Brown Bag: SCI_BERIA: NOVOSIBIRSK SCIENCE CITY AND THE LATE SOVIET POLITICS OF EXPERTISE

Since 1991, innovation has become a buzz word and a key notion associated with the ‘strengths’ of the market economy. Meanwhile, the socialist system of knowledge production remains in the shadow of the political collapse: according to common wisdom, planned economy inhibited all innovation activities. Unlike the spectacular triumphs of the Soviet space program or the tragedy of the Chernobyl disaster, the everyday operation of the late Soviet science and technology sector is largely unknown. This presentation is based on my book manuscript which studies the Novosibirsk Scientific Center, known as Akademgorodok, from its creation in 1957 to its transition into the post-Soviet period. In exploring this Soviet project, I offer a new perspective on the relationship between experts and the state during the late socialist period. I capitalize on the traditional tools of urban history and biography to investigate the “relocation” of Siberian science from “sharashka,” populated with convicts, to a model socialist community, a community tied to Moscow and to international science via a web of lifelong personal networks. My approach is informed by history of science and STS theories as well as the latest perspectives on Soviet history. I argue against the Western scholarship of the 1990s, which saw Soviet science in general, and the science-city in particular, as representative of the failure of socialism to innovate. I use the concept of “showcasing” to avoid approaching Akademgorodok as a unique and isolated phenomenon of late socialism and to instead consider a set of interactions taking place in the city and a variety of contexts ranging from local, to regional, to national, and to global. At stake is a series of questions coupling Soviet developments with Cold War techno-science. I ask: What is the relationship between post-Stalinist Science and Big Science? How did national and regional scientific structures shape the geography of the international circulation of knowledge? And could the capitalist notion of innovation account for science's role as a productive force of socialism? In particular, I will focus on the science-related representations of Siberia in the last quarter of the twentieth century when the characteristic of “scientific” became tied to Siberia, and that of “Siberian” to a significant number of Soviet scientists.