enterprises of the garment industry were selected (the Bolshevichka factories in Moscow and the Mayak factories in Gorky), the Western Coal Basin in Ukraine, as well as a number of transport enterprises. Kosygin, being the deputy chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers and chairman of the State Planning Committee, long resisted the implementation of the Lieberman reform. However, after the October (1964) Plenum of the Central Committee of the CPSU, which removed Khrushchev from all posts, Kosygin became chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers and soon began to carry out this reform.

In other words, during these years (1962-1964) the party leadership of the country was at a crossroads between two fundamentally different ways of reforming the country's governance. And the market method was chosen. The OGAS project fell victim to this choice.

Author - Maxson