A Struggle for the Soviet Future： The Birth of Scientific Forecasting in the Soviet Union
In this article, I examine these questions through two cases central to the history of Soviet forecasting: the debates about long-term economic planning in the 1960s, and the emergence of social forecasting. I argue that due to its postpositivist epistemology, but also its close relation to the strategically important computer technologies, scientific forecasting was particularly conducive to criticism of Soviet economic planning. Scientific forecasting enabled some actors to reform (at least intellectually) Soviet governance: a demand for glasnost in the circulation of data was posed as a necessary condition for producing valid forecasts as early as the 1960s.9 Other actors assumed a more complacent approach, seeing the scientific forecasting of society as a tool of surveillance and a shortcut to a political career. I argue that, whether reformative or complacent, Soviet forecasting incrementally undermined the ambition for total, centralized control.
scientific forecastingがどう長期的な管理経済の夢やその他色々と関係していたか
De-stalinzationで、行政等におけるwide intellectual changesがあったよと
- cyberneticsOKになったり
Cyberneticsと比べて、scientific forecasting注目されてないよねと
- この論文は、それがどう政府に影響与えたり、東西の外交に影響与えたりとかを議論
plannersはforecasting欲しかった
- ただ、秘密主義, データーが区画間で共有されていないソ連行政と相反するものだった #官僚主義 ?
- 予測にはデータ必要
- だんだん情報公開, ペレストロイかへと向かうのとつながる
あと、scientific forecastingは国際的な協力のもと生まれたから、そう言う意味でもソ連が開いていく過程とつながる
born 1950s, boomed 1960s
科学者の間で意見分かれがち
p54にscientific forecastingの歴史や説明
- 定量的でも精度に限界もあるよと
Even the scientifi c forecasters, representing the most quantitative branch of future studies, admitted that their method was able to produce alternative paths of development only for narrow sectors and short-term periods;
- 管理経済だとしても遠い未来の予想は難しい
- これをどうソ連が用いたか
How could this approach, apparently so disruptive with regard to what was described by James Scott as the Soviet high modernist ambition to rationally plan and control the development of both society and nature, be adopted and used in the Soviet Union?
# Knowing and Controlling the Future in Postrevolutionary Russia (1920s-)
- 経済の長期計画を立てるには未来がわからないといけない
- テクノロジーの未来わからんしゆるめの計画でいいんじゃない?という考えも p55-56
- いや厳密に予想できるっしょという考えも
- まあin retrospect、できなかったけど
- Futureの定義とは、とかいう議論も
- 結局5か年計画ぐらいがギリ上手くいった
- 未来予想しようよ: Gosplan
- 1937に潰されたけど（政治的なやつ）
# Cybernetic Governmentality of the Soviet Future
- > Scientific forecasting, based on statistical time series and used to identify probabilistic future states of a given process, was part of what I call a cybernetic governmentality
- Cyberneticsはeventually being declared the「science of governance」
- Cybernetics also transformed Soviet governance by giving it a new orientation to the future.
- "Goal-oriented cybernetic control"
Newtonic mechanicな考え方: 過去によって未来が決まる
- それに対して、
- Cyberneticな考え方: システムに定められているGoalによって未来が決まる (Goal-oriented)
Goal-oriented cybernetic control linked the past, present, and future through feedback loops of free-fl owing information
A mechanical universe was replaced with a cybernetic one.
- 物理(Newtonic, Mechanic)っぽい考え方より、cybernetic的な考え方をしだした
The metaphor of workers as cogs in the machine was replaced by one of people as carriers and conductors of information in Soviet governmental discourses
We need to pause here to stress that Wiener’s idea of teleology should not be confused with the Soviet concept tselevoe planirovanie, created in the 1920s and translated in English as “teleological planning,”
- ソ連の方は、cybernetic的なリアルタイムフィードバックの考えはなかった、flexibilityあんまりない
話変わって、Scientific-Technical Revolution (STR) p58あたり
- 技術めっちゃ進歩すれば労働不要になって共産社会も資本主義社会もめっちゃtransformするっしょという
One of the underlying reasons for introducing the STR into the Marxist-Leninist version of development was its emphasis on universalism and “peaceful struggle in economics,” which was expected to facilitate east-west technology transfer.
