Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology

by Chris Miller

Before the FBI could catch them, Sarant and Barr fled the country, eventually reaching the Soviet Union. When they arrived, they told KGB handlers they wanted to build the world’s most advanced computers. Barr and Sarant weren’t experts in computers, but nor was anyone else in the Soviet Union. Their status as spies was, in itself, a much admired credential, and their aura gave them access to resources. In the late 1950s, Barr and Sarant began building their first computer, called UM—the Russian word for “mind.” Their work attracted the attention of Shokin, the bureaucrat who managed the Soviet electronics industry, and they partnered with him to convince Khrushchev that the USSR needed an entire city devoted to producing semiconductors, with its own researchers, engineers, labs, and production facilities. Even before the towns on the peninsula south of San Francisco had become known as Silicon Valley—a term that wasn’t coined until 1971—Barr and Sarant had dreamt up their own version in a Moscow suburb.