With the heels of her loafers clacking against the marble floor, Nina made her way to the beginning of their assigned section. A large rendering of a man labeled Victor Glushkov was projected at the entrance of the exhibit. “In 1970 comrade Glushkov set about the restructuring of the motherland to usher us into the era of the digital age,” a recorded voice floated directly and exclusively to the ear of Nina. As she walked along the illuminated path, the recording tracked her position to play the appropriate audio and visual cues at each projected artifact. A hollow marble corridor lay beyond her, colored with visual displays projected through various mediums.
The exhibit detailed the commissioning of the All-State Automated System project by Brezhnev in 1970, despite political infighting surrounding the initial financial strain of the project. “But Comrade Brezhnev had the foresight to see a new future for communism”, color the video prompted, “The project created a new job for the citizen, a devotion to the language and study of programming. Upon the completion of Glushkov’s original plan of a hierarchical decentralized computer network, the success of the economy synergized with the efficiency of the communist spirit to absorb other aspects of life. This new integrated life system was named великая система. It signaled the creation of a digital brain for the motherland, where her people were the blood keeping the flow of success, her factories the legs moving her forward, and the spirit of innovation in the collective computer revolution, her heart.”
A topological map appeared against a wall, detailing the original project design and demonstrating the network’s expansion. Lines from Moscow to large cities to factories appeared and multiplied until the graphic was a large entanglement of arrows. Projections of factory managers at terminals and giant rooms of programmers engrossed in their stations, lined up in massive rows, flowed in front of Nina. Schematic renderings of planned transportation routes, food production, and meal allocation models unfolded. Advertisements for evolving domestic electronics floated into view and a video of terminals being delivered to from house to house played just beyond that.
“The Soviet nation was the first global leader to establish a moneyless economy. Physical money quickly became unnecessary as monetary exchange transformed into the digital neural firings of великая система.” Nina walked through the halls and observed how the networked economy grew into a communication and shared knowledge system for the people of the motherland. Before служащий, one used a “terminal” to access information and programs stored on large computers far away. The terminals were replaced with smaller computers in homes and then even smaller like the one Nina took notes on in her hand. The invention of “American Web” triggered the creation of an autonomous Soviet database of all Soviet information, signaling true hybridization and the creation of SovietWeb (the one in which her notes were being stored in a cloud instantly).
In the distance a world map appeared, fractured in the middle dividing the eastern and western hemispheres. One side featured an emblematic portrait of Gorbachev and the other of U.S. Presidents Reagan and Gore. The end of the hallway was dark and gloomy: the period outlining the arms race between the US and the Soviet Union and the ensuing almost destruction of the planet. Young children were told the true tales of times of near global destruction, scared witless. Nina’s heart swelled a bit with pride, as all Soviet hearts did when reminded of the struggle their motherland faced against the imposing West. She knew of this time but hadn’t realized that it was the computer technology of the planned economy saved the USSR from extinction, that saved their way of life from falling behind. The two nations still stood at a distance from each other, daring not to stare too long into the abyss.