[summa_tech]

This was a fascinating article, because I've seen so many results of the Eastern Bloc reverse-engineering efforts basically founder into obscurity. Many of these re-created (sometimes with minor variations, or quite novel and ingenious implementation choices) computers were made in small series, but could not compete against illegal imports, and in any case would only be briefly popular in their local university town.

So it's cool to see that Bulgaria managed to muster enough government interest to force a cohesive strategy for the whole country. It sounds like it paid off.

Also, after googling for Правец, I have found out that I can in fact read Bulgarian, which was quite surprising to me.

[Zardoz84]

Well... The rusian Spectrum clones had some sucesfull career. And they did a lot of improvements over the original Sinclair and Amstrad designs. The Pentagon and the Scorpion with extra RAM, or the ATM come from pure rusian ingenuity .

[anovikov]

>could not compete against illegal imports

How could that be possible? Imports had to be made in hard currency which was incredibly scarce in the Soviet Bloc (a VCR cost couple years of engineer's income on a black market), and was hard to obtain both for official/communist enterprises, and private individuals. Locally made stuff was bound to be a lot cheaper.

[gambiting]

At least in Poland it was semi-common that if you had any family abroad they could send you dollars. So yeah a soviet computer was in theory cheaper but it was impossible to buy, or you could just walk into PEWEX and walk out with an actual commodore 64 bought with dollars that you "happened" to have. Of course, PEWEX stores were fully state-sanctioned enterprises, not illegal imports.

[whizzter]

I think the point was that the illegality was that manufacturers in the west was not supposed to sell computers to the east?

[gambiting]

Illegal for whom? The manufacturers? It's the same as it's now illegal for Boeing and Airbus to sell parts to Russia, yet Russia developed a network of intermediaries in several countries that buy the parts on their behalf so they can maintain their planes. PEWEX stores used to sell of kinds of goods from the west, including computers and even cars, if you had the dollars it was far easier to buy a western car or a computer than wait for a domestically made one. Maintaining it afterwards was a different question of course, but PEWEX stores were created specifically by the government to obtain dollars, they bought goods in the west usually by barter, and then sold them domestically for dollars, which then they used to buy the goods they really wanted since no one would take Polish Zloty in the west, but dollars opened many doors.

[actionfromafar]

Yes, but, wasn't the prices fixed for stuff? I imagine there must have been things which were either cheap to buy, or which could easily "disappear" from a production line and sold in the West for more than it was worth on the other side of the curtain.

[mike_hearn]

You couldn't just go and sell stuff in the west. The USSR had exit visas. You had to prove you had a genuine need to leave, would be searched and treated very carefully. And proving a need to leave was difficult. Merely wanting to go on holiday or see relatives wasn't close to enough. There were very few exit visas available, which is why stories about defectors are often about elite athletes or sports champions.

https://www.rbth.com/history/334094-athletes-fled-ussr-how

Also the Soviets manufactured very little of anything valuable to the west. Their primary exports were commodities.

[gambiting]

>>Also the Soviets manufactured very little of anything valuable to the west. Their primary exports were commodities.

Time to mention the story of how Pepsi Co briefly had one of the largest navies in the world, because CCCP couldn't settle its debt to Pepsi with cash, so they accepted several warships instead.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/soviet-union-pepsi-shi...

[mike_hearn]

Lol, that's an amazing story. Thanks for sharing, I'd never heard of it!

[nickpp]

> Locally made stuff was bound to be a lot cheaper.

Lots of stuff under communism was cheaper on paper. It was also extremely crappy and/or unavailable.

So black markets were thriving, even though, as you rightly point out, used hard to get, expensive currency.

[gostsamo]

Bulgarian is phonetic to a large degree so if you know the sound associated to a letter, you can understandably pronounce it as well.

