In 1966, Soviet officials made a bet that cost the country more than any Cold War— they decided not to reinvent the wheel, but to steal the blueprints from the Americans. And not just from anyone, but from IBM, whose System/360 mainframes had already become the gold standard of corporate computing. Thus was born the "Ryad" project—or ES EVM (Unified Series of Computers), a standardized line of machines meant to propel the socialist bloc into a digital paradise. Instead, it locked the USSR in a technological purgatory, where its own geniuses withered in the shadow of foreign patents, and the economy paid for decades for someone else’s architecture.
💀 Imagine this: 1968, the USSR had just launched the BESM-6—a supercomputer that outperformed mid-range IBM mainframes, its architecture so advanced that Western engineers studied it as a benchmark. The machine could execute 1 million operations per second, featured a unique interrupt system, and was used for nuclear reactor calculations, space missions, and even weather forecasting. But instead of scaling this marvel, Soviet leadership decided: "Why don’t we just copy the Americans?" Why? Because the BESM-6 was a handcrafted product—over 20 years, only 350 units were produced, while IBM was already churning out its System/360 by the thousands, like hamburgers at McDonald’s.
📉 The paradox was that the USSR wasn’t just losing the race—it was voluntarily disarming. By 1970, the country had 5,500 computers, while the U.S. had 62,500. The gap was catastrophic, but instead of catching up, Soviet economists chose the path of least resistance: if you can’t beat them, become a copy. Thus, ES EVM became not a technological breakthrough, but a colossal monument to bureaucratic laziness. The machines were hardware- and software-compatible with IBM, to the point that the operating system OS ES was a modified clone of IBM OS/360. Even programmer manuals were translated from English without bothering to adapt them to socialist realities. This wasn’t just borrowing—it was technological serfdom disguised as progress.
🛠️ Cloning the IBM System/360 was like trying to build a spaceship using steam locomotive blueprints. Sure, technically it’s a vehicle, but you’re not flying to space in that. Soviet engineers faced monstrous problems: reverse engineering required not just disassembling American machines down to the last screw, but recreating them from scratch using Soviet component bases. And those were slower, less reliable, and more expensive than Western ones. For example, transistors that cost pennies in the U.S. were produced in the USSR on outdated factories with up to 30% defect rates. As a result, ES EVM machines turned out twice as heavy, three times as power-hungry, and five times less reliable than their American prototypes.
💸 But the real curse was standardization. The "Ryad" project assumed that all COMECON countries—from East Germany to Bulgaria—would produce different parts of the same machine. Sounds logical, but in practice, it led to absurdity: Czechoslovakia made peripherals, Hungary made memory, and the USSR made processors. If one country’s supplies fell through, the entire production line stopped. On top of that, CoCom (the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls) blocked shipments of modern components, forcing the socialist bloc to use obsolete technologies. In the end, ES EVM machines were released 5-7 years behind their Western counterparts. While the U.S. was already using IBM System/370, the USSR was just starting to produce its first clones of System/360. It was like a race where one runner starts 10 years late, and the other is chained to a cart.
🧠 Yet the most ironic part of the story was the software. The USSR didn’t just copy IBM’s architecture—it inherited all its flaws. For instance, the OS ES operating system was so cumbersome that it required several megabytes of memory—a luxury unavailable to most Soviet enterprises. Moreover, due to the ideological taboo on personal computers (deemed a "bourgeois toy"), all the computing power of ES EVM went toward processing accounting reports and five-year plan projections. While the West was already using computers for scientific research, production automation, and even art, in the USSR they remained expensive calculators for the planned economy.
📦 Another casualty of this madness was supercomputing. While the U.S. and Japan were investing billions in machines for modeling nuclear explosions and climate systems, the USSR kept churning out ES EVM machines, useful for little more than payroll calculations. The BESM-6, capable of real scientific breakthroughs, was deemed unnecessary—its production was shut down in favor of mass-produced, standardized mediocrity. It was like abandoning aircraft carrier construction in favor of mass-producing barges.
🖥️ The bitterest paradox of this story is that the USSR didn’t just lose the mainframe race—it banned itself from participating in the next revolution. In 1983, the country introduced the Agat personal computer, a poor copy of the Apple II that cost 17,000 rubles (about $25,000 at the time). For comparison: a real Apple II in the U.S. cost $1,300. But even this monstrosity was doomed—ideologues saw personal computers as a threat. They feared people would start using them for something more than data processing, and that would undermine the foundations of the planned economy.
🚫 As a result, by the mid-1980s, the USSR lagged behind the West not by years, but by decades. The U.S. was already developing networks, graphical interfaces, and artificial intelligence, while the USSR was still debating whether to allow schoolchildren to use calculators. Only with Gorbachev’s arrival in 1985 did the development of domestic PCs begin, like the 16-bit "Elektronika BK-0010." But it was already too late—the Iron Curtain had fallen, and a country that could have led the computer revolution found itself on the sidelines of the digital age.
🔄 Another irony of fate: ES EVM machines were produced until 1998—after the USSR’s collapse. In total, over 15,000 units were released, becoming symbols not just of technological backwardness, but of missed opportunities. These computers worked in banks, factories, and research institutes, but no longer as tools of progress—rather, as monuments to an era when the country chose to copy, not to create.
💡 Today, as Russia once again attempts to build a "sovereign internet" and develop its own processors, the story of ES EVM serves as a warning. Technological independence isn’t about copying someone else’s solutions—it’s about the ability to create your own. The USSR had every chance to become a leader in the computer industry: the MESM (the first computer in continental Europe), the BESM-1 (one of the world’s fastest machines in the 1950s), the BESM-6 (a supercomputer ahead of its time). But instead of investing in these developments, the country chose standardization and copying.
🔮 Today’s attempts to create "domestic" technologies often echo that same story: instead of developing unique solutions, we see clones of Western products with Chinese or Russian stickers. But real progress doesn’t start with copying—it starts with believing in your own strength. The lesson of ES EVM is simple: if you want to be great, you don’t follow others—you invent the future yourself. Otherwise, history will repeat itself—but without a second chance.