Научный совет по комплексной проблеме «Кибернетика» при Президиуме АН СССР в 1960–1970-е годы: наука и практики координации

Социология науки и технологий. 2023. Т. 14. № 1. С. 87–105.

Зимирев М. О.

The transformation of cybernetics into one of the basic operators and symbols of the scientific
and technological revolution in the USSR chronologically coincided with the emergence of a new
organizational trend in Soviet scientific and technical policy — coordination. The author traces the
history of the Scientific Council on the Complex Problem of “Cybernetics” under the Presidium of
the USSR Academy of Sciences, analyzes organizational potential of this body, which undertook
the coordination of complex cybernetic research on an all-Union scale. The author comes to the
conclusion that the Scientific Council in the 1960s and early 1970s contributed to the formalization of
the scientific apparatus, the introduction of mathematical statistics and computerization of intellectual
labor in disciplines that had long been “descriptive” in nature: biology, linguistics, economics. The
Council also had “levers” of influence in departments and directly fought for institutionalization,
provision of laboratories, equipment and personnel training for promising scientific fields, such as
engineering psychology and machine learning. Implementing the coordination of a complex scientific
field in practice, Soviet cyberneticists did not seek to specify the theory of coordination, which
distinguished them from their colleagues from the “global North” countries.

Keywords: история СССР, history of USSR, history of knowledge, History of Science, история науки и технологий