Regarding communism and computing, deterministic systems where the entire state is knowable and predictible have certain appeal for the communist mind. If you search in the HN archives, you might find even more stories about the bulgarian computer industry with a MIT publication in the mix. There could've been even more, but a combination of distrust towards the new capitalist science and later unwillingness for those pesky machines to show the real state of the USSR economy meant that this was not developed with the full backing of the eastern block.

[summa_tech]

You know, I never thought about it that way. But you're making a lot of sense here. And in older sci-fi literature, after a very early period of distrust of the concept, cybernetics as a component / enabler of perfect collectivist society did show up, before - as you said - the West advanced too far away from the local state of the art.

Also, as a broader view of your point, perhaps technocratic communism degenerates by giving way to bureaucratic communism.

[gostsamo]

One thing to understand about communism is that lots of people believed in it, but for the most part the communist elites considered it a feudal system where one's access to resources made them valuable and gave them power. Anything that would provide the higher ups transparency and accountability would be ruinous for the balance of power and therefore met significant pushback. There was never a technocratic communism because idealists would be either defanged to act as specialist executor clas or outright removed as unreliable players.

Regarding computer usage, it was increasing to the very end, but the desolution of the USSR stopped it and the industry was destroyed in the following crises. The elites tried to modernize the economies, but it was too little too late.

[anovikov]

Was there "communist mind" in Bulgaria? Which is same as asking - did you guys perceive Communism as something homegrown, something of your own - "your take on how it is best to develop a country", or something forcibly imposed on you by the Soviets? Bulgaria was seen with disdain in the Soviet Union as seen as a country where little but tomatoes were made (even if we knew it wasn't really the case), so in our Soviet mental map of the world there was no particular image of what a Bulgarian thought about Communism. We knew Serbs liked it and we knew Czechs and Poles didn't, for instance. What about Bulgarians?

[bojan]

Serbs liked it because our implementation was different (albeit also unsustainable), and we were not forcefully dependent on the Soviet Union.

For example, my father was able to buy a Beta VCR in the late 80s on his engineer's salary, it took him three months of intense saving.

[anovikov]

I think the latter was the main reason why. Serbs were not Soviet puppets, USSR could not control them, they didn't feel occupied by foreign power. So even if Communism kinda sucked, it was more like "dumbass politician we elected who keeps mismanaging things" rather than "foreign enemy who's yoke we must get off our butts".

[gostsamo]

I used "communist mind" as a collective term for the ideological framework in which computers were discussed. The state had a party and the party had an ideology and the ideology legitimized the other two, hence all actions of the state and the party had to be justified through it. It does not mean some other kind of consciousness that allowed one to be closer to the ghost of Marx or whatever some people seem to ascribe to it.

Regarding your question, I cannot talk on behalf of everyone. Many who didn't like communism were killed or crushed otherwise in the early years, many who accepted communism did it because of the association with Russia and the historical connection there, many who had their best years in the booming years of the regime until 1970 approx remember it fondly, many who had their worst years in the nineties have a nostalgia avoiding to talk about the bad aspects of it, many didn't give a damn and lived in the system while undermining it, and many of those who would formulate intellectual criticism of it were actually well incorporated in the system to give a damn about what is good or bad. Overall, there were lots of people who disliked both the party and its dependence on the USSR, but there was not a mass movement until the very last years when things started to break down.

[anovikov]

My question wasn't about liking the 'socialism' or not as much, more about seeing it as something of your own - no matter if good or bad, or something that your enemies imposed on you by force?

[gostsamo]

Again, depends whom you are asking. When the party includes Moscow in the national anthem, you realise that the party sees itself coupled with the USSR. The official line is that the brotherly russian nation helped the forces of good win against the faschists and it would work due to the associations with the liberation war. Many would strongly disagree. The scandals are ongoing even today.

[adrian_b]

Bulgaria was somewhat shielded from the direct force of the Soviet Union, unlike the Baltic countries, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and East Germany, which were invaded and conquered by the Soviet army.

