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Call for papers. “Faster, Higher, Stronger?”: The History and Philosophy of Soviet Science

2025-11-03

Soviet science operated within a distinctive epistemological regime in which knowledge was inseparable from politics, morality, and technology. Originally conceived as part of the project of proletarian emancipation, it encompassed efforts to construct a “non-classical” epistemology free from “bourgeois” categories — an undertaking that extended to the creation of a new human being and even a new cosmos. As a key element of socialist modernization, Soviet science existed in constant tension between ideological control and internal autonomy, between administrative governance and research initiative. It combined collective enthusiasm, bureaucratic discipline, and a utopian belief in the transformative power of knowledge, becoming a space where truth demanded not only proof but loyalty— where thought was a form of labor, and labor a mode of political participation.

The choice of instruments, computing machines, laboratory techniques, and even TRIZ methodologies was shaped by the kinds of questions that could be asked and the answers deemed (scientifically) permissible. One may recall, for instance, the OGAS project — an ambitious attempt to create a nationwide automated system for economic management — which failed to materialize for both organizational and political reasons. How were research ethos and topos formed within and beyond state institutions? Moscow, Novosibirsk, Tartu, and other scientific centers, including closed settlements, can rightly be described as laboratories of a special kind of knowledge.

Yet the history of Soviet science is not only the story of institutions, disciplines, and laboratories, but also of individuals whose scientific biographies were shaped by the limits of the permissible — as in the cases of Nikolai Vavilov or Valery Legasov. The strategies of existence of the Soviet scientist — a figure for whom the question “Who am I: a scholar or a Soviet citizen?” had an acutely concrete significance — cannot be reduced to the opposition between “conformity” and “resistance”. They form a more complex narrative about how science lived and survived under ideological pressure, censorship, and repression.

Another One invites philosophers, historians of science, anthropologists, cultural theorists, and scholars of Soviet intellectual traditions to participate in a discussion on the philosophical and cultural foundations of Soviet science — its research ethos, disciplinary formations, and trajectories of knowledge transfer, from early ideological programs to the late-Soviet pursuit of “inner sovereignty”. We believe that the analysis and interpretation of specific research episodes in the history and philosophy of Soviet science allows us to approach it not merely as an archive of the past, but as a lens through which to understand where and how the boundaries of scientific autonomy are drawn in Russia today.