After the launch of Sputnik I, a number of voices from the US “military-industrial complex” asked to learn from the Soviets, and negotiations on scientific cooperation with the Soviets were accelerated. In January 1958 the “Agreement Between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on Exchanges in the Cultural, Technical and Educational Fields,” aka the Lacy–Zaroubin agreement, was signed. The Soviets asked the USA to designate the National Academy of Sciences as their partner in the coordination of collaborative projects. The two academies negotiated an agreement that included short- and long-term visits, joint symposia, and joint research projects. Between 1957 and 1977 some 400 researchers visited the USA and the USSR. In the mid-1960s the National Academy of Sciences also established exchange agreements with Eastern European countries. Focusing on the reports of US scientists who visited the USSR in the archives of the National Academy of Sciences, this talk aims to explore to what extent the scientific collaboration under the Lacy–Zaroubin agreement shaped scientific research in the USA, and contributed to the understanding of Soviet science and Soviet life.

During détente U.S. companies sold a handful of the most powerful high performance computers (HPCs) in the world to the Soviet Union – despite their obvious military applications. The U.S. government balanced the benefits and risks of HPC sales – and of détente economics in general – through export controls. For HPCs, the U.S. government established a special, highly elaborate international regime revolving around measures, called “safeguards”, that made it possible to control HPCs after their export – on Soviet soil. The most remarkable component of this regime was the establishment of extensive inspection rights for Western companies and the U.S. government inside the Soviet Union. This was an extraordinary diplomatic achievement as during most of the Cold War, the Soviets stiffly opposed inspectors in their own country, most notably in regard to the nuclear safeguard regime of the IAEA.

Those who were trying to survive the calamities of World War I, the collapse of the Russian Empire, and the ensuing Civil War, perceived the spectre of an impending World Revolution in combination with another radically modernist revolution – scientific. Einstein’s relativity theory was changing not just the historical, but the universal concept of Space-Time. Relativity, in its special version, had been known in Russia prior to the war, but became a top cultural obsession after 1919, with the arrival of the general theory of relativity. Its popular reception has been studied very selectively, with attention devoted to professional physicists, but the bulk of responses came from educated publics of all stripes – artists and medical doctors, religious mystics and poets, philosophers and mathematicians – and an entire spectrum of ideological beliefs. Together, they produced a wide variety of interpretations and misperceptions, reflecting the existential realities and sensibilities of a society in the whirlwind of revolutionary change. Among many unconventional ideas, one encounters the first proposal of a non-stationary cosmology, the seed of what would eventually become the Big Bang model of the relativistic Universe.

When construction on the Bratsk hydroelectric station began in December 1954, writers, students, and workers flocked to the site. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, they described standing inside and outside of the construction zone – at elevated vantage points, as well as on bottom of the Angara’s riverbed. Because the creation of an adjoining water reservoir required flooding over 200 low-lying villages, spatial indicators were especially significant: gesturing to what would endure into the future, and what would not. Reading encounters in and around Bratsk as expressions of embodied experience reveals an acute awareness of the vertical axis — a heightened sensitivity to what lay “above” and “below” — as well as a sense of porosity between the self and the surrounding environment. This talk explores how an awareness of the phenomenal context in which such transformations took place might bring to light a sense of vulnerability and disorientation, in addition to the starkly productivist rhetoric typical of such projects.

Тема «искренности», характерная для различных нарративов эпохи сталинизма и «оттепели», присутствует в моем докладе в виде вопроса, обращенного к истории биосоциального знания: можно ли в изменениях, произошедших в советской науке после появления нацизма в Германии, увидеть конфликт знания и ценностей, который побуждал бы ученых к действительному, «искреннему» пересмотру их научных воззрений? Свидетельством подобного конфликта становится деятельность Александра Федоровича Котса (1880 - 1964), создателя и директора московского Дарвиновского музея, в практике которого морфологические особенности «низших» человеческих рас служили важным свидетельством эволюционной преемственности человека – обезьяноподобным предкам. Признание равноценности человеческих рас в рамках типологического их изучения – трансформация, совершившаяся в 1930-е годы в воззрениях Котса и советской антропологии в целом, породила, как я показываю, сложности для визуальной репрезентации ископаемых гоминид, в особенности неандертальцев. С одной стороны, «примитивность» ископаемых форм становится потенциальным источником расовых аллюзий, а с другой, признание равноценности «расового типа» неандертальца – «типам» современных рас, к чему в итоге пришел Котс, заставляет его усомниться в дарвиновской теории антропогенеза, подрывая представление о промежуточных звеньях эволюции.

Science as an institution and scientists individually contributed to the emergence of Cold War policies and mentality. They also worked to counter the ensuing tensions, to reverse isolation and exclusion of the “other” intellectual community from knowledge exchanges and data circulation, and to restore severed ties between colleagues and establish new ones. My book project looks at several venues of American-Soviet scientific communication from 1945 to 1991 across disciplines, analyzing their intellectual and social benefits, as well as cultural, political, and bureaucratic challenges. Who arranged those interactions? Why did scientists invest time and intellectual and emotional energy in what others condemned as useless or even traitorous activity? How can one evaluate the productivity of these contacts? I will share the structure and some of the arguments in the book, discuss the source base, and present a case study to illustrate.

