1917: The October Revolution begins in Petrograd

On 6 November 1917, according to the Gregorian calendar, armed Bolshevik forces and Red Guards began seizing key bridges, railway stations, post offices and other strategic points across Petrograd (today’s St. Petersburg). The following day they took the Winter Palace, bringing down the Provisional Government and ushering in a new political order that would reshape the twentieth century.

At first glance the October Revolution seems remote from the history of artificial intelligence. Yet the state it created became one of the major centres for the mathematical and engineering sciences that later fed into computing and AI. In the 1940s and early 1950s cybernetics—Norbert Wiener’s science of control and communication—was officially condemned in the Soviet Union as a bourgeois, idealist pseudoscience. After Stalin’s death the ban was lifted. Cybernetics was enthusiastically embraced and linked to the construction of a communist society.

Soviet researchers made lasting contributions to the theoretical foundations that AI still relies on. Andrey Kolmogorov and his school developed modern probability theory and the notion of algorithmic complexity. Work in mathematical logic, control theory and pattern recognition flourished. Early Soviet computers such as MESM (the first electronic computer on the European continent) and the BESM series were designed under the influence of this intellectual climate.

The rehabilitation of cybernetics also created institutional space for research into self-regulating systems, automation and eventually machine intelligence. Although the political context was very different from the one that produced the Dartmouth workshop or the Perceptron, the mathematical tools and the ambition to understand and build intelligent control systems were shared.

Today’s AI landscape still carries traces of that history. Core ideas in statistical learning theory, information theory and recursive function theory travelled across the Iron Curtain in both directions. As artificial intelligence becomes a global endeavour, the Soviet chapter reminds us that the field’s intellectual roots are more geographically and politically diverse than the standard Silicon Valley narrative sometimes suggests.