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Chapter
From “Threat” to “Treat”
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From “Threat” to “Treat”
DOI link for From “Threat” to “Treat”
From “Threat” to “Treat” book
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ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how cybernetics in the Soviet Union was initially considered a “threat” to the governing elite and ideological grounds of Soviet science, such as dialectic and historical materialism. In this chapter, we trace some previous trajectories of reasoning that could have functioned as springboards if cybernetics had not been perceived as a “threat.” After the death of Josef Stalin, the official attitude toward cybernetics gradually shifted as it came to be seen as something that could “treat” societal and educational problems and thereby help modernize Soviet society. In this transition from “threat” to “treat,” some of the older arguments and ways of reasoning about social sciences and, in particular, about education were revitalized and put into use. The analysis of articles and textbooks that discuss the promise of cybernetics in education shows that the cybernetics approach was eventually “normalized” as the way of creating communist society and a Soviet man.