A hundred times I said this oath:
A hundred years in a dungeon is better than a protost one, I will interpret a hundred mountains rather in a mortar, Than explain the truth to a dumbass.
Bahvalan Mahmoud
August 24 marks the 90th anniversary of the birth of the great Soviet mathematician, cybernetics and one of the creators of the principles laid down in domestic missile attack early warning systems, as well as directly developing and implementing ACS at defense enterprises of the Soviet Union.
Viktor Mikhailovich Glushko was born into a mining family in the town of Shakhty, Rostov Region, on August 24, 1923.
On June 21, 1941, he graduated from secondary school No. 1 in the same city with a gold medal. The outbreak of the Great Patriotic War hit Viktor Mikhailovich painfully - in the fall of 1941, his mother was killed by the Nazis.
After the liberation of the city of Shakhty by Soviet troops, Glushkov was mobilized and took part in the restoration of the Donbass coal mines.
After the end of the war, he brilliantly graduated from the Faculty of Mathematics of Rostov University. In his thesis, he was engaged in the development of methods for calculating tables of improper integrals, having discovered inaccuracies in the existing tables, which had stood before 10-12 editions.
After 1948, a young promising mathematician was sent by assignment to the Urals in a secret institution involved in an atomic project.
Head of the Department of Theoretical Mechanics of the Ural Forestry Institute. The topic of his doctoral dissertation, successfully defended at the Dissertation Council of Moscow State University on December 12, 1955, is devoted to the proof of Hilbert's fifth problem.
In the late fifties, the scientist became interested in the capabilities of the rapidly developing electronic computing technology.
Remaining after moving from Kiev to Moscow S. A. Lebedev, his laboratory, in which the first computer-MESM in the USSR and continental Europe was created, was transferred to the Institute of Mathematics of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR, whose director B. V. Gnedenko invited Glushkov to manage it in 1956. Having moved, from August 1956 he lived and worked in Kiev. In 1956 he became the head of the laboratory of computer technology at the Institute of Mathematics of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR at the invitation of its director.
Laboratory employee Z. L. Rabinovich noted in his memoirs that with the arrival of Glushkov “none of the work carried out in the laboratory was abandoned. On the contrary, they all got their logical conclusion."
Further activities of Viktor Mikhailovich were completely related to computer technology - in December 1957, on the basis of his laboratory, the Computing Center of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR was created, and he became its director. And in December 1962, on the basis of the Computing Center of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR, the Institute of Cybernetics of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR was created, the director of which was also Glushkov.
From 1958 to 1961, the Dnepr computer was developed, which was actively used in the most diverse sectors of the USSR national economy.
A complex of two computers "Dnepr" (standing behind the screen) in the space flight control center. Information from 150 sensors enters the complex, which displays the satellite's trajectory on the screen.
Viktor Mikhailovich was actively involved in teaching. Since 1956, he taught at the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics of KSU a course of higher algebra and a special course on the theory of digital automata, and from 1966 until the end of his life he headed the Department of Theoretical Cybernetics.
From 1962 until the end of his life, vice-president of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR.
In 1963, Glushkov was approved as the chairman of the Interdepartmental Scientific Council for the introduction of computer technology and economic and mathematical methods in the national economy of the USSR under the State Committee of the Council of Ministers of the USSR for Science and Technology.
Later, Glushkov was directly involved in the development and implementation of automatic production control systems (APCS) in the national economy, published scientific works in the field of theoretical cybernetics, and he was also asked to write an article about cybernetics in the Britannica encyclopedia in 1973.
In 1965, under the leadership of Glushkov, the first in a series of computers for engineering calculations MIR-1 was created.
Machine for engineering calculations MIR11966
He was a member of the USSR State Committee for Science and Technology and the Lenin and State Prize Committee under the USSR Council of Ministers. He was Advisor to the UN Secretary General on Cybernetics. More than one hundred dissertations have been defended under his supervision.
Glushkov was the initiator and main ideologist of the development and creation of the National Automated Accounting and Information Processing System (OGAS), intended for automated control of the entire economy of the USSR as a whole. For this, he developed a system of algorithmic algebras and a theory for managing distributed databases.
At this stage of his life, it is worth dwelling in more detail. Further cited from the book by B. N. Malinovsky "The history of computing technology in persons".
The task of building a nationwide automated control system (OGAS) of the economy was posed to Glushkov by the First Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers (then A. N. Kosygin) in November 1962.
V. M. Glushkov, V. S. Mikhalevich, A. I. Nikitin et al. Developed the first draft design of the Unified State Network of Computer Centers EGSVTs, which included about 100 centers in large industrial cities and centers of economic regions, united by broadband communication channels. These centers, distributed over the territory of the country, in accordance with the configuration of the system, are combined with the rest involved in the processing of economic information. At that time, we determined their number at 20 thousand. These are large enterprises, ministries, as well as cluster centers serving small enterprises. Characteristic was the presence of a distributed data bank and the possibility of unaddressed access from any point of this system to any information after an automatic check of the requester's authority. A number of information security issues have been developed. In addition, in this two-tier system, the main computing centers exchange information with each other not by switching channels and switching messages, as is customary now, with a breakdown into letters, I proposed to connect these 100 or 200 centers with broadband channels bypassing the channel-forming equipment so that was to rewrite information from a magnetic tape in Vladivostok to tape in Moscow without reducing the speed. Then all protocols are greatly simplified and the network acquires new properties. The project was secret until 1977.
Unfortunately, after the consideration of the project by the commission, almost nothing was left of it, the entire economic part was withdrawn, only the network itself remained. The seized materials were destroyed, burned, as they were secret.