- 当然STRもpolitical-ideological censorshipは通された
Yet western future studies based on quantitative methods were borrowed in piecemeal 断続的 fashion, making them correspond crudely with dialectic materialism. p59
. Being similarly skeptical about the plural futures studies, the Soviets preferred prognozirovanie, translated into English as “forecasting.”
# Forecasting in Service of Centralized Planning?
p60
ソ連の経済発展遅いやばいって1950sになって、Gosplan grew
フランスを視察
Forecasting was understood as “failed planning,” a compromise and a tool that a weak state planning agency used to coordinate a free market economy, designed to compensate for the absence of central directive–based planning.
Accordingly, forecasting was deemed unnecessary in directive-led Soviet economic planning.
- 計画経済ならforecastingいらなそうと
- p61に1941plan, 1950s planとかソ連の立てた計画(forecastingなしで)について色々書かれている
- ただ実際必要だし、いらないねと言われた中でも軍とかでっそりforecasting研究されてた
Memoirs also hint that the spread of forecasting in the Soviet Union resembled that in the United States, where the military control techniques developed at RAND were extended to the civil sector, although Russian historiography remains opaque about this.
めっちゃ技術決定論！！！
It was the introduction of a new large-scale technical project that propelled scientific forecasting in Soviet economic planning forward in the late 1950s, just like it did in the 1920s.
- Computer Scientistsが関わってくる
- Kosyginが1964ごろからサポート
Kosygin worked in tandem with his son-in-law, Dzhermen Gvishiani, an infl uential westernizer of Soviet management and mediator of many large east-west trade deals.
- そんな役割があるのか
In his 1965 speech at Gosplan, Kosygin proclaimed that scientifi c forecasting was the key component of planning, because “planning is a science.”
- Computer Scientistsが関わってくる
From 1965, both Gosplan and the Academy of Sciences institutes began to develop long-term forecasts for economic development.47 In December 1966, the fi rst open academic meeting dedicated to the conceptual development of long-term planning on the basis of forecasting was organized in Moscow
- この会議がめっちゃ盛り上がったらしい
ソ連を"mother of planning"と自分で持ち上げ
The reformative eff ect of scientifi c forecasting was also noted: forecasts explore several alternative directions of development, thus implying that the Soviet future was open to diff erent trajectories.
- Forecastは、複数のありうる未来を提示する事になっている（Only one futureじゃない考え方）
- この考え方は頭の良い人たちの間で共有されてったけど、あくまでもprivateな場所でしか言えなかった
その後、The 1966 meeting went as far as to insist on public discussion of forecasts.
Gosplan economists frankly asserted that forecasting did not challenge the existing power concentration because it was limited to a “small circle of specialists” at the top of government.
あと、1965あたりのforecastの議論は、glasnost情報公開への圧力を産んだ p64
Even the most technical and narrow forecasting required a much higher degree of open information fl ow than the Soviet system was prepared to allow for
- ただ「strictly centralized, supervised, and compartmentalized data flows」を壊すまでには至らず
- 著者: まあそれでもドミノエフェクト的な影響は体制に結構与えたでしょと
One of the reasons was a particular view of the STR, which required the revision of Marxist-Leninist dogmas to accommodate the view that science and technology were no longer a superstructure but a direct driver of social transformation.
# Soviet Future Studies, the Bestuzhev-Lada Way
- 読む気力がないのであらすじをコピペ
The article’s last section will provide a critical perspective on the contribution of Igor΄ Bestuzhev-Lada, a Russian scholar who is described in the internal historiography of future studies as the key, pioneering promoter of social forecasting in the Soviet Union. However, Bestuzhev-Lada remains unknown in the histories of Soviet science, even sociology, although he worked at the prominent Institute for Concrete Social Research, which has attracted a lot of historians’ attention because of its dramatic fate: the institute sought to rejuvenate Soviet social studies with western sociological theories and as a result was purged and placed under tight ideological control. Bestuzhev-Lada nevertheless looked beyond sociology. Outlining his eff orts to dominate the fi eld of social forecasting, I demonstrate how the struggle for the Soviet future turned into a struggle for Soviet future studies.
- あとで重要そうだったら読む
# Soviet Future Society Forecasted
なんかもう一章あった、ただ読む元気がない