Moreover, the Baltic countries were then incorporated into the Soviet Union, together with big parts from Poland, Czechoslovakia and Romania, while the remaining parts of those countries became vassal states, from which Russia continued to steal vast amounts of resources during the fifties, under the cover of some mixed companies established with the locals. In some of these countries armed resistance in the mountains has continued to fight against the Russians for a few years, until eventually all opponents were defeated. In Hungary and Czechoslovakia the Russians made large-scale military interventions in 1956 and 1968.

East Germany has also been occupied by the direct invasion of the Soviet Army, which have also plundered everything that they could, like they also did in the other directly invaded countries. From East Germany, the Russians have stolen entire factories, piece by piece and tool by tool, transporting them in Russia and reassembling them there.

So in such Eastern European countries, the Russians were much more clearly identified as the invading enemies, since WWII until 1990.

Bulgaria had been too far away from the Soviet Union, so unlike most East European countries it has not lost territory after WWII. If you compare pre-WWII and post-WWII maps, you can see that the Soviet Union has moved tremendously towards the West. While other countries have lost much territory, Poland has not lost much area, but the country has moved to the West as a whole, because the Eastern Polish territory occupied by the Soviet Union has been somewhat compensated with territory taken from East Germany.

In Bulgaria, like everywhere else, most of those who had been rich before WWII have been robbed or killed by the communists, but overall Bulgaria has suffered much less during the transition to communism, so I expect that much fewer of them were seeing the communists as external enemies imposed by force.

In all Eastern European countries only falsified histories were taught about the Soviet Union, Russians, WWII and communism, but nevertheless in the countries that had been directly invaded by the Soviet Union there was a large fraction of the population which were aware of the histories of their own families, which typically included the loss of property stolen by communists and relatives detained, deported and/or murdered either by the Russians or by the authorities installed by the Russians. So despite the public brainwashing, it was hard to completely erase the memories of these facts.

[unmole]

> We knew Serbs liked it

I wouldn't have thought that was the perception given Yugoslavia was explicitly non-aligned and the economy was more market oriented.

[unmole]

> Regarding communism and computing, deterministic systems where the entire state is knowable and predictible have certain appeal for the communist mind.

Francis Spufford explores this idea in Red Plenty, which I highly recommend. More broadly, I think the book would appeal to many HN readers.

[NitpickLawyer]

Some explorations with an AI overlord also in LeGuin's "The Dispossessed"

[WaxProlix]

Hard to talk about favorites in books, but there was a solid decade of my life where I'd have probably said this was my favorite sci fi book. Highly recommend to anyone reading this.

[keybored]

The incredible things I read on this site. The communist mind? Oh right, there’s a book for that, and it’s probably agreeable to people on this site.

What the heck is this psycho-mysticism.

[gostsamo]

As I commented elsewhere:

I used "communist mind" as a collective term for the ideological framework in which computers were discussed. The state had a party and the party had an ideology and the ideology legitimized the other two, hence all actions of the state and the party had to be justified through it. It does not mean some other kind of consciousness that allowed one to be closer to the ghost of Marx or whatever some people seem to ascribe to it.

[keybored]

I know where you’re coming from.

[unmole]

Ponting out that communist regimes tried to implement planned economies with the help of computation is a statement of fact, not psycho-mysticism.

Red Plenty features Leonid Kantorovich trying to build a computer powerful enough to model the entire Soviet economy. It absolutely is something HN readers would find interesting, your uninformed, middle-brow dismissal notwithstanding.

[keybored]

This focus on the X Mind has a certain legitimacy in literature and biographies, where there is a focus on characters and persons/personas. Because they can certainly have an X Mind. I’ll grant it that. But in the context of discussing the Eastern Bloc it does become psycho-mysticism, and this is the context where I was commenting on it.

This and that type having such and such mindset always needs to, in a serious treatment about real things and across more than a handful of people, play a very secondary role. Because it can only ever be speculative narrative that does not enter into any real argumentation. Seeing Like a State does it well. It discusses state projects and their outcomes. What people did given their positions and limitations (the limitations of what they could see). Any narrative about how The State Seer Mind works is just speculative narrative; the real meat is in the discussions on the grand projects like the pitfalls of monocultural forestry.

