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with , data. The word entropy was placed in quotation marks to warn the reader against inferring a connection with entropy in physics. The section applying information theory to the statistics of natural language was omitted entirely. The result was technical, neutral, juiceless, and thus unlikely to attract interpretation in the terms of Marxist ideology.♦ These were serious concerns; “cybernetics” was initially defined in the Short Philosophical Dictionary (standard reference of ideological orthodoxy) as a “reactionary pseudoscience” and “an ideological weapon of imperialist reaction.” Kolmogorov leapt upon Shannon’s paper nonetheless; he, at least, was unafraid to use the word information. Working with his students in Moscow, he put forth a rigorous mathematical formulation of information theory, with definitions of the fundamental concepts, careful proofs, and new discoveries—some of which, he soon learned to his sorrow, had appeared in Shannon’s original paper but had been omitted from the Russian version.♦

In the Soviet Union, still moderately isolated from the rest of the world’s science, Kolmogorov was well placed to carry the banner of information. He was in charge of all mathematics in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, choosing the authors, editing the articles, and writing much of it himself. In 1956 he delivered a long plenary report on the theory of information transmission to the Soviet Academy of Sciences. His colleagues thought this was a bit “addled”—that Shannon’s work was “more technology than mathematics,”♦ as Kolmogorov recalled it afterward. “It is true,” he said, “that Shannon left to his successors the rigorous ‘justification’ of his ideas in some difficult cases. However, his mathematical intuition was amazingly precise.” Kolmogorov was not as enthusiastic about cybernetics. Norbert Wiener felt a kinship with him—they had both done early work on stochastic processes and Brownian motion. On a visit to Moscow, Wiener said, “When I read the works of Academician Kolmogorov, I feel that these are my thoughts as well, this is what I wanted to say. And I know that Academician Kolmogorov has the same feeling when reading my works.”♦ But the feeling was evidently not shared. Kolmogorov steered his colleagues toward Shannon instead. “It is easy to understand that as a mathematical discipline cybernetics in Wiener’s understanding lacks unity,” he said, “and it is difficult to imagine productive work in training a specialist, say a postgraduate student, in cybernetics in this sense.”♦ He already had real results to back up his instincts: a useful generalized formulation of Shannon entropy, and an extension of his information measure to processes in both discrete and continuous time.

Prestige in Russia was finally beginning to flow toward any work that promised to aid electronic communication and computing. Such work began almost in a void. Pragmatic electrical engineering barely existed; Soviet telephony was notoriously dismal, a subject for eternally bitter Russian humor. As of 1965, there was still no such thing as direct long-distance dialing. The number of toll calls nationally had yet to surpass the number of telegrams, a milestone that had been reached in the United States before the end of the previous century. Moscow had fewer telephones per capita than any major world city. Nonetheless, Kolmogorov and his students generated enough activity to justify a new quarterly journal, Problems of Information Transmission, devoted to information theory, coding theory, theory of networks, and even information in living organisms. The inaugural issue opened with Kolmogorov’s “Three Approaches to the Definition of the Concept ‘Amount of Information’”—almost a manifesto—which then began its slow journey toward the awareness of mathematicians in the West.

“At each given moment there is only a fine layer between the ‘trivial’ and the impossible,”♦ Kolmogorov mused in his diary. “Mathematical discoveries are made in this layer.” In the new, quantitative view of information he saw a way to attack a problem that had eluded