ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that computer-based global modelling produced particular long-term horizons which played an important, transformative role in Soviet governance by opening it up to East-West cooperation. Global modellers conceptualized the planet as a complex, interconnected system, the understanding of which required transnational scientific cooperation, enabling both scientists and data to cross national boundaries and Cold War divisions. The chapter discusses several such thought collectives, based at the Computer Centre and the All-Union Institute for Systems Research of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow. The International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) global modelling conferences played an important role in socializing scientists from East and West into a shared understanding of the possibilities, but also, importantly, the limitations of global modelling. The focus on long-term global and environmental processes enabled Soviet scholars and policy makers to point out that the Soviet economy and society also had serious problems, which were of universal character and which could not be internally resolved.