But this infantile treatment of Communism is treated as okay/normal, even celebrated. On that subject you can start with the supposed ideology and work backwards from that.

[unmole]

> But in the context of discussing the Eastern Bloc it does become psycho-mysticism

The comment was made by a Bulgarian who actually lived under the regime and explained what he meant. The psycho-mysticism is entirely in your head.

> the real meat is in the discussions on the grand projects like the pitfalls of monocultural forestry.

You mean like, I dunno, Gosplan? Which was the point of the comment that you so strenuously objected to?

Communism deservedly lies on the ash heap of history. Attempts to rehabilitate it by feigning nuance should be met with derision and contempt.

[vidarh]

One of the most interesting little nuggets on this is Reagans notes on Able Archer 83, where he for the first time seems to have realised that the Soviet leaders weren't cartoon villains, but actually were just as scared of the US as the US was of them.

That doesn't make the authoritarian nature of the regime any better, nor does it excuse any of the brutality, but it demonstrated how reductive it had been to try to interpret how they were thinking based on an outsider view that generalised all of them into some archetype without understanding individual motivations.

The irony is that so much of Western thinking of this assumes a ridiculous level of collectivism that never existed because it's fundamentally at odds with human nature.

If anything a lot of people have adopted what they deem a "communist mind" in their own analysis of these regimes - and ideologies - and treat large groups of people as if they are carbon copies.

[vidarh]

It's a fascinating exercise in antrhopology to see otherwise smart people confidently discuss the mind of people most of them have had no exposure to in person. Having spoken to a variety of people across the very broad spectrum of left-wing thought, ranging from libertarian marxists opposing the very existence of a state, to hardline marxism-leninists who thought the former group belonged in labour camps, I find the idea of a singular "communist mind" as ridiculous as you.

[flohofwoe]

...or as the post-'68 West-German joke goes: "When two leftists meet, 3 splinter groups are formed", doesn't quite roll off the tounge like the German version "Treffen sich zwei Linke: bilden sich 3 Splittergruppen."

[vidarh]

Indeed. It is quite fascinating how that is simultaneously a wide-spread view of the left, while at the same time the left is regularly accused of being all collectivist. Some left wing ideologies are decidedly collectivist. Some are going equally far in the other direction...

[mike_hearn]

All actual communist societies work the same way, so it's clearly possible to generalize.

[vidarh]

All "actual communist societies", have been run by marxist-leninists or regimes supporting derivations of it, which is a couple from dozens of ideologies within the umbrella. So, sure, you can generalize about those regimes. That still does not speak to any unified "communist mind". Those regimes have collectively murdered vast numbers of proponents of other communist ideologies.

[unmole]

Yeah, real communism has never been tried. /s

[vidarh]

Strawman - at no point did I make that claim. It has no relevance to my comment.

[keybored]

Here we see the standard intellectual repertoire on Communism.

- Communist Totalitarian Thinking

- “Never been tried” quips as a retort to, um, no one even claiming that here

[unmole]

I just want to point out how absurd this is. A Bulgarian says communist mind. People from the former Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, and other planned economies immediately understand what he means. But we have an American and a Brit complaining about how the good name of communism is being sullied.

[keybored]

I know I know, Standpoint Epistemology is being desecrated. I wouldn’t put much weight in Three Off The Streets of Hamburg when it comes to how liberal democratic state planning works either.

I don’t know where these Anglos are.

[unj]

"systems where the entire state is knowable and predictible " was exactly what got computer systems killed in Communist Poland.

WEKTOR system was killed because it would made deputy minister of innovation at that time (Jan Mitręga) the best informed person in the Communist Party.

INFOSTRADA/KSI (Krajowy System Informatyczny - National IT System) systems were killed because they would disrupt the falsified and controlled information flow within the Communist Party.

