Innovation in Isolation: the highlights of Ukrainian technology history
The book Innovation in Isolation: The Story of Ukrainian IT from the 1940s to the Present chronicles the miraculous development of Ukrainian computer science
Veronika Moroz–The Tech
Innovation in Isolation: The Story of Ukrainian IT from the 1940s to the Present
Volodymyr Nevzorov and Victoria Ugryumova
MacPaw Inc.
March 4, 2025
Kyiv, 1947 — the government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) tasks a team of researchers, led by Sergey Lebedev, with developing an electronic computing model so their country can keep up with the United States’ computing-enhanced defense system. With their city in shambles from three years of Nazi air raids, the best makeshift laboratory gets so hot that the machine room reaches over 100 degrees Fahrenheit — in the winter and with the windows open. None of the researchers have any experience building computers, and reading a Western journal could land them 10 to 15 years of imprisonment in Soviet labor camps under espionage charges. The only knowledge they have is that such a computer exists in the West, and that they need to build it.
And somehow, they do.
In their book, Innovation in Isolation: The Story of Ukrainian IT from the 1940s to the Present, Volodymyr Nevzorov and Victoria Ugryumova analogize, “For many years, the [Soviet Union’s Communist] Party line was that computer science, or cybernetics, was a ‘bourgeois pseudoscience.’ In their quest to uphold ‘true communism,’ Soviet leaders essentially asked their scientists to build a computer with their hands tied behind their backs.” Published in the context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, this book traces the miraculous rise of Ukrainian information technology (IT) to “tell the story of the scientists who strove to make life in the USSR a bit better, in defiance of numerous material, technical, ideological, and political barriers.”
Ukraine was the “beating heart of cybernetics in the USSR,” Nevzorov and Ugryumova argue. Their claim embeds their book in a growing movement of de-Russification, re-emphasizing a narrative of Ukrainian individuality that has been buried under centuries of Russian and Soviet propaganda. The movement, which extends from Ukrainian cities to Wikipedia to museums all over the world, is more than culturally significant in a time where Russian president Vladimir Putin is trying to erase Ukraine from history books. Everything about Ukrainian national identity, including its literature, is under attack.
Innovation in Isolation begins with one of the first computers in Europe, Lebedev’s MESM, then traces the rise of Ukrainian IT from the development of Address, one of the first high-level programming languages in the world, to the technology giants of modern Ukraine. With stunning multi-page photographs, firsthand quotes, anecdotes from primary sources, and a visual design that organizes information into bite sized-chunks, the book presents itself as more of a collection of facts than the kind of novel that demands readers’ undivided attention for hours at a time. Flip to a random page, and you’ll be taken on a whirlwind tour of a chapter-long Ukrainian equivalent of the 2016 Hollywood film Hidden Figures. But sit down and read it cover to cover, and you’ll be immersed in a multi-dimensional narrative that desperately needs to be told.
As both a history of computing in Ukraine and a reflection of the development of Ukrainian identity alongside the computing industry, Innovation in Isolation includes detailed descriptions of both the hardware behind multiple generations of Soviet-era computers and the rise of an overwhelmingly grassroots computing culture. Instead of likening computer scientists to ivory tower intellectuals or antisocial hooded figures in a dark room, cybernetics is portrayed as an activity of the people. The book not only discusses the robots and graphics systems built by the first large-scale generation of Ukrainian computer scientists, but also how they brought computing into mainstream Soviet culture. It recounts events, parties, and the invention of their own metaphorical country, “Cybertonia,” a place which existed “in four dimensions: energy, laughter, dreams, and fantasies!”
This do-it-yourself spirit epitomizes the resilience of Ukrainians through the fall of the Soviet Union and into its war-torn state today. In the 1980s, Soviet computer scientists, frustrated that their government did not believe a personal computer could possibly exist, began selling build-your-own computer kits that could be manufactured and distributed for cheap. When the Soviet Union disbanded and the economy collapsed, there was little financial incentives to innovate, owing to barely enforced copyright laws on Western inventions. That didn’t stop some Ukrainian developers from producing their own games, like the internationally-acclaimed video game S.T.A.L.K.E.R, which takes place in the Chernobyl exclusion zone.
Unable to provide guarantees of what the future holds for Ukraine, Innovation in Isolation settles for a glimmer of hope for its possibilities by introducing us to the rising stars of the Ukrainian IT industry. The latter half of the book describes companies from Grammarly to the job-hunting website Jooble to PetCube, a device that lets users monitor their pets while they are away from home, which has garnered fans like English actress Emma Watson. The series of company descriptions reads like a cross between an advertisement and a series of company profiles in Forbes, but that’s not unexpected, given that the book was commissioned by Ukrainian-American technology company MacPaw. (Its website claims that “every fifth Mac on Earth has a MacPaw app installed on it,” and it goes without saying that the company’s origin story takes up a sizable chapter in the second half.) But what makes these companies particularly impressive is how much they’ve accomplished with relatively limited educational resources. Before the Soviet education system began teaching computer science, and way before the Soviet education system actually began using computers instead of chalkboards to teach computer science, kids assembling and programming computers in their basements kick-started a new era of Ukrainian technology entrepreneurship.
From its heroic stories to MacPaw’s promise to spend all book proceeds toward non-lethal Ukrainian aid, Innovation in Isolation: The Story of Ukrainian IT from the 1940s to the Present is the book that Ukrainian intellectuals desperately need Western science enthusiasts to read. Look what Ukrainians have accomplished with so little, the authors seem to be telling us. We are our own, sovereign nation of innovators.