How Not to Network a Nation is a pioneering contribution to the history of Soviet computer networking and cybernetics. Investigating multiple Soviet national computer network projects, Peters demonstrates how futuristic technical visions for computerized planning and production intertwined with the everyday operation of the late Soviet party state and command economy. In a dialogue with the scholarship of Slava Gerovitch and his groundbreaking From Newspeak to Cyberspeak: The History of Soviet Cybernetics (2002), Peters's work is a vital addition to the scarcely populated field of late Soviet historiography of science and technology. However, the book is a must-read across many other fields as well. Systematically considering the Soviet projects in light of international developments and intriguing theoretical concepts – from a Weberian ‘iron cage’ to a cybernetic heterarchy, to an original network entrepreneurship – it is of interest to historians of twentieth-century science and technology, as well as an audience of media, communications and network studies.

Enticing, lucid and thought-provoking, the book is driven by an ambitious agenda. It aims to revise the biases and stereotypes associated with narratives about American success and Soviet failure at creating a nationwide network, and to suggest that the Internet, as we know it, is intrinsically connected to neither collaborative nor control cultures but is an artefact produced by technical and political choices. The actual scope of the book does a lot more and somewhat less than its title suggests. In fact, the ‘Soviet Internet’ from the book's title overrides the actor categories to highlight the book's engagement with today's debates about the global age of connectivity. Such an anachronism is an asset for making the forgotten Soviet case relevant, yet it is also an avenue for questioning the limits of the book's revisionist arguments.

The book opens with an overview of cybernetic discourses and their diffusion across multiple national contexts to set the stage for the peculiar Soviet change in the reception of the so-called ‘meta-science’. During the 1950s, the fate of cybernetics in the Soviet Union drastically changed as a vicious anti-cybernetic campaign gave way to public celebration as a tool for building communism. The next two chapters then follow the early cybernetic network projects meant to solve the Soviet system's notorious coordination problems in the context of raging economic debates. These debates were connected to the so-called ‘Kosygin reforms’ of 1965, which aimed at economic optimization by providing mechanisms for local initiatives. Introducing several network projects alongside the better-known initiative by A.I. Kitov, Peters highlights a general preoccupation with the notion of ‘efficiency’ and its contradicting interpretations by competing schools of economists and technical experts. This multiplicity of competing visions is key for understanding the outcome of the most important case study of the book, the All-State Automated System (OGAS), conceived in the early 1960s as a colossal 20-billion-ruble network that would interconnect all planning and production from the shop floors to the Kremlin by 1990.

Drawing on unique archival materials, memoirs and interviews, the two final chapters of the book depict an intricate professional milieu connected to the main network entrepreneur of the book, Viktor Glushkov. The chapters trace Glushkov's intellectual and personal journey to the leadership of one of the largest Soviet research organizations devoted to cybernetics, the Institute of Cybernetics located in Ukraine, and to the Moscow-centred web of competing patronage networks. Peters provides delightful descriptions of the local research culture, personal aspirations and political group interests that nurtured the decades-long simultaneous efforts to implement the local factory-level automated control systems (ASU), to secure the downscale version of the network and to promote a transformative vision of a networked paperless communism of OGAS. Part of the public debates on computerization since 1977, by the early 1980s OGAS had diversified into multiple sub-projects and technical systems across production branches and geographical regions, leading Glushkov and his colleagues to lament the project's fate and blame bureaucratic infighting for the project's failure.

Peters skilfully turns this actor-produced explanation into an analytical claim, namely that competing informal social networks unravelled cyber networks. More generally, he argues that there was no fundamental incompatibility between vertical state and horizontal computer networks. Instead, sociopolitical factors on the ground – such as grey-economy practices, the competing self-interests of the Central Statistical Administration and the Ministry of Finance, and a divide between civilian and military sectors – are ascribed the decisive role. However impressive, the encyclopedic character of the narrative to support these arguments also creates occasions for slip-ups; for instance, Akademgorodok was not a closed city, perestroika did not start in 1985, and Turing's association with the ‘joy of computer programming’ has its own part in mythology (p. 178). In any case, of far greater importance are the questions that the book's arguments raise for future scholarship.

One set of questions is related to the Soviet–American comparative analytic: what kind of social forces would come to the foreground if one compared not a successful project and a failed one but two failures: the OGAS and the Computer Utility time-sharing project? What were the networking practices around the technical solutions of the seven thousand ASU systems built by the mid-1980s? Were they different or similar to the local American computer networks, or those operating elsewhere? Two other issues familiar from the historiography of Soviet science and technology come to mind: how does the computer network fit with the earlier and contemporaneous national networks transcending the civilian–military divide, for instance the railways or the electric network, which was closely associated with early Soviet computing and with experiments at automated control? And are there any structural differences between the informal networks underlying the successful space and nuclear programmes and those that unravel the cyber networks? With How Not to Network a Nation Peters invites us to rethink the relationship between infrastructures and social structures in the Soviet Union and beyond.