V. N. Starovsky, head of the CSO. His objections were demagogic. Glushkov insisted on such a new accounting system so that any information could be immediately obtained from anywhere. And he referred to the fact that the Central Statistical Board was organized on the initiative of Lenin, and it copes with the tasks set by him; managed to get assurances from Kosygin that the information that the CSO gives to the government is enough for management, and therefore nothing needs to be done.
Beginning in 1964 (the time when my project appeared), scientists-economists Lieberman, Belkin, Birman and others began to openly oppose Glushkov, many of whom later left for the United States and Israel. Kosygin, being a very practical person, became interested in the possible cost of our project. According to preliminary estimates, its implementation would cost 20 billion rubles. The main part of the work can be done in three five-year plans, but only on condition that this program is organized in the same way as atomic and space. Glushkov did not hide from Kosygin that it is more complex than the space and nuclear programs combined and organizationally much more difficult, since it affects everything and everyone: industry, trade, planning authorities, and the sphere of management, etc. Although the cost of the project was roughly estimated at 20 billion rubles, the working scheme for its implementation provided that the first 5 billion rubles invested in the first five-year plan at the end of the five-year plan will yield more than 5 billion returns, since the cost of the program was self-sustaining. And in just three five-year plans, the implementation of the program would bring at least 100 billion rubles to the budget. And this is still a very underestimated figure.
But our would-be economists have confused Kosygin with the fact that, they say, the economic reform will cost nothing at all, i.e. will cost exactly as much as the paper on which the resolution of the Council of Ministers will be printed, and will result in more. Therefore, Glushkov's team was put aside and, moreover, began to be treated with caution. And Kosygin was unhappy. Glushkov was ordered to temporarily stop the propaganda of the OGAS and take up lower-level systems. As it turned out later, this was the beginning of the end of a grandiose project.
There are several reasons for this, but the inertia of thinking of some responsible party functionaries played the main role. This can be best illustrated with the help of a fragment of Viktor Mikhailovich's memoirs about the Politburo meeting, held after the Soviet leadership began to receive information that the Americans had made a draft information network (more precisely, several networks) back in 1966, i.e. … two years later than us. Unlike us, they did not argue, but did, and in 1969 they planned to launch the ARPANET network, and then SEIBARPANET and others, uniting computers that were installed in various cities in the United States.
The same fragment contains Glushkov's gloomy prophecy about the beginning of the economic recession of the USSR in the late 70s. The notes in brackets are mine.
“… Garbuzov (USSR Minister of Finance) spoke in such a way that what he said would be suitable for an anecdote. He took the podium and turned to Mazurov (he was then Kosygin's first deputy). Here, they say, Kirill Trofimovich, on your instructions, I went to Minsk, and we examined poultry farms. And there, on such and such a poultry farm (named it), the poultry women themselves developed a computer.
Then I laughed out loud. He shook his finger at me and said: "You, Glushkov, don't laugh, they are talking about serious things here." And he - as if nothing had happened, such a self-confident and narcissistic person, continues: “He performs three programs: he turns on the music, when the hen has laid an egg, turns off the light and turns it on and so on. Here, he says, what we need to do: first, automate all poultry farms in the Soviet Union, and then think about all sorts of nonsense like the state system. (And I really laughed here, not then.) Okay, that's not the point.
A counter-proposal was made, which reduced everything by an order of magnitude: instead of the Goskomupra - the Main Directorate for Computer Engineering under the State Committee for Science and Technology, instead of the scientific center - VNIIPOU, etc. And the task remained the same, but it was technicalized, i.e.changed in the direction of the State network of computing centers, and as for the economy, the development of mathematical models for OGAS, etc. - all this was smeared.
At the end, Suslov speaks and says: “Comrades, perhaps we are now making a mistake by not accepting the project in full, but this is such a revolutionary transformation that it is difficult for us to implement it now. to be "And asks not Kirillin, but me:" What do you think? " And I say: "Mikhail Andreevich, I can only tell you one thing: if we do not do this now, then in the second half of the 70s the Soviet economy will face such difficulties that all the same we will have to return to this issue." But they did not take into account my opinion, they accepted the counter-proposal."
Ironically, the unrealized ideas embodied in the OGAS were developed in the organization of an early warning system for a missile attack, which was actively being built in the USSR in the seventies.
In addition, on his initiative and under his active leadership, automated control systems began to be introduced at defense enterprises of the Soviet Union.
Viktor Mikhailovich Glushkov and Admiral of the Fleet Sergei Georgievich Gorshkov (left). The automation system for the design of submarines, created at the Institute of Cybernetics and its SKB, has been put into operation. 70s of XX century
Alas, the scientist's long-term struggle with inertia and bureaucracy was not in vain for him - in the fall of 1981, Viktor Mikhailovich's health deteriorated.
A year later, on January 30, 1982, after a long illness, he died in Moscow at the Central Clinical Hospital and was buried in Kiev at the Baikovo cemetery.
Viktor Mikhailovich was awarded a large number of high government awards, including three Orders of Lenin and the Order of the October Revolution. Laureate of the Lenin Prize and twice laureate of the USSR State Prize. Hero of Socialist Labor.
When writing the article, materials from the popular science journal "Propaganda" (https://propaganda-journal.net/636.html), the book "How the OGAS" went out ", books by Academician V. Glushkov were used. Pages of life and creativity. Malinovsky B. N.- Kiev: Naukova Dumka, 1993.- 140s. and the Museum "History of Information Technologies Development in Ukraine" (https://www.icfcst.kiev.ua/MUSEUM/about_r.html).