This presentation will address some anthropological insights into the Soviet Armenian technical intelligentsia and Soviet information technologies’ industry. Soviet industrial and cultural modernization brought about significant changes in the social structure of Soviet and, in particular, Armenian society by creating an urbanized and educated group of new specialists of technical profile, often referred to as “technical intelligentsia.” The 1960s and early 70s became an era of achievements of the Armenian industrial institutions and scientific centers, including secret agencies working for the defense and coded as “mailboxes.” This paper is focused on narratives about the Armenian Soviet technical intelligentsia, its relationships with the Soviet ideological machine and administrative controls, systems of social privileges and material rewards, concepts of “freedom” and “regime,” and cultural identities, exemplified by institutional and personal biographies. It will also address a very specific relationship between humans and computers.

Along with the targeted airstrikes, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began with the occupation of the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant. By considering the industrial subsumption of Ukrainian Polissia, this talk will discuss the expansion of the Soviet cold-war infrastructure — including the ballistic rocket detection radar Duga-1 and the Chornobyl NPP — as an overlooked case of colonialism resulting in the multiple instances of slow violence that have now accelerated by the Russian war in Ukraine.

In The Will to Predict, Eglė Rindzevičiūtė demonstrates how the logic of scientific expertise cannot be properly understood without knowing the conceptual and institutional history of scientific prediction. She notes that predictions of future population, economic growth, environmental change, and scientific and technological innovation have shaped much of twentieth and twenty-first-century politics and social life, as well as government policies. Today, such predictions are more necessary than ever as the world undergoes dramatic environmental, political, and technological change. But, she asks, what does it mean to predict scientifically? What are the limits of scientific prediction and what are its effects on governance, institutions, and society?

Her intellectual and political history of scientific prediction takes as its example twentieth-century USSR. By outlining the role of prediction in a range of governmental contexts, from economic and social planning to military strategy, she shows that the history of scientific prediction is a transnational one, part of the history of modern science and technology as well as governance. Going beyond the Soviet case, Rindzevičiūtė argues that scientific predictions are central for organizing uncertainty through the orchestration of knowledge and action. Bridging the fields of political sociology, organization studies, and history, The Will to Predict considers what makes knowledge scientific and how such knowledge has impacted late modern governance.

This presentation investigates the merging of hydropower and nuclear engineering traditions in Soviet Ukraine. Focus areas are the realisation of the Dnieper Cascade, of Chernobyl and Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plants, as well as of South Ukraine Energy Complex. Engineers from the hydrotechnical design institute Gidroproekt played a key role in the envisioning, planning and realisation of these unique energy projects. They combined nuclear reactors, cooling water reservoirs, diverse hydropower plants, grand irrigation systems, pisciculture, and the recycling of water flows between these different forms of usage. While the Dnieper Cascade, a consecutive line of six large-scale hydropower plants, fundamentally changed the envirotechnical system between the river, cities, industry, and agriculture, Chernobyl and Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plants further developed this entanglement, introducing the new characteristic of radioisotopes. South Ukraine Energy Complex was an original project that completely reshaped the confluence of the Southern Bug and the Tashlyk River with the aim of recycling their waters to create synergies.

Drawing on my recent book Alexander Bogdanov and the Politics of Knowledge after the October Revolution (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), this talk will focus on Alexander Bogdanov’s Tektology, a seminal three-volume proto-cybernetic theory, published between 1912 and 1921. The talk will address a whole range of conceptual innovations borrowed by Tektology from physics, biology, political economy and the philosophy of technology to argue that it is at this disciplinary junction that Bogdanov sketched a new environmental model of even distribution. Even distribution is an infrastructure for a horizontal type of self-regulating cooperation or a system in which parts modify one another by evening out each other’s capacities. I shall reconstruct this model in two steps. I will first consider Bogdanov’s concept of dynamic (moving) equilibrium and the principle of biophysical mutualism. This will then be elucidated alongside Bogdanov’s engagement with the biologist Justus von Liebig and Karl Marx’s theory of reproduction. I will conclude my talk by exploring the contemporary relevance of even distribution in the situation of proliferating wars and climate crisis.

In 1953, an Uzbek military doctor submitted a medical dissertation on the topic of Central Asian vernacular bone-setting. While framed as a quackery and a threat for the Soviet public health, bone-setting practiced by urban healers was nevertheless considered worthy of painstaking inspection both by the aspiring postgraduate surgeon and his supervisors in Tashkent Clinic for Traumatology and Orthopaedic Treatment. In the next decades, vernacular methods, skills, and particularly medicinal matter were carefully explored and tested, which changed the surgeon’s career as well as epistemic and social trajectories of the phenomena under his study. The talk focuses on extractive-cum-cooperative relationships between state-sponsored medical research and vernacular healing and discusses the heuristic potential of frameworks of colonisation, appropriation, and braiding in regard of ethnic knowledge in the long shadow of Soviet medicine.

The first complete plant growth cycle in zero gravity was achieved in the early 1980s by the Soviet scientific institutions that were stretched across the USSR. That period was the peak of Cold War tensions and international campaigning for nuclear disarmament. Collaboration between Soviet and Western scientists took place, yet all international communications went through Moscow and thus the visibility of contributions by non-Russian USSR scientists on a global scale was erased. This condition exemplified the dynamics in both science and cultural productions of the entire USSR. In this talk, I invite us to think together, how can we research the history of space botany today? What are the limitations of the Cold War epistemic framing?  What methodological approaches could be useful when investigating the history of space botany from a perspective of a fragment of the space research infrastructure? What could film and media studies, as well as artistic research, bring to this area of exploration?

See a compilation of excerpts from audiovisual installation Arabidopsis Thaliana, Museum of Modern Art Bogota 2021, co-authored by Ilona Jurkonytė and Santiago Reyes Villaveces