Poletaev, I. Signal: On Some Concepts of Cybernetics (Signal, o nekotorykh ponyatiyakh kibernetiki). The first Soviet book on cybernetics. First edition, 1958. In Russian.

Полетаев, Игорь Андреевич. Сигнал : о некоторых понятиях кибернетики / редактор В. И. Грознова ; технический редактор Н. Н. Корузев ; художественное оформление В. В. Волкова. Первое издание.
Москва : издательство «Советское радио», 1958. 404 страницы, с иллюстрациями, схемами и графиками в тексте ; 20 см.
Твердый издательский переплет.
Состояние хорошее: переплет потерт, по краям передней крышки заломы, углы притуплены, корешок с легкой потертостью. Блок крепкий, бумага равномерно пожелтевшая, текст полный.
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Poletaev, Igor Andreevich. Signal: On Some Concepts of Cybernetics / editor V. I. Groznova ; technical editor N. N. Koruzev ; cover and design by V. V. Volkov. First edition.
Moscow : "Sovetskoe Radio" Publishing House, 1958. 404 pp. : illustrations, diagrams and graphs in text ; 20 cm.
Hardcover.
Condition good: boards rubbed with creasing along the edges of the front cover, corners bumped, spine lightly worn. Text block firm, paper evenly age-toned, text complete.

The first book on cybernetics published in the Soviet Union, and one of the defining scientific publications of the Khrushchev Thaw. Igor Andreevich Poletaev (1915-1983) was a military engineer at the research institute of the Main Artillery Directorate and a student of Alexey Lyapunov, the founder of the Soviet cybernetics school. He wrote this book at a moment when the subject had only just ceased to be officially proscribed: the fourth edition of the standard Soviet Brief Philosophical Dictionary, published as late as 1954, still defined cybernetics as a reactionary pseudoscience of American origin, and it was only after Stalin's death and the 1955 article by Sobolev, Lyapunov and Kitov in Voprosy Filosofii that the field could be discussed openly. Poletaev's book carried the new science to a general readership for the first time, treating the concepts of signal and information, the relation between informational and physical entropy, transmission channels in engineering and in the nervous system, feedback systems, the architecture of electronic computing machines, relay logic, automatic translation, game theory, self-organising systems, and the question of whether a machine can think. The final chapters, "A robot that could be cleverer than its designer" and "The big robot", place the book among the earliest Russian-language discussions of machine intelligence. In October 1959 Poletaev's letter to Komsomolskaya Pravda, written in defence of the engineer against Ilya Ehrenburg, launched the "physicists and lyricists" controversy that dominated Soviet cultural debate for years and produced Boris Slutsky's celebrated poem. The book is thus a landmark of both the history of computing and the intellectual history of the Thaw, sought by collectors of early computer science, information theory, and Soviet science of the 1950s.