The All-Union Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (VINITI) was launched by the USSR Academy of Sciences in 1952. Soon it developed into a grandiose system which served researchers and engineers throughout the USSR. Here we describe its inception, the way it was structured, and how it relates to similar grand visions of how to organise knowledge. The history of VINITI provides rare insights into a partly alternative history of how scientific information was organised in the latter half of the 20th century. Based on available sources in English and Russian, we consider the ideas behind this grand initiative for acquiring international literature, as well as how it was received and presented to a foreign audience. In this effort we put particular emphasis on the first 25 years of VINITI (1952–1977) while at the same time focusing on central ideas in its organisation such as “enrichment”, abstracting and pre-printing. Overall, the activities of VINITI can today appear as both old fashioned, bordering on the utopian, and as visionary and modern in its abandonment of journals and traditional forms of peer review.