Eager to (let) know: knowledge production and dissemination in state socialist Eastern Europe

Abstract

ABSTRACT The Communist parties of Eastern Europe depended on gathering information, producing and accumulating knowledge, and curating and disseminating it to their citizens. Promising to establish a form of government that rested on rationality and science, these processes needed to be regulated and monitored to ensure they corresponded to the (supposed) party line at every step of the way. But how could individuals down the chain of command conceptualize the party line and what role did their subjectivity play in shaping their actions? How should we deconstruct knowledge-producing and -curating processes to better understand what the parties knew and what and how this knowledge was ‘handled’? Our dossier brings together case studies from various national contexts from Stalinist, post-Stalinist and late socialist contexts from Eastern Europe, where cadres and experts with different relationships with the ruling parties negotiated their various identities. In the introduction, we situate these case studies against the backdrop of a procedural view of knowledge, distinguishing between the stages of production, gathering, analysing, disseminating and employing knowledge, drawing on the framework proposed by Peter Burke. We argue that adopting the procedural view of knowledge questions the binary of orthodoxy and heterodoxy in following the party line effectively. Second, we draw attention to heterodoxies as spaces of resistance without the inherent intention of dissent. Thus, we introduce a new angle through which the constraints of individual knowledge-producing actors under state socialism can be investigated.