People of the Revolution and the USSR

Activity(set)
Any Political and party leadership 8 Government and administration 10 Legislature and state representation 2 Military command 7 Diplomacy and international organization 4 Economy, finance and planning 3 Industry and production 1 Agriculture and land policy 1 Social movements and organizing 4 Scholarship and theory 3 Science and technology 1 Law and justice 1
Affiliation

Most people

Any Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks 1 Soviet Unionstate 1

All 2 affiliations

Soviet Union

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks 1 Soviet Unionstate 1
Position
Any Marxism and communism 1
Citizenship
Any Soviet Union 1
Background(set)
Any Russia 108 Ukraine 10 Germany 4 Armenia 3 Poland 3 United States 3 Azerbaijan 2 Belarus 2 Georgia 2 Latvia 2 China 1 Czechia 1 Estonia 1 Finland 1 Lithuania 1 Netherlands 1 United Kingdom 1
Era
Any

People of the Soviet Union

People of the thaw and the stagnation1953–1985 1
Science and technology Background: Finland Clear all

Aksel Ivanovich Berg

Аксель Иванович Берг
Soviet Union Soviet communism Soviet Finnish, Swedish and German descent 1893–1979 ○ Natural causes

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.

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