Combining a policy analyst's sensitivity to practical politics and a historian's instinct for contingency and context.... Rindzeviciute has provided a rare glimpse through the lens of boutique institutional history of a time and place.
SLAVIC REVIEW
The Power of Systems is a first-rate monograph, best suited for graduate students, scholars of Soviet Russia and the Cold ... Read moreWar, and scholars of the history and sociology of science.
American Historical Review
In this deeply researched book, Egle Rindzeviciute tells the story of a unique Cold War institution, the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis, located in Laxenburg, Austria. Here scientists and political leaders from the Soviet Union and the United States met in the years after 1972 to discuss, in the framework of the new field of systems analysis, such problems as acid rain, nuclear winter, the impact of technology on society, and the possibility of 'neutral' mathematical modeling of civilization's problems. Was it a naive and doomed effort? Rindzeviciute gives us a sophisticated answer to this question.
Loren Graham, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, co-author of Science in the New Russia In The Power of Systems, Egle Rindzeviciute offers a compelling account of the convergence of American systems analysis and Soviet cybernetics in a picturesque Austrian castle. Using a wide range of rarely cited archival materials as well as revealing personal interviews, she shows how Cold War scientific diplomacy produced real and influential results. Attuned to ideas and institutions, to personalities and most importantly to power, Rindzeviciute provides a model for historical scholarship on late Soviet science and on East-West connections in the Cold War.
David C. Engerman, Ottilie Springer Professor of History, Brandeis University, author of Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America's Soviet Experts The Power of Systems provides a compelling summary of the rise of the systems approach globally. Egle Rindzeviciute describes the Soviet component of that rise and Soviet-Western cooperation in the field and provides a new level of detail through extensive and informative interviews. Rindzeviciute makes a strong case for the view that the cooperation was not just diplomatic puffery, but a serious phenomenon that had real effects on Soviet-Western relations and the way the two sides saw and behaved in the world.
Stephen Fortescue, University of New South Wales, author of Russia's Oil Barons and Metal Magnates Show Less