This book contains a collection of thoroughly refereed papers derived from the First IFIP WG 9.7 Conference on Soviet and Russian Computing, held in Petrozavodsk, Russia, in July 2006. The 32 revised papers were carefully selected from numerous submissions; many of them were translated from Russian. They reflect much of the shining history of computing activities within the former Soviet Union from its origins in the 1950s with the first computers used for military decision-making problems up to the modern period where Russian ICT grew substantially, especially in the field of custom-made programming.

This book is the first compendium on the development of the computer in Russia to appear in the West. After briefly illuminating the history of Russian mechanical calculation devices, the book largely focuses on the first generations of (military and civilian) electronic computers, most of which were developed in the Soviet Union during the "Space-Race" and the Cold War, simultaneously with similarly fundamental developments in computing in the U.S.A. The reader is introduced to computers and cybernetics from mathematical, technical, social and cultural perspectives through archive material and through texts by some of the preeminent veterans of Russian computing (historians, engineers, military historians).

early computers, programming languages and systems in retrospective, microelectronics industry emergence, computer science curricula, teamwork in programming, key events in computing history, scientific biographies, computing perspectives, international cooperation in R&D

The conference will be held in Moscow Higher School of Economics on October 6 8, 2020 to follow traditions of the first four SORUCOMs The conference is aimed at retention of the history of design and development of computers, software and information systems Key historical events and outstanding persons are also in the focus of SORUCOM Working languages Russian, English (synch translation) Conference Topics History of computing devices from mechanical calculators to supercomputers Programming languages and systems in retrospective History and evolution of artificial intelligence Microelectronics in Russia Programming the second literacy Software and hardware teams and organization Key events in the history of computing Biographies and memoirs Social aspects of the history of computing Evolution of Internet Computing perspectives International scientific cooperation SORUCOM 2020 welcomes original, previously unpublished and high quality papers addressing the topic

This collection compares Russian and Soviet medical workers – physicians, psychiatrists and nurses, and examines them within an international framework that challenges traditional Western conceptions of professionalism and professionalization through exploring how these ideas developed amongst medical workers in Russia and the Soviet Union. Ideology and everyday life are examined through analyses of medical practice while gender is assessed through the experience of women medical professionals and patients. Cross national and entangled history is explored through the prism of health care, with medical professionals crossing borders for a number of reasons: to promote the principles and advancements of science and medicine internationally; to serve altruistic purposes and support international health care initiatives; and to escape persecution. Chapters in this volume highlight the diversity of experiences of health care, but also draw attention to the shared concerns and issues that make science and medicine the subject of international discussion.

How, despite thirty years of effort, Soviet attempts to build a national computer network were undone by socialists who seemed to behave like capitalists. Between 1959 and 1989, Soviet scientists and officials made numerous attempts to network their nation—to construct a nationwide computer network. None of these attempts succeeded, and the enterprise had been abandoned by the time the Soviet Union fell apart. Meanwhile, ARPANET, the American precursor to the Internet, went online in 1969. Why did the Soviet network, with top-level scientists and patriotic incentives, fail while the American network succeeded? In How Not to Network a Nation, Benjamin Peters reverses the usual cold war dualities and argues that the American ARPANET took shape thanks to well-managed state subsidies and collaborative research environments and the Soviet network projects stumbled because of unregulated competition among self-interested institutions, bureaucrats, and others. The capitalists behaved like socialists while the socialists behaved like capitalists. After examining the midcentury rise of cybernetics, the science of self-governing systems, and the emergence in the Soviet Union of economic cybernetics, Peters complicates this uneasy role reversal while chronicling the various Soviet attempts to build a “unified information network.” Drawing on previously unknown archival and historical materials, he focuses on the final, and most ambitious of these projects, the All-State Automated System of Management (OGAS), and its principal promoter, Viktor M. Glushkov. Peters describes the rise and fall of OGAS—its theoretical and practical reach, its vision of a national economy managed by network, the bureaucratic obstacles it encountered, and the institutional stalemate that killed it. Finally, he considers the implications of the Soviet experience for today's networked world.

Russian computer scientists have been much in the news recently, with allegations of hacking and of interference in the US presidential election. This book explores the social background of Russian computer scientists. It considers the excellent education system of the Soviet Union which greatly encouraged computer science, highlights the different development path taken by computing in the Soviet Union/Russia compared to the path followed in the West and examines the post-Soviet migration of many Russian computer scientists, many of them Jewish, to other parts of the world. It discusses the difficulties many of these Russian computer scientists have had in assimilating in their new countries, both in work and in their wider situations, and reveals the existence around the world of many autonomous enclaves of highly intelligent, globally-minded people, with a huge capacity for high impact technical innovation and no allegiances to existing national, corporate and social structures or ideologies.