though it was not commissioned by any soviet authority and never mentioned the science by name, agapov's article was taken as a signal of an official critical attitude towards cybernetics; editions of norbert wiener's "" were removed from library circulation, and several other periodicals followed suit, denouncing cybernetics as a "reactionary pseudoscience". in 1951, , of the institute of philosophy, led a public campaign against the philosophy of "semantic idealism", characterising wiener, and cybernetics as a whole, as a part of this "reactionary philosophy". in 1952, another more explicitly anti-cybernetic article was published in the "literaturnaya gazeta", definitively starting the campaign and leading the way for a flurry of popular titles denouncing the topic. at the zenith of this criticism, an article in the october 1953 issue of the state ideological organ, "voprosy filosofii", was published under the pseudonym "materialist", entitled "whom does cybernetics serve?"; it condemned cybernetics as a "misanthropic pseudo-theory" consisting of "mechanicism turning into idealism", pointing to the american military as the "god whom cybernetics served". during this period, stalin himself never engaged in this rabid criticism of cybernetics, with the head of the soviet department of sciences, iurii zhdanov, recalling that "he never opposed cybernetics" and made every effort "to advance computer technology" in order to give the ussr the technological advantage. though the scale of this campaign was modest, with only around 10 anti-cybernetic publications being produced, valery shilov has argued it constituted a "strict directive to action" from the "central ideological organs", a universal declaration of cybernetics as a bourgeois pseudoscience to be criticised and destroyed.