Brighter members of the Soviet establishment must have realised that in order to increase efficiency (military, economic, managerial and scientific) computers had to be introduced on a large scale. They did their best but under the circumstances that did not go far.

Having recognised that they had fallen behind in the military race, the Soviet leadership decided to reduce East-West tension. Glasnost and perestroika followed, which the leadership hoped would change Soviet reality. Their failure was predicted by Smaryl. The best theory to lean on was classical Marxist theory, with its concepts of “base” (relations of production) and “superstructure” (political institutions). According to Marx, when the two are no longer in harmony that society will perish. We should credit Gorbachev with the attempt to change both the base and the superstructure but those attempts failed. By the late 1980s, the Soviet system was beyond repair.

For those who prefer not to rely on Marxist theory to explain the collapse of the Soviet Union, there could be a similar explanation based on the Soviet power structure. The two main components were the government (let’s include in this both the nominal government and the Communist Party) and the intelligence services. In the second half of the 1980s there was an increasing mismatch between the aims of the KGB and those of the General Secretary, culminating in the participation of Vladimir Kryuchkov, the head of the KGB, in the anti-Gorbachev coup of August 1991. Smaryl’s prediction for the second part of the ’80s was: “In international relations the Soviet Union will adopt increasingly softer stands. It will first withdraw its support from the various revolutionary movements and then, slowly and reluctantly, will relinquish its hold over Eastern Europe.” Smaryl concluded: “Economic efficiency will increase accompanied by a spread of pluralistic ideas and there, at the end of the tunnel, will loom the inevitability of free elections.” He was wrong about economic efficiency. The relaxation of strict political control under Gorbachev led to declining, not improving, efficiency, but in all other aspects Smaryl was right.

The merit of Smaryl’s paper is that it gives only one reason for the USSR’s collapse: the emergence of new technology. Everything else followed from there. To give only one reason is a technique often followed in the natural sciences. It has the merit of simplicity, and it focuses the reader’s attention on one thing.

For later scrutiny another advantage of providing only one reason is that it offers critics the means of disproving whatever the author claimed. Playing the role of a critic now, could one conclude that the Soviet Union was bound to perish? By the beginning of the 1980s the writing was on the wall although nobody could as yet decipher it. But had circumstances been different in the 1950s and ’60s, could the Soviet Union have survived?

To answer that question we need to recall how new technology was born. In the early 1950s there were already well-defined research projects aimed at integrated circuits, i.e. combining several components. They were sponsored by the three arms of the US military, each of which had its own pet project. Had any of those projects been at least moderately successful, research money would have flown in that direction and the microchip (which came from a different project) would never have been realised. As it happens, it was. In the course of 40 years the number of  integrated components in an area covering a human nail rose to 15 billion. The invention of such an extraordinary device combined with such a fantastic growth rate was unlikely indeed. It was a lucky historical accident — for the West.