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Initially, from 1950–54, the reception of cybernetics, in the Soviet Union, was exclusively negative. The Soviet Department for Agitation and Propaganda had called for anti-Americanism to be intensified in Soviet media, and in an attempt to fill the Department's quotas, Soviet journalists latched on to cybernetics as an American "reactionary pseudoscience" to denounce and mock. This attack was interpreted as a signal of an official attitude to cybernetics, so, under Joseph Stalin's premiership, cybernetics was inflated into "a full embodiment of imperialist ideology" by Soviet writers. Upon Stalin's death, the wide-reaching reforms of Nikita Khrushchev's premiership allowed cybernetics to legitimise itself as "a serious, important science", and in 1955, articles on cybernetics were published in the state philosophical organ, Voprosy Filosofii, after a group of Soviet scientists realised the potential of this new science.
Cybernetics began to serve as an umbrella term for areas of soviet science such as structural linguistics and genetics. Under the headsmanship of academician Aksel Berg, the Council of Cybernetics was formed, an umbrella organisation dedicated to providing funding for these new lights of Soviet science. By the 1960's, this fast legitimisation put cybernetics in fashion, as "cybernetics" became a buzzword among career-minded scientists. By the 1980's, cybernetics had lost relevance in Soviet scientific culture, as its terminology and political function was succeeded by those of informatics in the Soviet Union and, eventually, post-Soviet states.