The tenth Which Computer Show? held in Birmingham this week kicked off with a keynote speech by Soviet ambassador Leonid Zamyatin who emphasised the potential commercial links between East and West Europe. Zamyatin began by saying that computers and nuclear weapons make our world a much smaller place. He hailed the role of small computers in changing the minds of politicians in Eastern Europe and making them start economic reform. Within the USSR he said that the computer industry was so behind because it was a victim of the Stalinist era when cybernetics was pronounced a prostitute on the payroll of world communism and banished for years. Zamyatin believes that computers will be instrumental in feeding the Soviet government’s change of direction from a vertically organised and centrally managed economy to a horizontally organised and integrated economy. He continued that the new political structure in the USSR consists of a myriad of public organisations and, making an oblique reference to Lithuania, said that computers make any event notable even if the events lack substance. He welcomed moves by European computer companies such as Olivetti to enter the Soviet market saying that at present IBM has a virtual monopoly over computers in the USSR. Zamyatin emphasised that it was wrong for the West to view the USSR simply as a market, since the Soviet Union has bright scientists and computer engineers who are merely hindered by outdated technology. He said that CoCom had never hurt the USSR, and that its real victim was world trade. As for the vexed question of currency, Zamyatin said that in his opinion it would take three to five years to develop a stable economy within the Soviet Union, but added that the Soviet Union was not a poor country in terms of natural resources. He finished by admitting that the joint ventures set up with the Soviet government to buy computers were not rich enough to pay UK interest rates, but noted, with a charming diplomatic smile, that some UK computer companies are not rich enough to pay UK interest rates…