OGAS

What was proposed

Glushkov's plan had a three-tier structure. A central computing center would be placed in Moscow, up to 200 intermediate centers in major cities, and up to 20,000 terminals at economically important sites^※1. These would be connected in real time over existing telephone lines, drawing production and inventory data from factories and warehouses up to the center and feeding it back into the drafting and revision of plans.

Behind it was the forecast that the clerical work of the planned economy would break down if left to human hands. In 1962 Glushkov estimated that if paper-based planning methods continued, the planning bureaucracy would grow roughly 40-fold by 1980. He went further and envisioned using the system for electronic payments, moving toward an economy without money.

How it failed

The plan was never realized. On October 1, 1970, Glushkov requested funding from the Politburo and was turned down. The amount requested is said to have been no less than 100 billion rubles, and one estimate puts it at roughly 850 billion US dollars in 2016 terms^※2.

The cost was not the only reason for the failure. A system that would expose the real state of the economy to the terminals at the center threatened both the discretion held by ministries and factory managers and the party's control over the economy. Much of the party leadership opposed it, and official interest disappeared in the early 1970s.

Assessment and context

OGAS is often referred to because of Benjamin Peters's study How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet (MIT Press, 2016). The book covers Soviet attempts to build networks from 1959 to 1989 and places OGAS as the longest-lived and most ambitious among them.

The part of Peters's analysis most often cited is the contrast between the United States and the Soviet Union. ARPANET came about through state subsidies and a collaborative environment among research institutions. The Soviet network plans, by contrast, were crushed by the unregulated competition of self-interested ministries, institutions, and bureaucrats. Here is a reversal: organizations in the planned-economy country behaved competitively, and researchers in the capitalist country behaved collaboratively. This is why it is told as a case in which institutional design decided the fate of a technology.

In the same period, Chile under the Allende government pursued Project Cybersyn, which was to support the running of the economy with computers, and the two are often discussed side by side.