The Dog That Did Not Bark during the Night: The "Normalcy" of Russian, Soviet, and Post-Soviet Science and Technology Studies

Abstract

The collapse of the Sqviet Union let loose a flood of information about the history of the tsarist and Soviet periods. In the years since, scholars have produced much valuable work based on that new information, as the pages of Voprosi Istorii Estestvoznaniia i Tekhniki (Questions in the history of science and technology) attest. Cooperation and communication among researchers are far easier and faster than they were, aided immensely by the internet and the worldwide web. In Russia, the community of historians of science and technology is healthy if not yet fully robust.1 It seems to be a good time to pause and take stock. What have we as historians of science and technology learned in the past fifteen or so years? A recent conference on Russian and Soviet science between 1860 and 1960 at the University of Georgia gathered academics from seven countries whose major problem was securing funding, not visas.2 It served to demon-