[mike_hearn]

Quite a few words in Bulgarian are similar to words in other European languages, just written in a different alphabet. I briefly dated a girl in Bulgaria years ago and was surprised at how quickly I could find my way around by reading street signs, applying knowledge of French and German, etc.

The author asks why did the communists always clone things despite having engineers who could have designed their own? You don't need an LLM to answer this. The book "Chip Wars" is a really good history of Silicon Valley and has a section on the Soviet chip industry, how it was structured and why it cloned chips instead of designing their own.

The Soviets didn't just clone computers but most of their advanced tech. Partly it was just mandated top-down. You had dictators at the top who were there, as the author observes, because they were just more aggressive and swivel-eyed than anyone else. They mandated cloning, so cloning is what happened because everyone was afraid of them.

But that doesn't really answer the question. Cloning things isn't just an attribute of one specific set of leaders in the Soviet era. All communist countries are like this. Western AI labs keep claiming the Chinese labs are distilling them like crazy, and we know Anthropic has anti-distillation measures hidden inside Claude Code so it's not just a PR thing, they do believe it's happening for real.

It always happens because leftism rejects the role of the capitalist in society. Capitalists are workers whose output is voluntary coordination across complex projects. If you kill them all then you have a society that's unable to create voluntary coordination across complex projects. The immediate consequence is that the economy goes haywire because without capitalists nobody knows how much or what to produce; the USSR solved this by having spies steal price lists. But you also can't run a novel chip design programme. That would require finding the right people with the right skills, encouraging innovation by giving them a cut of the rewards, and other things you aren't allowed to do in leftist regimes. So ... they just couldn't produce voluntary coordination. And thus to get anything done outside the military they had to steal the output of western capitalists by just copying whatever their teams were doing, down to the last detail.

[unmole]

You're eliding the more prosaic and direct explanation for why the Soviets were forced to clone chips instead of designing systems from scratch: cost. The American semiconductor industry had a vast civilian customer base that let it recoup R&D expenses. The Soviets didn’t. Chip Wars covers this in detail with numbers.

[mike_hearn]

It wasn't that, not at the start. Soviets were cloning US semiconductors right from the very first days of the industries existence when they were mostly selling chips to the US military. There wasn't a huge consumer base back then keeping them afloat, and the Soviet chip industry was highly prioritized by the Kremlin. They even built an entire city called Zelenograd just to house the semiconductor workforce.

[unmole]

The Soviets did try to design their own chips in the beginning. But it was a lost cause because they simply couldn't keep up with the advances of the West.

[codeflo]

Cost can't be the true reason. In a planned economy, the customer base doesn't matter. If the state wants to allocate X number of engineers to do Y, it simply does, at the expense of whatever other project is considered politically less important.

The fact that the customers' demands have no influence on resource allocation, except to the extent that bureaucrats decide it's politically convenient to address them, is in fact precisely why life under communism is so shitty.

[unmole]

It may not have been the only reason, but cost was absolutely a major real reason. In a planned economy, cost does not disappear. Skilled engineers, specialized materials and equipment are all still scarce. Semiconductors are literally the most sophisticated manufactured products and require the most complex supply chains. The Soviet Union was notoriously bad at coordination between ministries, state agencies, design bureaus, and factories. Semiconductors are probably the single worst industry for the Soviet model.

Maybe in theory, they could have lobbed enough bodies at the problem to make it go away. But they simply did not have the resources.

[codeflo]

Of course in any economy, there are scarce resources, and skilled labor is certainly one of them. What I'm specifically arguing against is the assertion that in a planned economy, the existence or lack of a customer base would in any real way impact the allocation of those resources. That's not a helpful way to analyze the decisions of the communist planning committee.

[IAmBroom]

That is a simplistic and naive POV.

Yes, the state can allocate X engineers to do Y.

But a complex system requires Z engineers to design subsystem 1, and repeat 100x.

And engineers for sub-subsystems.

And specialists for allocating resources reliably.

And mass shipping systems for transporting those resources efficiently (remember, this is a country that STILL doesn't have palletized supply chains!).

