Eagle, I don't want to form an alliance anymore.

Seek truth from facts

Slava paused as he walked out of the office, glancing back at the room where he had lived for almost a year.

The map of Ukraine on the wall was still there, the screen of the terminal on the table was still flashing, and the idol of the mentor was still shining.

"Comrade Krasovsky, take good care of this place, always remember your beliefs, and never let the people down."

Slava left.

A large crowd came to the train station to see him off. A year ago, when he left Moscow, only a few ministers, such as Ryzhkov and Ligachev, came to see him off. Now, there were few local officials, but the people came like a tidal wave.

People held flowers to bid him farewell, some carried portraits of their mentors, and others spontaneously gave him local specialties. On the train platform, he also saw several young people holding signs that read:

Goodbye, Comrade Slava!

At this moment, all the fatigue of the past year vanished. The hammer and sickle emblem in his inner pocket was as hot as his heart. Even if Andropov gave him ten awards, he wouldn't be as moved as he was now.

The praise and recognition of the people is the highest honor a Communist Party member can receive in his lifetime.

Determination and faith flowed in the corners of his eyes; at that moment he knew he must meet his mentor openly and honestly.

Slava wiped his eyes, waved to the crowd at the station, and boarded the train.

The train started moving.

The fields of Ukraine outside the window receded slowly: sunflower fields, beet fields, the red roofs of collective farms, the chimneys of factories in the distance, and the occasional onion domes of churches flashing by... He had seen these scenes countless times from the train window over the past year.

He's coming back now.

Sigrún has taught at the Iceland University of the Arts as a part-time lecturer since and was Dean of the Department of Fine Art from -. In – she held a research position at Reykjavík Art Museum focusing on the role of women in Icelandic art. She studied fine art at the Icelandic College of Arts and Crafts and at Pratt Institute, New York, and holds BA and MA degrees in art history and philosophy from the University of Iceland. Sigrún lives and works in Iceland.

May 20, 1986, Baikonur Cosmodrome.

A Proton-K launch vehicle ignited and lifted off from Kazakhstan, sending a 20-ton metal cylinder into low Earth orbit—the core module of the Mir space station.

This is the first modular space station in human history designed for long-term manned operation. Unlike the previous Salyut series, Mir was designed as a continuously expandable space structure.

The core module provides basic living and control functions, and in the coming years it will be connected to the spectroscopy module, crystal module, etc. Each module is a new laboratory, eventually forming a multifunctional scientific research complex that runs in orbit.

As for the Salyut 7 space station, which is currently in orbit, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union decided to continue maintaining its operation due to the relatively ample budget of the Soyuz this year.

PS: Historically, Salyut 7 crashed into Earth in 1991.

Slava watched the launch live on television from his new office in Moscow, and a question came to mind:

Why can't a country that can send a 20-ton space station into space build a decent personal computer?

This question precisely points to the first decision-making challenge he faced after taking office as director of the State Commission of Economy and Information Technology.

The difficulties presented themselves to Slava in a Soviet-style manner that he was already very familiar with over the past two weeks: a host of contradictory opinions, competing departmental interests, and mutually exclusive development paths.

In his first week in office, he found that his office had become a transit point for various people to come and lobby.

The lobbyists are roughly divided into two camps, each with its own rationale, interests, and reasons for believing that it should receive the budget.

The first camp leans towards personal computers; let's call them the "computer faction" for now.

They mainly came from design institutes within the Ministry of Electronics Industry and the national defense science and technology system, as well as the computer science departments of several top universities. Their core proposition was:

The Soviet Union had to develop its own modern computer architecture!

The Soviet Union's computer technology was still acceptable in the mainframe field, but it had fallen behind the West by at least one and a half generations in the fields of personal computers and microprocessors.

In 1981, IBM launched the PC, and in 1984, Apple launched the Macintosh. Intel's 80286 processor was already running on desks all over the world—while the Soviet Union was still at the level of imitating Intel's 8080 in microprocessor design, lagging behind by at least ten years.

Several computer scientists from universities have proposed an ambitious plan:

Develop a new generation of Soviet computers based on superscalar processor architecture and optimization algorithms.

They believed that superscalar technology could allow a processor to execute multiple instructions simultaneously in each clock cycle, greatly improving computing performance—this was precisely the cutting-edge research area in Western academia in the mid-1980s, and if the Soviet Union could make a breakthrough in this field, it might be able to achieve a leapfrog development.

“But we need samples,” a minister of the Ministry of Electronics Industry said bluntly during a report. “The best and fastest way is to get the latest personal computers from Japan and the United States through neutral countries—China, India, Finland…”

We can disassemble and study their chip architecture and circuit design, and then build our own based on that.

Contrary to intuition, the Soviet Union's lithography machines were in no way inferior to those of the West at the time, but they were all used for military purposes, with no civilian applications whatsoever.

