The Ministry of Truth: Soviet Cybernetics and the Rise of the Information State

How an obsession with data collection brought down the Soviet Union and built our global information age.

The Ministry of Truth provides an alternative history of our global information age, one that traces the modern obsession with digital data surveillance to Soviet cybernetic utopias of the 1960s. Aro Velmet argues that, faced with a stagnating economy, the Soviet Union empowered cyberneticians and social scientists with extraordinary freedoms to gather information about the empire’s industries and citizens, in the hopes that they would wrest from this data the key to the Union’s renewal. Instead, these data scientists, working in Tallinn, Tartu, Kyiv, and Novosibirsk, became critics of Soviet centralization, and leaders of Perestroika-era opposition movements, such as the Estonian Popular Front.

In the post-socialist period, engineers trained in Soviet Estonia reprofiled themselves as champions of the global information age. From Estonia and Ukraine, to Benin and Brazil, these experts promoted a unique vision of digitization, one that emphasized a strong state, decentralized networks, and economic efficiency over the right to privacy. The Ministry of Truth provides a new history of the information age told from the Second World, a new interpretation of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and a reframing of the post-socialist period, particularly in the Baltics.