From Mendeleev to the first Soviet computer: Kyiv's technical inheritance

The Kyiv Polytechnic Institute opened in 1898. Dmitri Mendeleev chaired the commission that examined its first graduating class. Igor Sikorsky built and flew his early aircraft designs there as a student. The institution has been producing engineers continuously for well over a century, through four different states.

That continuity is the single most useful fact for understanding why Ukraine has a software industry.

The computing line

In 1951 a team led by Sergei Lebedev, working in a former monastery outside Kyiv, completed MESM — the first stored-program electronic computer in continental Europe. It was built with vacuum tubes, occupied a large room, and ran calculations for thermonuclear and rocket programmes.

The work continued at what became the Institute of Cybernetics under Viktor Glushkov, which grew into one of the largest computing research organisations in the Soviet Union. Glushkov's programme included work on machine translation, automated management systems, and an ambitious and ultimately rejected proposal for a nationwide computer network for economic planning.

Whatever one thinks of the planning ambition, the institutional consequence was a large concentration of people in Kyiv trained in mathematics, algorithms and systems design.

What happened to it

The Soviet system collapsed and the funding disappeared. The institutes survived on almost nothing through the 1990s, with senior researchers on salaries that did not cover living costs.

What did not disappear was the teaching. The polytechnic, the university mathematics faculties, the Kharkiv and Lviv institutes and the specialised secondary schools kept producing graduates in mathematics and engineering throughout the decade in which there were no jobs for them.

Those graduates are the people who staffed the outsourcing companies that arrived in the early 2000s, and who founded the product companies that came after.

The general point

There is a lesson here about industrial policy that is worth stating explicitly, because it is usually drawn the wrong way round.

Ukraine's software sector was not created by a policy. No ministry designed it, no incentive scheme attracted it, and no strategy document predicted it. What the state contributed was an education system it had inherited and did not dismantle, and a tax regime that it left alone.

That is a real and repeatable contribution, and it is less glamorous than an industrial strategy. The institutions that produce technically trained people take decades to build and can be destroyed in a few years of underfunding, and the returns appear a generation after the investment.

What it means now

Two things.

The technical education system is the country's most important economic asset and it is under strain — underfunded, losing staff to emigration and to industry, and disrupted in the eastern cities. Whether it is rebuilt determines what the economy looks like in 2040 more than any reconstruction programme does.

And for a company recruiting here: the depth of the mathematics and engineering talent pool is the reason to be in this market, and it is concentrated in specific institutions in Kyiv, Kharkiv, Lviv and Dnipro. Recruitment relationships with those faculties are worth more than any agency.

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• Chernivtsi and the Habsburg west: why the map still shows
• Ukraine Annual Review 2013: the year the model ran out

Having studied at KPI, I saw this inheritance from inside: what was taught in the classroom was not software but the habit of breaking a problem into parts. That is why a software sector could appear in the 2000s with no policy behind it — the people had already been trained, only the work changed. A country's most durable infrastructure turns out to be a curriculum rather than a building.