If they could snatch food from the mouths of the military-industrial ministries, they would certainly be able to build the Soviet Union's own personal computer within three to five years.

Slava understood that the Ministry of Electronics Industry wanted more than just computers; it wanted a long-term R&D budget worth billions of rubles that would solidify its position in the Soviet industrial system and create tens of thousands of high-paying R&D jobs.

The second camp tends to focus on improving and deploying information infrastructure; they can be called the "infrastructure faction."

They mainly come from users and beneficiaries of agricultural information systems that Slava himself has worked with—practitioners in planning departments at all levels, technicians in universities who have learned to operate terminals in the past two years, and many pragmatic cadres in industry who are interested in informatization.

These people's core arguments are exactly the opposite of the former:

The alliance's top priority is not to develop new computers, but to deploy information computing centers and public computing centers on a large scale using existing technologies and to improve automated planning and control systems!

Their reasoning is equally valid:

The Soviet Union's technological gap in mainframe computers was not as large as that in personal computers. While current mainframe computers are not the most advanced in the world, they are sufficient.

Over the past two years, these machines have been stably operating in agricultural production and research consortiums, performing data collection, statistical analysis, and report generation. A group of technicians familiar with the operation and maintenance of large-scale machines have been trained in universities and research institutions.

A researcher from the All-Union Planning Research Institute made an analogy at the meeting that left a deep impression on Slava:

"Comrades, to put it simply, the Alliance is currently in a situation like a country that has excavators but no roads. Some people want to build better excavators, while others want to build the roads first."

The problem is that even the best excavators can't get to the construction site without roads. What we lack now isn't stronger computing power, but the infrastructure to extend existing computing power to more areas!

His specific plan was to establish information computing centers and public computing centers in major cities and industrial centers throughout the Soviet Union.

Given the technology, infrastructure, and financial resources available at the time, equipping every factory and farm with a computer was completely impossible, but establishing a shared pool of computing resources was feasible.

All units in a city or region access the same computing center through terminals, sharing the computing power, storage, and software there.

"The advantages of this model are obvious. First, we save the huge cost of configuring computing equipment for each unit individually. Second, we take advantage of our existing mainframe technology. Third, we have accumulated a full set of practical experience from installation to operation and maintenance to training in the past two years of agricultural informatization deployment."

Even more convincing was the opinion of another young expert from a university, who believed that an automated planning and control system could be built on the basis of the computing center.

"The information computing center provides raw computing power and data storage, but the real value lies in the automated systems running on top of this computing power—which can achieve real-time data analysis, optimize resource allocation, and automatically adjust production plans according to the current economic situation."

This can greatly improve production efficiency.

The public computing center provides shared computing power at the bottom layer, the automated planning system processes data and generates optimization solutions in the middle layer, and decision-makers at all levels receive the analysis results and make decisions through terminals at the top layer.

This framework is laying the foundation for the OGAS system.

Sigrún has taught at the Iceland University of the Arts as a part-time lecturer since and was Dean of the Department of Fine Art from -. In – she held a research position at Reykjavík Art Museum focusing on the role of women in Icelandic art. She studied fine art at the Icelandic College of Arts and Crafts and at Pratt Institute, New York, and holds BA and MA degrees in art history and philosophy from the University of Iceland. Sigrún lives and works in Iceland.

The differences between the two camps reached a fever pitch at a plenary meeting of the committee.

Representatives from the computer sector vehemently criticized the infrastructure sector's proposal at the meeting:

"The West is already putting a personal computer on everyone's desk, while we're still discussing how to get hundreds of people to share a bulky metal box."

The gap between us and the West is widening! If, in three years, Western personal computers are more powerful than our mainframes—which is entirely possible according to Moore's Law—then all the computing centers you've deployed today will become piles of obsolete scrap metal!

Researchers from the infrastructure sector were equally assertive:

"We'll talk about what will happen three years from now!"

Your solution will take five to eight years to move from the lab to the factory—and that's the most optimistic estimate. There are still bottlenecks in semiconductor manufacturing processes and yield issues along the way... each of which could delay the project by several years!

In the five to eight years that your chips went from being academic papers to products, was the Soviet economy still managed with abacuses and telephones?

Oil prices are collapsing, budgets are shrinking, the window of opportunity for reform is closing... We don't have the luxury of waiting five to eight years for your product!

The argument lasted for about an hour. Then Slava spoke up:

"Have you all finished speaking, comrades?"

The meeting room fell silent.

“Both sides have a point. I know everyone wants to fight for more budget, but what the alliance needs right now is production. We are currently in a planned economy, and the purpose of our system is not to create profits, but to produce products.”

The need for a computing center is now much greater, and it's the only viable solution at present. Oil prices are collapsing, budgets are shrinking, and the accelerated development strategy requires IT support—we can't afford to wait five to eight years.

