Automated control system of the economy of Tomsk region: late Soviet university technocracy in search of a way out of the systemic limitations

The example of the project to create an automated management system for the economy of Tomsk Oblast is used to examine two key plots of the post-war official intellectual history of the USSR that determined the late Soviet version of technocracy: the transformation of the image of cybernetics and the formation of the doctrine of the scientific and technological revolution. The goal was to identify specific socio-, cultural-historical circumstances that determined the technocratic essence of such projects, as well as the features of the Tomsk university technocracy that pushed it to find ways to overcome the organizational barriers of the Soviet system. The corpus of sources used is represented primarily by official party and government documents and publications and memoirs of the participants in the ACS project for Tomsk Oblast and their colleagues. The main attention is paid to the genesis of Soviet technocracy, based on the development of engineering education in the USSR and the growth of its importance in the first post-war decades. All this was superimposed on narratives about cybernetics and the scientific and technological revolution, which became the basis for the growth of technocratic sentiments and corresponding socio-professional attitudes. The ways and forms of technocratization of Tomsk cybernetics as a derivative of the local scientific school of radiophysics are linked to the participation of local ACS designers in the development of military radar systems and the directorial experience of their leader F.I. Peregudov in automating the management of a large defense enterprise. The formation of a specific cybernetic discourse in the USSR in the 1950s and 1960s is recorded, the leading form of practical application of which was the automation of production and management processes. The promotion of the ACS theme was a relevant way of integrating the technical intelligentsia into the distributing hierarchies of the Soviet administrative market. This was one of the main forms of manifestation and implementation of the Soviet version of technocracy. At the same time, by the beginning of the 1970s, cybernetics found itself inscribed in a much broader context of the scientific and technological revolution, which contributed to the final formulation of cybernetics as a universal means of solving management problems in the Soviet system. As a result, conclusions are made that the architects of the ACS were unable to go beyond the systemic limitations imposed by the Soviet project, proposing an exit option comparable to it in scale. The reasons for this were the secondary nature of the Soviet technocracy in relation to the partyocracy, the dogmatic nature of its thinking and the limitations of social imagination by the parameters of the adopted development model. The author declares no conflicts of interests.

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