ABSTRACT
Studying scientifi c and technological developments and exchanges during the Cold War presented numerous challenges, including high levels of secrecy, unreliable data, and limited sources. Still, the work of scholars like Zhores Medvedev, Kendall Bailes, Alexander Vucinich, and Loren Graham proved illuminating.1 More was written about the physical and natural sciences rather than technology, and specifi cally on the question of what was “Soviet” about Soviet science. As telling examples, scholarship focused on the assault against genetic research in the Soviet Union, launched under Stalin, and the momentous transformations within the Soviet Academy of Sciences.2 But the literature on Soviet science and technology developed largely in isolation from the major debates among historians and sociologists in the West. The “constructivists” of the 1970s and 1980s, for example, who sharply emphasized the social, economic, and political factors shaping scientifi c and technological knowledge, did not engage with comparisons across socio-political systems.3 In more recent years, another generation of
4 Not confi ned to Big Science, authors have turned to transnational interactions among experts and the rise of new fi elds like computing.5 Nevertheless, works that cross the Iron Curtain, or that adopt a transnational angle within the communist world, like Paul Josephson’s highly evocative studies of technologies under authoritarian rule, remain the exception.6 Finally, only recently have Cold War historians seriously engaged with the connections between technology, economic planning, and consumption.
