In Search of Hackers

By Philip Elmer-DeWitt

In the lobby of Moscow's Hotel Ukraina, a dingy Stalin-era landmark, clerks who used to book reservations with paper chits now check guests in with a pair of Soviet-made computer terminals. Specialty stores that once tallied purchases on wooden abacuses have bypassed cash registers and gone directly to computers. And computers can now be found at the TASS news-wire service, at the offices of Aeroflot and at the government planning agency Gosplan.

In almost any other country, the sight of a few computers would hardly seem worth noting. But in a society predicated on the control of information -- and, perhaps more important, on centralized decision making -- the placing of information processors in the hands of factory managers, middle-level bureaucrats, educators, journalists and regional planners is very big news. "There's a struggle taking place over the control of information," says Loren Graham, a Soviet-science watcher at M.I.T. "The debate is whether to make personal computers available to the general public or to restrict access by price or institutional control."

Four years have passed since Gorbachev launched his crash program to catapult the Soviet economy into the computer age, and the results are just starting to show. Soviet manufacturers cranked out a record 100,000 microcomputers last year, bringing the total number of personal computers to an estimated 200,000. That is a far cry from the 30 million machines Moscow estimates the country can absorb. By all accounts, Gorbachev's electronic- literacy program will fall far short of its ambitious goal of installing a million computers in the schools by 1992.

The problem is as much political as it is technological. Consider, for example, the children's computer club that chess champion Gary Kasparov helped organize in 1987 and to which he donated two U.S.-made Atari 1040s. Although it had the blessings of Yevgeny Velikhov, vice president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, the fledgling organization was beset by bureaucrats at every turn. First the housing authority said space would be granted only if the club agreed to turn over its computers. Then, when Kasparov procured 70 more machines, the state committee on sports insisted that it should have control of the computers. Only after Kasparov vehemently protested were the bureaucrats thwarted and the children able to keep their machines.

Unless Soviet youth grow up with computers, the country will be at an increasing disadvantage in the global technological race. The U.S.S.R. must rapidly automate and computerize its industry if it is to increase productivity and manufacture goods that can compete in the world market. And without exportable products, the Soviet economy will never earn the hard currency it needs to finance modernization and growth.

With reporting by Glenn Garelik/Moscow , and Thomas McCarroll/New York