the initial public reception of cybernetics in the soviet union, in the stifling scientific culture of joseph stalin, was exclusively negative. under the plans of the soviet department for agitation and propaganda, soviet anti-american propaganda was to be intensified, in order "to show the decay of bourgeois culture and morals" and "debunk the myths of american propaganda" in the wake of the formation of nato. this imperative put soviet newspaper editors in a frantic search for topics to criticise, in order to fill these propagandistic quotas. the first to latch onto cybernetics was science journalist, boris agapov, following the post-war american interest in the developments in computer technology. the cover of the january 23, 1950 issue of "time" had boasted an anthropomorphic cartoon of a harvard mark iii under the slogan "can man build a superman?". on 4 may 1950, agapov published an article in the "literaturnaya gazeta" entitled "mark iii, a calculator", ridiculing this american excitement at the "sweet dream" of the military and industrial uses of these new "thinking machines", and criticising wiener as an example of the "charlatans and obscurantists, whom capitalists substitute for genuine scientists".