Theory and Practice of Coordination in the History of the Scientific Council on the Complex Problem of "Cybernetics" at the Presidium of the USSR Academy of Sciences in the 1960s - 1970s

The transformation of cybernetics into one of the basic operators and symbols of the scientific and technological revolution in the USSR chronologically coincided with the emergence of a new organizational trend in Soviet scientific and technical policy - coordination. The author traces the history of the Scientific Council on the Complex Problem of "Cybernetics" under the Presidium of the USSR Academy of Sciences, analyzes organizational potential of this body, which undertook the coordination of complex cybernetic research on an all-Union scale. The author comes to the conclusion that the Scientific Council in the 1960s and early 1970s contributed to the formalization of the scientific apparatus, the introduction of mathematical statistics and computerization of intellectual labor in disciplines that had long been "descriptive" in nature: biology, linguistics, economics. The Council also had "levers" of influence in departments and directly fought for institutionalization, provision of laboratories, equipment and personnel training for promising scientific fields, such as engineering psychology and machine learning. Implementing the coordination of a complex scientific field in practice, Soviet cyberneticists did not seek to specify the theory of coordination, which distinguished them from their colleagues from the "global North" countries.