I have several times watched an interesting documentary on why the Soviet OGAS never became a reality. It was heavily inspired by what the Americans were doing and their ARPAnet would end up being the internet as we know it today. It aimed to network all factories in the USSR so that the demands of on plant could be more easily linked to the production at another plant. The USSR economy at this time was in dire staits, so why no OGAS?
First of all, in the US the military spearheaded a lot of technology. It was pretty similar in the USSR. The difference was that in the US military technology trickled down to the civilian sector. Not so in the USSR. “The military will never concern themselves with mere civilian issues” was effectively the conclusion drawn by one proponent of OGAS.
Second, it was really expensive. Like, it would have cost more than the clean-up after Chernobyl. The USSR wasn’t a networked or computerized country in general so introducing OGAS would have required a huge investment.
Third, it threatened a lot of bureaucrats whose jobs were endangered by OGAS. So OGAS needed the support of the very people it was bound to replace.
But this is not what I’m curious about. It seems fairly straight forward why OGAS didn’t happen. There were as noted earlier several reasons why it didn’t go anywhere. What I’m curious about is why OGAS was even on the table? This project seems to have been discussed at the highest levels of the USSR before it was mothballed. So improvements to how the economy was organized were discussed? Why then did they not conclude that they needed proper accounting without falsifications? Why didn’t they introduce proper quality control?
Traditionally you try to solve problems from Least Expensive to Most Expensive. Ideally you can pair that with Most Impactful to Least Impactful. OGAS seems very expensive and moderately impactful. At the same time their poor accounting and lack of quality control constituted existential threats to their economy. Now, accounting and quality control isn’t free but I don’t see how the Soviet economy could have survived with them. OGAS however was a solution to a problem that might have been necessary to solve somewhere down the line but there were more pressing issues that cost a lot less right in front of them.
Now, Breznev was notoriously disinterested in corruption so it would have been out of character for him to pursue accounting and quality control as I suggest, but why then even discuss OGAS? If being ideologically correct was more important than anything else, why think in terms of high-tech and networking in the first place?