Why the Soviet Computer Failed

In 1986, the Soviet Union had slightly more than 10,000 computers. The Americans had 1.3 million.

At the time of Stalin's death, the Soviet Union was the world's third most proficient computing power. But by the 1960s, the US-Soviet computing gap was already years long. Twenty years later, the gap was undeniable and basically permanent.

Why did this happen? The Soviet state believed in science and industrial modernization. Support for research & development and the hard sciences were plentiful. They had the country’s finest minds.

Goodness gracious, they launched Sputnik! They landed on Venus! How did it come to this?

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[davidgates]

I once worked with a programmer from Russia. One day I marveled at his skill in reading English, which far exceeded his ability to speak English. His response was that all Russian programmers could read English well because they used computers smuggled from the West and all of the manuals were written in English.

[ducknorris]

My father in law worked for the railroad in Houston in the late 50s. He worked in the money counting room and one day the big bosses came into the room and told them they we going to computerize things and did any of them have a interest in computers. He raised his hand and for the next 40 plus years that was his career. It’s especially interesting that he was born into a rural home without electricity only to have his life’s career be in computers.

[Dan-krbm]

On a sidenote, the largest computer manufacturer in East Germany was called "Kombinat Robotron", which is just objectively a rad name.

[lukeo]

My father-in-law frequently travelled to Moscow for his work as an aeronautical engineer in the 1980s. The Russian engineers were known for saying "we may not have the best computers here, but we do have the biggest". You can't fault their sense of humour!

[gregorymalchuk]

The Soviet Union was 9 to 12 years behind the West in semiconductor device fabrication. But they did manage to do creative things with the transistor budgets they had, like superscalar architectures in the Elbrus supercomputers and the native Elektronika microarchitecture. The real thing that inhibited progress was the factory managers' hesitance to computerize factory accounting, because it would hamper the graft and corruption in resource allocation which happened with central economic planning.

[seeratlasdtyria]

Shortly before the fall of the USSR, I happened to be traveling there meeting with officials and notables from St. Petersburgh to the Altai, and had the occasion to have dinner/drinks (LOTS of drinks:) with a group of Soviet scientists meeting in Yalta. During that evening, an issue came up having to do with the then oil/gas pipeline being constructed thru the Caucasus. During the discussions between them, which quickly grew into a rather heated argument, I was amazed when several of them whipped out their slide rules in order to support their respective positions. I said nothing till things were winding down later( I had not even seen a slide rule, well, for decades.) Having resolved their argument, we returned to the meal (long, long, meal) and near its conclusion, I rose and announced that I had a parting gift as a token of my appreciation for the chance to meet and confer with the group. I then opened my briefcase, reached in, and presented to the groups' principal scientist and leader, the latest (and just released in the West) solar powered Casio Scientific Calculator (which surpassed the comparable HP products at the time). When he realized what I had just handed to him, quite literally, tears came to his eyes, and for a few moments, he could not speak. The rest of the group surged around him in astonishment and excitement as he opened the box and fired it up. :) Needless to say, the post meal celebration went on for some time:) JESUS could these men Drink! I've gotta say, it was one of most memorable, productive, and satisfying encounters with intelligent people of my lifetime, and frankly, let me tell you, THAT is saying something:)

[bahamut]

As a Vietnamese, this is the first time in my life I hear about Soviet computer. All we have back in the day are Soviet made cars, and Aluminum wash-tub. The wash-tub is indestructible and the car was unbearable.

[jonnsmusich]

I had a dear Russian friend, now passed, who grew up in the USSR as a computer engineer. He told me that whenever the main computers in his department went down a notice would come up with the IBM US service phone number.

[shroedingercat]

Great video. However, it has several issues. With so many comments I think nobody will ever read this, but anyway.
1. At the moment of Stalin's death there were 4 computers in USSR. Not four models or types, just four computers. 2 in Moscow, 2 in Kiev.
2. MESM was initially decoded as a Model of an Elecrtonic Machine, not the Small Machine.
3. There were 8 Strela computers ever made.
4. Not all ES computers were copies of IBM-360 and also not all were IBM-compatible.
5. The newspaper shown is not Pravda, but Pionerskaya Pravda. The difference is like that between The Times and The Washington Times.
Otherwise everything is almost correct.

