After the Rosenbergs were sentenced to death for espionage, Joel Barr and Alfred Sarant, who had been part of Julius Rosenberg’s spy ring since the 1930s, realized the net was closing in on them and left the United States for the Soviet Union, where they would work on the first Soviet computers in Zelenograd, the city Khrushchev had built to become Russia’s Silicon Valley. Barr and Sarant had worked in the United States on radar and other military electronic systems. But the Soviets gave scientists strict orders to focus exclusively on copying integrated circuits invented in the West as quickly as possible. This would condemn the Soviet Union to perpetually lagging behind the West in terms of electronics.
