http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/mit6/papers/BenPeters.pdf

"Why wasn’t there a Soviet equivalent to the US ARPANET? Building on fresh
archival evidence, this paper examines several surprising leads: one, that the first
person anywhere to conceive of and propose a national computer network for
civilian use appears to have been the Soviet cyberneticist and Engineer Colonel
Anatolii Kitov; two, that Soviet economic cybernetics tried repeatedly but did not
succeed in building such a network; three, that the collective failure comes in part
due to unregulated bureaucratic competition and infighting over resources within
the Soviet state and academy (while the US ARPANET and French MINITEL
networks initially benefited from centralized state subsidy) and in part due to the
untenably comprehensive and hierarchically decentralized design in vogue among
Soviet cybernetists in the 1960s. The fact that cybernetics was a discursive
vehicle for reform-oriented science in the early 1960s makes its failed
contributions that much more culturally poignant. These and other ironies are
explored."