[ernestuz]

When I was a child in the 80s my family bought a bright red portable TV of Soviet origin, a really portable one, I didn't see anything similar in the shops for quite a while. But one day, after a few years, it broke. The technicians we brought it to told us it wasn't economically feasible to track the fault and repair it. We thought at the time that it was too advanced for the local repair shop. Actually it wasn't, instead of using ICs as their western counterparts, it was built using discrete transistors and the miniaturization was accomplished carefully crafting an incredible mess inside the device. I doubt the factory could produce many units per year. Still a remarkable feat of ingenuity and craftsmanship.

[dimrub]

Interesting review of the Soviet computing efforts. My first computer was a BESM-6 - I was at school, and would write my programs in a notebook, in Fortran, then travel by metro once a week to the institute that had the computer allocated to us, to type in and attempt to run my programs. It was around years 1987-88.

You would have been well advised to show the video to someone who speaks Russian though, prior to publishing. The pronunciation of some of the relevant names is unrecognizeable, and what you claim to be a headline of "Pravda" was actually "pionerskaya pravda", an entirely different newspaper, targeted at the younger audience.

[JackMenendez]

From what I know, this is an outstanding representation of what happened up to a point. I worked with a former Soviet computer scientist. He told me some great stories but adding to your account. As you said, the Soviet Union built the equivalent of the IBM 360 CPU but did not have IBM's latest operating system, MVT. MVT had virtual memory allowing a computer that had only 4 megabytes of memory to act like it had 16 megabytes. The Soviets had obtained MVT and the more advanced MVS through clandestine means; although they did not have a complete version, they could make it work. The Soviet Union bought most of its peripherals on the black market. However, their domestically built CPUs were excellent. The showstopper was that they could not purchase disk drives on the black market and failed to produce Winchester disk technology on their own. Disk technology allowed the US to run more advanced operating systems like MVT and MVS and, importantly, solve more advanced problems that depended on fast access to large amounts of data, such as seismic analysis of oilfields, heat flow, aerodynamic drag on wings, physics particle collision analysis, digital image analysis, etc. The Soviets did manage to get a few disk drives from the black market but never enough to make wide use of the capability.

[jamesjensen]

My dad was required to drive a different route to work each day to conceal his location while working at a special plant facility for Univac in the early 1950’s ... as a child I was given “toys” from his work... transistors the size of pocket watches, solar cells to power my small electric car and printed circuit boards... after hours he drove my by the location and pointed it out.

[petyavodolaz]

In a Uni I had lectures for Computer Security and the professor was 75+ yo guy who lived thru all this soviet computing era. He was a pretty chill dude and liked to tell stories from that time. One of the stories was: He was invited in a science group to reverse engineer a computer from a captured remotely controlled submarine.
The task basically was: Dismantle - Gather as much information as possible - And put it all back together. 🙃

[julianfp]

Fascinating. As a little anecdote in the early 1990s I worked for a US computer company and made a business trip to our office in Budapest. My main contact there was about my age so he would have been at university (studying computer science) in the early/mid 1980s. I remember to this day the story he told me about how he and his friends earned a bit of extra spending money while at university. Apparently at the time the Austria/Hungary border was quite easy to cross so most weekends they used to drive to a very small town just over the Austrian border which despite only having a population of a few hundred people had three shops on the main street all specialising in selling electronic components to service the market of all the Hungarian university students (there were lots of people doing this apparently) coming in to the town to buy electronic components to take back to Budapest and sell on to the local research institute that was using them to attempt to reproduce a DEC VAX.

[sthed]

I did my PhD research on microprogramming in the late '70s. Many years later I met someone who worked in a facility in the Armenian SSR who used some of my papers. They had a 360, a lower end one, and were modifying its microcode to support later peripherals they were able to get from the West.
All of us working on microprogramming in my department got postcards from behind the Iron Curtain asking for reprints of our papers since they were not allowed copiers to do it themselves.

