Russian and American Conversations on Cybernetics, Philosophy and Social Change

Panel Chair
Stuart A. Umpleby
The George Washington University
Washington, DC

In 1985 and 1988 Vadim Sadovsky and I arranged two conferences on the Foundations of Cybernetics and Systems Theory in the US and the USSR.  These meetings were supported by the American Council of Learned Societies and the Soviet Academy of Sciences.  The topics for the first conference, held near Washington, DC, were epistemology, methodology, and management.  By the time of the second conference, which was held in Tallinn, Estonia, glasnost and perestroika were being widely discussed.  So, we added a fourth topic, large-scale social experiments.  One important topic for both meetings was second order cybernetics or constructivist epistemology, which the American side was particularly interested in and the Russian side was curious about.

Due to contacts I made in arranging these two meetings, I began to host in the U.S. visiting scholars from the New Independent States under a U.S. State Department program, the Junior Faculty Development Program.  The George Washington University (GWU) has hosted, since 1994, over 150 visiting scholars from the former Soviet Union and Southeast Europe.

Beginning in 1990 I arranged symposia in Vienna, Austria, every two years on theories to guide the transitions in the post-communist countries.  These symposia were part of the European Meetings on Cybernetics and Systems Research.  Tatiana Medvedeva and Vera Gushchina were both visiting scholars at GWU and both have participated in the symposia in Vienna.