After repeatedly failing over the following years to revive interest in his plan, the rational Glushkov began to succumb to conspiracy theories, suggesting interference by American spies, and that the emergency landing of a flight he had taken shortly after the Politburo meeting had been caused by sabotage. Glushkov died in 1982, by which time the Soviet leadership had pinned its hopes for economic renewal on limited market liberalisation, an approach that rendered the concept of a computerised command economy redundant.

In retrospect, the OGAS seems absurdly ambitious. The development of such a vast network would have necessitated a depth and duration of political commitment even an authoritarian regime could unlikely sustain, and it is doubtful that early mainframe technology would have been capable of processing so much data (quite apart from the vexed question of whether the very concept of a complex planned economy makes sense.) The OGAS could only have been conceived during an era when boundless faith in the possibilities of new technology, and Cold War imperatives, made utopian thinking possible.

And yet their remarkable space programme gave the Soviets some justification for believing that they were capable — quite literally — of aiming for the stars. Why did economic modernisation, a project of similar scope and importance, to which thousands of their best minds had been dedicated, fail so completely?