[andrewkondrash]

In the late 1980s, I worked on the ES-1036. It was the second generation of the ES series and was an analogue of the IBM370. These computers eventually became increasingly used as servers and communication centres for users.

[MoritzvonSchweinitz]

I can't find it online right now, but I believe the Soviets reverse engineering was also sabotaged quite smartly by letting them steal modified and flawed IC designs back in the day. It was a fascinating story.

[arzen]

My father during the USSR worked in the Far Eastern Cybernetics Ministry, FECM. He began as a scientist - he was engaged in the development of programs for soil analyzers and in the creation of a mathematical model of permafrost soils depths - it was important for construction, drilling and mining, farming, paleontological and archaeological excavations, etc. But quite quickly my father became one of the directors, since he was practically the only one who understood Soviet computers in the entire ministry. According to him, they recruited ordinary employees by acquaintance - they did not understand anything in computers, and he had to constantly tinker with them, instead of actually developing and distributing computers in Siberia and the Far East, as well as lobbying for the interests of cybernetics in Moscow. Although, after a while he succeeded. He participated in the secret operation of the KGB, to steal a huge number of IBM documents, instructions and manuals from India, with help of their communists - the legacy of the Comintern. He was not an operative, but was involved in the technically correct translation of successfully stolen papers from English and Hindi. My father succeeded, so he was offered to go on an official business trip to the United States and Europe (naturally for industrial espionage). But his friend's friend was imprisoned for owning forbidden memoirs of Stalin's daughter, which father briefly read, for which he had been scolded by the KGB. They said there would be nothing punishment for him, but in fact they cancelled father's business trip a year later and forbid him to go abroad for 15 years. He remained in control, once told how they brought from France an machine for creating extra thin crystals and crystal films, a very important thing for research in microelectronics. Agregate was big, which is why... it didn't fit into the doors of the lab. Therefore, a wall was demolished in the laboratory, and a dozen people in their arms dragged the unit inside. They scratched the rest of the wall with a vacuum chamber and pierced it. Due to delays, French specialists replaced it only a few years later, and it turned out that almost no one can handle it, and only a couple of colleagues know for what this thing is used! In general, while they were messing with it, it managed to get technically outdated! But then the 90s have begun, and he and his colleagues PRIVATIZED this ministry completely, and turned it into ДВЭК, Far Eastern Electronic Company, FEEC. It still exists to this day, but in the 2000s father was driven out of the leadership, and he was forced (his apartment was robbed twice by bandits. Very unequivocally, but it turned out later that they were not connected with FEEC in any way, anyway this frightened the father) to sell his stake and remain a manager. When he suffered two heart attacks and quit, the company ceased to engage in any innovations (When my father was in charge, this company computerised whole region) at all and turned into a simple landlord, because the company owned a bunch of expensive office space, from the lease of which money flowed in millios of dollars. Now he is retired, sits in the next room, drinks Coke - illegaly imported from Kazakhstan due to sanctionsa - and watches YouTube 24/7, due to the consequences of heart attacks. Bright, interesting life and inglorious end. But his business lives on - I enter the university for applied mathematics and computer science.
Upd: I chose aerospace engineering & software profile. Hope to get a master's degree abroad in 4 years.

I translated some parts of the story with online translator, 'cause I am not that great in English yet. I hope it does not sucks.

[voicegain]

I did a course in Informatics at the Wroclaw Polytechnic in Poland in 1986-87. We had access to a Polish Odra computer which still used teletype terminals. The advanced classes had access to a Soviet Riad (or Ryad) computer which had CRT terminals. The year before, in 1985, the computer classes still were using punch cards for programming. In 1986 we were lucky to able to save our code on a disk. In think in 1987, the Polytechnic acquired a very modern East German computer that had a color CRT terminal. It filled an entire room and was made from simple integrated circuits (in the style of 74LS30).