Slava provided his own allocation ratio:

"The principle of budget allocation is 70/30. Seventy percent of the budget will be invested in the nationwide deployment of information computing centers and public computing centers—this will be the main focus for the next two years."

Our goal is to build at least two hundred public computing centers in all large and medium-sized cities and major industrial centers throughout the Soviet Union during the Twelfth Five-Year Plan period.

The remaining 30% of the budget was invested in the research and development of computer architecture. We systematically reverse-engineered the latest personal computers from the West and Japan through Sino-Soviet trade channels and neutral countries, gradually narrowing the gap based on our existing imitation capabilities.

If usable domestically produced microprocessors are developed in three to five years, the computing center can gradually upgrade to them.

By then, the infrastructure will be built, the operators will have been trained, and the application software will have been developed. The new hardware will have fertile ground to take root. What do you all think?

No one had any objections, and those who did had kept them to themselves.

“If there are no objections, then it’s settled,” Slava glanced at the meeting minutes and added a sentence that represented the most important management principle he had learned from a year of grassroots experience in Ukraine:

"The two hundred computing centers must be implemented. The site selection, equipment, and personnel plans for the first batch of fifty computing centers must be submitted within one month. Whoever delays will be held responsible."

After the meeting, Slava returned to his office and closed the door. Director Nian followed him in and sat in the visitor's chair.

"The people at the Ministry of Electronics Industry won't be too happy."

"Being unhappy is better than having no budget at all. Thirty percent is enough for the first year of a long-cycle R&D project. What they need is time and samples. Let them take apart the Western machines they can get their hands on and see what's inside. After three years, we can decide whether to increase investment based on the actual progress."

My concern is that this could lead to a research and development mentality where buying is worse than making, and renting is worse than buying. This would be a huge blow to my country's independent scientific research.

Director Nian comforted him, saying, "It's alright. The benefits and welfare generated by building a computing center are clearly visible to the people. Even if we put a lot of effort into developing personal computers, we can't make them available to the general public, right?"

"That's true."

He looked out the window. The Kremlin spires appeared particularly heavy in the overcast sky, but he knew that beneath those spires, a massive bureaucratic machine was slowly turning in the direction he was pointing.

"Did you know that the Soyuz space station has been launched?" he suddenly said, something that seemed unrelated.

"I watched the live broadcast on TV."

"A country that can send a space station into space has its own designed computer system, its own self-built life support system, and its own patented docking system..."

The alliance has no shortage of engineers or basic science; what it lacks is a way to bring these capabilities from space to the ground.

If technology could be applied to factories, logistics, and planning management, this country's efficiency would more than double.

He turned around and looked at Director Nian.

"We need to fix the road first, then the cars will come."

Director Nian smiled, cracked open a sunflower seed, and then put it into Slava's mouth.

"Alright, road foreman—where do you plan to start building your first road?"

“It starts with the planning departments in each state. Those guys are still using slide rules—damn, they were still using those things to make plans in 1986. I’m going to go into their buildings and install terminals so they can see for themselves that a computer can do a week’s worth of work in five minutes.”

“Your machine is bound to provoke resistance from the bureaucrats.”

"Then let them rebel! Fire them if they have any objections, get out of here! If you don't want to advance, there are plenty of young cadres who do. Back when we were developing IT in Ukraine, every local bureaucrat was rebelling! And what happened then? They themselves didn't want to go back to the days without terminals."

Once people have used a better tool, they won't want to go back to the worse one. This is human nature, and it works more effectively than any administrative order.

I would never mind being Stalin for a moment.

The Moscow sky outside the window remained gray. Three hundred kilometers above, a brand-new space station was orbiting the Earth once every ninety minutes—the best testament to Soviet technological capabilities and the perfect metaphor for what Slava was doing.

Connect existing capabilities in the right way.

The space station is modular, consisting of a core module and continuously docking functional modules, with each module adding a new capability.

His information network is also modular, with each computing center as a core node, and each newly connected terminal and each newly laid data link as a new functional module.

He doesn't need to wait until it's perfect before he starts; once he starts, it will only get better and better.

He picked up the phone and dialed the office of the Smolensk Regional Planning Commission—

"Comrade, I am Ivanov from the Union's Information Committee. We need to discuss your planned data processing system."

There was a moment of silence on the other end of the phone, followed by a reply that sounded somewhere between confused and uneasy:

"What Information Technology Committee?"

Slava smiled with relief.

The battle he's about to fight has only just begun.

Chapter 59 To Master Unparalleled Martial Arts... (1 words)

There's a saying that goes something like this: when you feel like things are going too smoothly for you, it means you're about to have some really bad luck.

Slava knew that, given the nature of Soviet bureaucrats, if he simply sat in his office waiting for reports to be delivered to him, he could live a smooth and successful life until the collapse of the Soviet Union.

So he started flying all over the country, inspecting the construction of information technology infrastructure and looking for new problems.