Unlike defeating the Third Reich, it is not a problem that can be solved by merely throwing more bodies at it.

[codeflo]

I don't disagree with that, but that's not what was discussed. The person I was replying to was asserting that the Soviet union couldn't have developed semiconductors because unlike the US, it didn't have "a vast civilian customer base that let it recoup R&D expenses". My argument is that "recouping" anything doesn't matter in a planned economy.

[BigTTYGothGF]

> Western AI labs keep claiming the Chinese labs are distilling them like crazy

It's been a couple years since I've seen a 'the Chinese can't innovate' post here and I can't say that I've missed it.

[gbacon]

That’s a nice driving tour of the effects of the economic calculation problem.

For those unfamiliar (not Mike based on his observations about Star Trek’s economy), absent a working price system, no rational method for economizing, i.e., choosing between alternatives, exists. When building a railroad, do you go around the mountain or tunnel through it? Who knows? Take away the profit-loss test, and the loudest, most aggressive thug in the room wins out, which Mike noted the history of communist countries as confirming.

Understanding the economic calculation problem reveals why communists had to copy or steal not just the technology but even its prices. Granting the extreme of an entire country full of perfectly obedient “new Soviet men” — which emphatically did not exist, as shown by the common saying “We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us” — Maximum Leader is in the dark without prices; he doesn’t know what to command them to build! So he does the next best thing: crib off someone else’s paper.

[imtringued]

I think you are overselling the killing aspect although its true.

The reason is that strict Marxist don't believe that entrepreneurs are producing any value. If anything, they are believed to produce negative value i.e. surplus value is an appropriation of value from workers. If you get rid of them, the negative value disappears and society is better off.

Since only workers produce value (labor theory of value aka LTV), they can only produce what is already confirmed to be valuable. Reproducing the work of other workers doesn't violate the labor theory of value, but producing something that has the potential to be worthless does. [0]

You can see that a disdain for intellectual property law and an obsession to only produce what others have already produced makes cloning a natural strategy for communism.

[0] The mudpie criticism against the LTV is usually rebutted by communists saying they would never produce something worthless. It is implied that they have efficient central planners tell them what to produce.

[nz]

I think it is even simpler than you suggest. Cloning an established product is more efficient in terms of both effort (even if costs are subsidized turnaround time is still a measurable physical quantity) and politics (nobody ever got fired for cloning -- if the clone becomes popular, you win, if the clone does not become popular, the West loses).

It is the difference between "safety" and "liveness" (the two kinds of correctness guarantees in computer programming). Communist societies are, at their extreme, "safety" societies: they try to guarantee that nothing bad ever happens. Capitalist/market societies are, at their extreme, "liveness" societies: they try to guarantee that something good/interesting _eventually_ happens (even if bad things have to keep happening).

A "safety" mindset is sympathetic to cloning, because it does not have to deal with much uncertainty. A "liveness" mindset is not sympathetic to cloning, because it has already been done, and profit/monopoly opportunity is minimal.

[bigfishrunning]

> if the clone does not become popular, the West loses

How? if the original product being cloned is popular, isn't the west still winning?

[pwg]

I think the OP meant "if the cloned item becomes popular 'in the west'".

[Joker_vD]

> why did the communists always clone things despite having engineers who could have designed their own?

Well, because they didn't always clone things, you know. But when they decided to, it was almost always pitched as "okay, we're 10/20/30 years behind in this industry, if we try to repeat that path from the zero, we'll never catch up — let's start at near of their cutting edge, and go from there".

> the USSR solved this by having spies steal price lists.

Oh, that's a story I'd like to hear.

[bigfishrunning]

A few years ago i went to the International Spy Museum in Washington DC[0]. It was really interesting and had a lot of cold war espionage stories, although it is one of the few museums in Washington DC that charges admission. Worth it in my opinion if you're interested in this stuff and have the opportunity to go

[0] https://www.spymuseum.org