Cold War competition shaped the process of computerization in both East and West during the second half of the twentieth century. This article combines insights from Science and Technology Studies, which brought the analysis of Cold War technopolitics beyond the context of the nation-state, with approaches from Critical Algorithm Studies, to question the algorithm’s role in the global “computer revolution.” It traces the algorithm’s trajectory across several geographical, political, and discursive spaces to argue that its mutable cultural valences made the algorithm a universalizing attribute for representing human-machine interactions across the ideological divide. It shows that discourses about the human capacity to devise algorithms, a practice central to computer programming, became a space for negotiating different versions of modern subjectivity. This article focuses on two related episodes to demonstrate how the notion of “algorithmic thinking” became explicitly associated with a range of politicized agendas, each claiming the algorithm’s power. On one hand, the coupling of “algorithm” and “thinking” was used to describe a naturalized cognitive capacity shared among the members of the international scientific community and projected backward to the medieval scholar Al-Khwarizmi. On the other hand, the universal spread of “algorithmic thinking” became the educational goal of a late Soviet computer literacy campaign under the slogan of “Programming, the Second Literacy,” a metaphor and a political vision conceived to bring about the Socialist “Information Age.”

This article follows the personal trajectory of Mikhail Lavrentiev from his early integration into the European mathematical community to his role in the construction of the Siberian science-city, Akademgorodok. Using biography as a privileged vantage point, it offers a revision of the conception of Akademgorodok as a remote utopia ultimately corrupted by political interference. It argues that, although built on a site geographically distant from the center, the project reflects Moscow’s aspirations and testifies to a close and evolving relationship between scientists and the party-state. Lavrentiev nurtured a community rooted in his personal networks and supervised the construction of an urban environment emblematic of the Khrushchev era. The success and the future of the new science-city were predicated on its visibility. Akademgorodok was a model and a showcase of post-Stalinist science, of a Soviet way of living and a universal way of knowing. Focusing on the city’s role as a showcase opens possibilities to take the investigation of late socialist science and society in new directions: from the unavoidable conflict between experts and the party state to the analysis of local, national, and transnational interactions shaping socialist knowledge-making. Ultimately, Lavrentiev’s ability to make Akademgorodok into the scene of major international encounters highlights the important role of Soviet science in the Cold War circulation of knowledge.