I have read Anne Fitzpatrick's proposal and two draft chapters for this project. I am also familiar with Boris Malinovsky's original book published in Russian in 1995. The proposed book is a participant account of key events and personalities in Soviet computing from the late 1940s to the 1970s. The proposed book would fill a yawning gap in English-language historiography of Soviet computing. It provides rare technical details about the development of Soviet computers for both civilian and military applications. It also gives an insight into the social history of Soviet science and technology, providing many examples of the influence of politics, economics, and institutional forces on technological development. In my opinion, the proposal is very well thought-out and deserves full support.

Boris Malinovsky's work is highly original. As the chief designer of several Soviet control computers, who worked in one of the major centers of Soviet computing, the Institute of Cybernetics in Kiev, he has a unique perspective to offer. In the course of writing his book, he interviewed a large number of other participants and collected previously unpublished archival material. His book includes extensive quotations from interviews and original documents. This is not a traditional first-person memoir; the book speaks in many voices. For a researcher, this a treasure trove of historical material; for a student, an engaging first-hand account of important and often controversial events.

Since Malinovsky relied heavily on original documents, the accuracy and level of detail of his technical descriptions of Soviet computers is far beyond anything previously published on this subject. His work also provides a window into decision-making at critical junctures in the development of Soviet computing, such as the turn from analog to digital computing in the early 1950s and the fateful decision on the architecture of the Unified Series of Computers in 1967.

This book would be of interest to any student of computer history, Soviet history, and history of the Cold War. In a single narrative, it provides history that spans decades and covers a variety of computer projects. Other publications, such as the motley collection _Computing_in Russia_ (ed. by Trogemann et al.), present only bits and pieces of this rich history and can hardly be used in classes. Malinovsky's book offers a broad perspective, rich in both technical detail and social context.

As a participant first-hand account, Malinovsky's book is both valuable and problematic. Like any other personal account, it is prone to certain biases. When Malinovsky touches upon controversial topics, he often provides only one side of the story. For example, the rivalry between the two first Soviet large-size digital computer projects, the BESM and the STRELA, is narrated largely from the viewpoint of the BESM camp. A historian would have written a more balanced account. Other topics that may require a historiographic commentary include the wide introduction of automated control systems actively promoted by the director of the Institute of Cybernetics in Kiev Viktor Glushkov (many observers claimed that this campaign led to inefficiency and waste) or the controversy over the decision to build the Unified Series of Computers that supposedly "copied" IBM 360 (Malinovsky claims that this decision directly led to the "demise" of the Soviet computer industry). In both cases, Malinovsky covers one side of the story in great detail but gives little voice to Glushkov's critics or to the supporters of the Unified Series, who claimed that Unified Series computers were no copies of IBM but were only software-compatible with IBM and had high performance characteristics. Anne Fitzpatrick's explanatory comments are very helpful; and it would be very beneficial for the reader if she could also address controversial historiographic issues, either in the endnotes or in the Introduction.

The translator should be complimented on having done an excellent job in conveying the style of the original Russian text. This style, however, may sound a bit too heavy for an American reader, for it carries some of the typical features of Soviet-era formal discourse: too many nouns, the abundance of passive voice, overblown epithets, etc. Adjusting the style for an American audience would make the book much more readable.

Chapter titles are taken from the original Russian text and are not particularly helpful (e.g., "The Way to Immortality" or "Son of the Epoch"). The book would be much easier to navigate if chapter titles were more informative about their content. The current organization of the book is a bit complicated, with many parallel and intersecting stories. It would probably be impossible to disentangle them all and to make it a single linear narrative, but at least some additional order could be brought in, for example, by gathering all material on military computer applications in one chapter, and by transferring material on the Unified Series (currently in chap. 5) into the final chapter.

All these suggestions are aimed only at improving the readability of the text and do not question the high scholarly value of this project. The adoption of these suggestions can be left to the discretion of the author/editor.

Slava Gerovitch, Ph.D.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology