Admiral-engineer who built Soviet radar and revived cybernetics
"The main goal of cybernetics is to help people raise the efficiency of their control over complex, hard-to-manage processes. The role of the human is not reduced in the least." Report to the Presidium of the USSR Academy of Sciences, 10 April 1959
Born in Orenburg in 1893 into a Lutheran military family of mixed Swedish, Finnish and German descent, he died in Moscow in 1979. He graduated from the Naval Corps and served as an Imperial Navy officer; after sinking a British destroyer as navigating officer of the submarine Pantera in 1919 he went on to direct naval communications research and radar development. Arrested in December 1937 on counter-revolutionary charges, he was never convicted and was released in 1940, and was fully rehabilitated only posthumously in 1991. A full member of the USSR Academy of Sciences from 1946 and admiral-engineer from 1955, he served as Deputy Minister of Defence from 1953 to 1957 and chaired the Academy's Scientific Council on Cybernetics from 1959 until his death, institutionalizing biological and technical cybernetics and artificial intelligence research.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1914–1918Navigating officer, battleship Tsesarevich; liaison officer, British submarine HMS E8 (Imperial Russian Navy)
- 1918–1922Submarine navigator (Pantera) and commander (Rys, Volk, Zmeya), Red Navy; sank HMS Vittoria, first Soviet submarine victory (1919)
- 1925–1937Instructor, Naval Engineering School; founded radio laboratory → director, Naval Research Institute of Communications and Telemechanics (NIMIST)
- 1937–1940Arrested, imprisoned in NKVD sharashka developing military communications; released without conviction
- 1943–1944Deputy People's Commissar of Electrical Industry; founder & first director, All-Union Scientific Research Institute of Radar
- 1943–1947Deputy Chairman, Council on Radar, State Defence Committee (chairman: Georgy Malenkov)
- 1953–1957Deputy Minister of Defence, USSR
- 1953–1955First director, Institute of Radio Engineering and Electronics, USSR Academy of Sciences
- 1959–1979Chairman, Scientific Council on Complex Problem "Cybernetics," USSR Academy of Sciences
Related historical events
- 1914–1918First World WarImperial Russian Navy officerHe served in the Imperial Russian Navy from 1914 to 1918.
- 1918–1922The Civil War and Foreign Interventionsubmarine commander
- 1937–1938The Great PurgeArrested target of the Great PurgeHe was arrested on counter-revolutionary charges in December 1937.
Cybernetics: From "Pseudoscience" to State-Planned Science (1952–1979)
In 1952, while heading the closed Central Research Institute No. 108, which developed military radar, Berg announced a lecture cycle titled "Cybernetics, the science of the most general laws of control" and then organised a cybernetics seminar, at a time when a campaign under the slogan "Cybernetics is a pseudoscience" was being waged in the country.
In February 1959 he headed the government commission examining A. I. Kitov's proposal to Khrushchev for a Unified State Network of Computer Centres; the commission approved it. On 10 April 1959 he reported to the Presidium of the USSR Academy of Sciences, defining cybernetics as the science of purposeful control of developing processes. The report was approved, and Presidium decree No. 221 created the Scientific Council on the complex problem "Cybernetics" (NSK).
By decision of the Presidium, Berg was confirmed as NSK chairman, with A. A. Lyapunov and A. A. Kharkevich as deputies and M. L. Tsetlin as scientific secretary; Ya. I. Khurgin became the salaried deputy chairman. Within about a year major scientists of many profiles had gathered around Berg and the NSK (V. V. Parin, V. S. Nemchinov, N. G. Bruyevich, V. I. Siforov, B. F. Lomov, Ya. Z. Tsypkin, V. M. Akhutin, A. G. Spirkin and others), and a Linguistics Section was created under V. V. Ivanov. He chaired the council from 1959 until 1979, and from 1964 he also headed the coordination of research in cybernetics.
According to the NSK report for 1967, more than 800 leading specialists took part in its work on a voluntary basis, among them 14 academicians, 30 corresponding members, about 200 doctors and more than 300 candidates of sciences. From the early 1960s, with Berg's support, institutes of cybernetics were created in the Soviet republics and new departments and laboratories appeared in Academy institutes.
In the late 1950s he initiated work on structural, mathematical and cybernetic linguistics and semiotics. A translation of Morse and Kimball's "Methods of Operations Research" appeared on his initiative and under his editorship, and the report "General Questions of Cybernetics" prepared under his direction contained a section on cybernetical problems of linguistics. In 1958 he secured the Russian edition of Norbert Wiener's "Cybernetics". In this way cybernetics moved from a forbidden field to a state-planned area of research.